Journalist
Washington, D.C
Jacob M. Schlesinger is currently a DCI continuing fellow, studying the threats and challenges to democracy, in the U.S. and around the world.
Before coming to Stanford, Jake worked for more than 30 years as a reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, DC, Tokyo, and Detroit.
During his time at the Journal, he covered economics and economic policy, chronicled elections and summits, trade wars and market crashes, labor strikes, the 9/11 terror attacks in the U.S., and Japan’s March 2011 triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear meltdown. Jake was the Journal’s Tokyo bureau chief, deputy Washington bureau chief, and global financial regulation editor.
He is the author of “Shadow Shoguns: The Rise and Fall of Japan’s Postwar Political Machine”, published in 1997 by Simon & Schuster. While writing that book, he was a fellow at Stanford’s Asia-Pacific Research Center. He was later a Stigler Center Journalist in Residence at the University of Chicago.
Jake was a member of the Journal team winning the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting on the dot-com bubble and crash. In 2014, he was given Stanford’s Shorenstein Journalism Award, presented annually to a reporter helping global audiences understand the complexities of the Asia-Pacific region.
Jake grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, and has a BA in economics from Harvard. He lives in Washington with his wife, Louisa Rubinfien, a professor of Japanese history. They have two daughters, one currently working at the White House Office of Presidential Correspondence, the other doing graduate studies in chemical physics at the University of Minnesota.