Moses Berkman 1920 Memorial Journalism Award

The prize honors a journalist whose work demonstrates the qualities of integrity, insight, journalistic excellence, and serious moral purpose that were the hallmarks of Moses Berkman’s journalism, political editor, columnist and editorial writer on the Hartford Times from the 1920s to the 1950s. The prize was established by a gift from the estate of his wife Florence Berkman, also a longtime journalist at the Hartford Times and Hartford Courant.

2022: Thomas Edsall

Edsall is a New York Times Contributing Op-Ed Writer, whose weekly column covers American politics, inequality, campaign strategy and demographics. He had an impressive twenty-five-year journalistic career at The Washington Post, covering national politics, presidential elections, the House and Senate, lobbying, tax policy, demographic trends, social welfare, the politics of race and ethnicity, and organized labor.

He is a correspondent for The New Republic and has contributed TV and radio commentary to CNN, CSPAN, MSNBC, PBS, FOX, and NPR. For the last eight years, Edsall has taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he was the holder of the Joseph Pulitzer II and Edith Pulitzer Moore Chair. Edsall is the author of five books including The Age of Austerity, Building Red America, The New Politics of Inequality, and Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics” (a Pulitzer finalist in General Non-Fiction.) He has written extensively for magazines, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and more. For his contributions to journalism, Edsall has received awards including the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association, the Bill Pryor Award of the Newspaper Guild, a yearlong fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and five Media Fellowships at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Tom Edsall’s free public lecture, “What If Democracy Fails?,” took place at Trinity October 11 2022