Journalist Dan Rottenberg has been the chief editor of seven publications, most recently Broad Street Review, an independent cultural arts website that he launched in December 2005 and edited until January 2014. (He stepped down as chairman in 2019.) He is also the author of 13 books, most recently The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55, published in 2024 by Shorehouse Books. 

His weekly column, “Contrarian’s Notebook,” has been published on Substack since February 2023. For a free subscription, click here.  

His previous books include Finding Our Fathers, a guide to tracing Jewish ancestors (1977); Fight On, Pennsylvania, a college football history (1985); Wolf, Block, Schorr and Solis-Cohen, the history of a Philadelphia law firm (1988); Main Line Wasp, the memoirs of Philadelphia civic leader W. Thacher Longstreth (1990); Revolution on Wall Street, a chronicle of the securities industry (1993); Middletown Jews, an oral history of the Jews of Muncie, Indiana (1997); The Inheritor’s Handbook (1998); The Man Who Made Wall Street, a biography of the 19th-Century banker Anthony Drexel (2001); In the Kingdom of Coal, a narrative history of the U.S. coal industry as seen through the eyes of two families (2003); Death of a Gunfighter, a biography of the Pony Express superintendent Joseph Alfred Slade (2008), The Outsider: Albert M. Greenfield and the Fall of the Protestant Establishment (2013) ,the biography of a 20th-Century Philadelphia tycoon, and his memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech (2022)..

From 2000 to 2004 he was editor of Family Business, an international quarterly magazine dealing with family-owned companies. From 1996 to 1998 he was editor of the Philadelphia Forum, a weekly Philadelphia opinion paper that he founded. In 1993 he created Seven Arts, a monthly magazine based in Philadelphia. From 1981 to 1993 he edited the Welcomat, a unique Philadelphia-based weekly opinion forum, later known as Philadelphia Weekly.

He wrote an editorial-page column for the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1978 to 1997. He has written more than 300 articles for such magazines as Town & Country, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times Magazine, Forbes, Civilization, American Benefactor, Bloomberg Personal Finance, TV Guide, Playboy, Rolling Stone, Chicago, and many others. He served as a consultant in 1981 when Forbes magazine launched its annual “Forbes 400” list of wealthiest Americans. His syndicated film commentaries appeared in monthly city magazines around the U.S. from 1971 to 1983.

Earlier in his career, he was executive editor of Philadelphia Magazine, managing editor of Chicago Journalism Review, a Wall Street Journal reporter, and editor of the Commercial-Review, a daily newspaper in Portland, Indiana.

Dan Rottenberg is a native of New York City and a 1964 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, a piano teacher. Their two adult daughters live and work in New York City.

From 1979 to 1992 he served on the board of Philadelphia Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, which provides support services for artists, performers, composers, and writers. Since 1994 he has been a trustee of the MacJannet Foundation, which promotes global citizenship and international student exchange programs. In Indiana in the 1960s, he was a founder of the Jay County Historical Society as well as the Portland Cinema Society, which flourishes today as Arts Place, a cultural center serving nine counties in Indiana and Ohio.

For biographical details, click the following links:
Publications edited by Dan Rottenberg
Awards and Honors
Major (and minor) achievements
Noted figures I’ve profiled
Conversation points (for which I deserve no credit whatsoever)
Profile of Dan Rottenberg in Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept. 2010
Interview with Dan by Tom Tirney, April 2010
Interview with Dan by Joseph Glantz, Feb. 2013 
Dan’s podcast interview on “It’s All Journalism,” May 2022 
New profile of Dan in Pennsylvania Gazette, Sept.-Oct. 2022