Richard C. Schneider

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Richard Chaim Schneider (born January 6, 1957 in Munich) is a German journalist, author and documentary filmmaker. He was also director of the ARD studios in Tel Aviv and Rome.

Live life
Schneider was born the son of Hungarian Shoah survivors and studied German, theatre, art history and philosophy. He worked for several years as assistant director, dramaturge and director at city and state theatres in Amsterdam, Bonn, Munich and Vienna. After a long research stay in Jerusalem, he began to write as a freelance journalist for various print media.

From 1989 he worked for the ARD and since then regularly reported from the Middle East. From September 2006 to February 2016, he was director of the ARD TV studio in Tel Aviv and responsible for Israel, the Palestinian Autonomous Territories and Cyprus. After expiry of his service in Israel, he took over the management of the ARD TV studio in Rome in March 2016 with responsibility for Italy, Greece, Malta and the Vatican. In spring 2017 he returned to Tel Aviv, from where he continues to work as Editor-at-Large for ARD.

Schneider also regularly published contributions in a video blog, in which he highlighted further connections and backgrounds of his current field of work as a foreign correspondent. Also contributions about everyday life or about the sights in his reporting area found their place. His video blog from the Middle East was titled Between Mediterranean and Jordan, his video blog from Southern Europe was called Where Europe began.

He is co-founder of PEN Berlin.

Positions
In 2018, Schneider described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cooperation with right-wing populist leaders such as Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński as a “Faust Pact”. They recognized Netanyahu as “one of their own” (and vice versa) because they shared a common ideology: “the fight against Islamism, the rejection of liberal democracy, the distrust of the free media and, last but not least, the hatred of George Soros.” Netanyahu appears to be “sacrificing the interests of European Jews, their struggle against anti-Semitism in their own countries, to the pure interests of his country, or rather: his person.”

Awards
2000: Bavarian Television Award and Civis Media Award for the four-part documentary We are here! Jews in Germany after 1945
2007: Tagesthemen Award for a reportage from a Kassam factory of Islamic Jihad in Gaza
2009: Bavarian TV Award for the documentary Days of Horrors about the war in the Gaza Strip, because he had succeeded in compassionately portraying the suffering on both sides
2011: Grimme Prize for KiKA production scavenger hunting in the Holy Land; Schneider and the ARD studio Tel Aviv were significantly involved in the implementation of the project (concept development, all reportage activities)