Daniel Halperin Kurzman (27 March 1922, in San Francisco â 12 December 2010, in Manhattan), was an American journalist and writer of military history books. He studied at the University of California in Berkeley, served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1946, and completed his studies at Berkeley with a Bachelor's degree in Political Science. At the end of his life, Dan Kurzman lived in North Bergen (New Jersey) with his wife, Florence. He died December 12, 2010, at the age of 88, in Manhattan. (His wife had died the previous year.)
In the early 1950s, Kurzman worked in Europe and in Israel for American newspapers and news agencies, thereafter becoming correspondent of the NBC News in Jerusalem.
Mr. Kurzman's first assignment was as corre-spondent for the Paris Bureau of International News Service, and he later became feature editor of the Marshall Plan Information Division in Paris. From 1950 to 1952 he served as Middle East cor-respondent for the National Broadcasting Com-pany, covering such events as the assassination of Jordan's King Abdullah, the Iranian oil crisis, the Black Saturday anti-British riots in Cairo, the first nationalist riots in Tunis, and the Arab-Israeli bor-der disputes.
In 1953 he made a year-long, village-to-village tour of North Africa, the Middle East, and AsiaâÂÂfrom Casablanca to Tokyo. His articles appeared in several major newspapers and magazines.
In 1954 he returned to Tokyo as Far East bureau chief of the McGraw-Hill World News Service. In 1958 he visited Russia, entering by an unusual routeâÂÂfrom Kabul, Afghanistan, across the Hindu-kusb Mountains to Tashkent. Later in 1958 he went back to the Middle East to cover the landing of American Marines in Beirut, Lebanon, for the Washington Post, following up this assignment with a six-month overland tour of Black Africa, also for the Post.
Early in 1959 Mr. Kurzman returned to the, United States to work on Kishi and Japan (pub-lished in 1960), but soon went back to Africa to cover the Congo crisis for various publications, as well as to report on nationalist uprisings in other African countries.
In 1960, he published his first political book, a biography of the Japanese Prime Minister, Nobusuke Kishi. In the 1960s, Kurzman worked as a foreign policy correspondent for The Washington Post. In 1965 he received the George Polk Award for external reporting.
Later in life, he left the Washington Post and focused on researching and writing Modern History, especially military history non-fiction. In 1980 he received the Cornelius Ryan Award. A Polish-Israeli research team have suggested that much of what Kurzman wrote about the Warsaw Ghetto was actually tainted by the personal testimony of unreliable Polish witnesses who deliberately magnified their own role in wartime Warsaw - most notably, Henryk Iwanski. Dariusz Libionka and Laurence Weinbaum suggest that Kurzman accepted the account of Iwanski (who presented himself as a hero) uncritically, and that Iwanski's testimony should be treated as confabulation.