Dutch writer and scholar of Asian culture, he was professor of Democracy, Human Rights and Journalism at Bard College, New York between 2003 and 2017 and is currently editor of The New York Review of Books. His reflections on intercultural relations and on the tensions and transformations brought about in the Netherlands and Europe in general by continuous migratory flows and on the value of tolerance in Western liberal culture have aroused great interest and fuelled lively debate, in particular after the publication of Murder in Amsterdam: the Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (2006). His many publications include Occidentalism: the West in the Eyes of its Enemies (2004, written with A. Margalit); The China Lover (2008); Taming the Gods: Religion and Democracy on Three Continents (2010); Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013); Theater of Cruelty. Art, Film, and the Shadows of War (2014). In 2008 Buruma won the Erasmus Prize.