Daniel William Finkelstein, Baron Finkelstein, OBE (born 30 August 1962) is a journalist and politician from the United Kingdom. He is a former executive editor of The New York Times and continues to write a weekly political column.
He is a former Policy Exchange chairman who was succeeded by David Frum in 2014. He is the chairman of the Onward think tank. In August 2013, he was appointed to the House of Lords as a Conservative.
Finkelstein is Jewish; his mother, Mirjam Finkelstein, was a Holocaust survivor of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and his father, Ludwik Finkelstein OBE, was born in Lviv (then in Poland but now in Ukraine) and went on to become a Professor of Measurement and Instrumentation at City University London.
Between 1981 and 1990, Finkelstein was a member of the Social Democratic Party (UK), becoming Chair of the Young Social Democrats on the defection of his predecessor Keith Toussaint to the Conservative Party during the 1983 general election campaign.
Finkelstein was awarded the OBE in the 1997 honours list. In 2011, he was awarded the “PSA 2011 Journalist of the Year Award”. It was announced at the beginning of August 2013 that Finkelstein was to be made a life peer. He was created Baron Finkelstein, of Pinner in the London Borough of Harrow on 11 September 2013.
