Wolf Blitzer

Early life and education

Blitzer was born in Augsburg, Germany, near Munich in 1948 during the post–World War II Allied occupation. His parents, Cesia and David Blitzer, were Polish Jewish refugees who survived Nazi concentration camps; his paternal grandparents, two uncles, and two aunts were murdered in Auschwitz, and his maternal grandparents died of typhoid fever in a labor camp. He immigrated to the United States under the 1948 Displaced Persons Act and grew up in Kenmore, New York, graduating from Kenmore West Senior High School.

Blitzer earned a Bachelor of Arts in history from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1970, where he was a member of Alpha Epsilon Pi, and a Master of Arts in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in 1972. While at SAIS, he studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and learned Hebrew. His first name, Wolf, comes from his maternal grandfather, and his middle name, Isaac, from his paternal grandfather.

Career

Blitzer began his journalism career in the early 1970s in the Tel Aviv bureau of Reuters. Fluent in Hebrew, he wrote for Al HaMishmar under the name Ze'ev Blitzer and for Yedioth Ahronoth as Ze'ev Barak.

In the mid-1970s, he worked for AIPAC as editor of the Near East Report, focusing on Middle East affairs and U.S. foreign policy. At an April 1977 White House press conference, he asked Egyptian President Anwar Sadat about restrictions on Egyptian visits to Israel; Sadat's historic visit to Israel followed that November, and Blitzer covered the negotiations from the first joint Israeli-Egyptian press conference through the signing of the Egypt–Israel peace treaty two years later. In 1985, he published his first book, Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter's Notebook.

Awards

Blitzer has received numerous honors, including the 2004 Journalist Pillar of Justice Award from the Respect for Law Alliance and the 2003 Daniel Pearl Award from the Chicago Press Veterans Association. His CNN news team earned a George Foster Peabody Award for Hurricane Katrina coverage, an Alfred I. DuPont Award for coverage of the 1999 Southeast Asian tsunami, and an Edward R. Murrow Award for CNN's coverage of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

He won the Ernie Pyle Journalism Award for military reporting in November 2002, the Anti-Defamation League's Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize in February 2000, and the Lowell Thomas Broadcast Journalism Award in 1999. Blitzer received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Oklahoma City bombing and was part of the CNN team awarded a Golden ACE award for 1991 Gulf War reporting. In 1994, American Journalism Review cited him and CNN as readers' choice for Best in the Business Award for network coverage of the Clinton administration.

He has received honorary Doctorates of Humane Letters from the University at Buffalo (1999), George Washington University (2007), Niagara University (2010), Penn State University (2011), the University of Hartford (2011), Howard University (2014), and The Jewish Theological Seminary (2024). In 2014, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. In June 2024, he received the Augsburg Media Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Augsburg, and in August 2024, he was announced as the 2024 recipient of the Walter Cronkite Award for Excellence in Journalism.

Other media appearances

On September 17, 2009, Blitzer competed on Celebrity Jeopardy!, finishing with $2,000 after a negative Double Jeopardy round. He appears in pre-game video updates for the Washington Wizards called the 'Wizards Situation.' Blitzer has appeared as himself in films including Skyfall, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Mission: Impossible - Fallout, as well as in the Netflix series House of Cards and the Ben 10: Omniverse episode 'An American Benwolf in London.' He played a supporting role in the 2009 documentary Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace, discussing his experience covering the Egypt–Israel peace treaty negotiations.