Rich Benjamin

Rich Benjamin is a scholar and writer whose work examines how power shapes American institutions and everyday life. He is interviewed in the national and international media, including on NPR, BBC, MSNow, PBS, and HBO. And Benjamin’s essays appear regularly in public debate, including in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books.

Benjamin is the author of Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History (Pantheon, 2025). The book has been received “not only as a portrait of Benjamin’s family, but as a bold, pugnacious portrait of America.” Talk to Me was the finalist for the 2026 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. It was also named a “Best Book of 2025” by Kirkus Reviews.

Benjamin’s first book, Searching for Whitopia: An Improbable Journey to the Heart of White America, chronicles his two-year, 27,000-mile journey to the whitest, fastest-growing communities in America. Searching for Whitopia earned an Editors’ Choice award from the American Library Association. Now in its second printing, this groundbreaking study is one of the first to have illuminated in advance the rise of white anxiety and white nationalism threatening this democracy.

Most recently, Benjamin was the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University, the Walter Jackson Bate Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His research has received support from the Bellagio Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Russell Sage Foundation.