O’Keefe, Theodore

Theodore J. O'Keefe, born in 1949, grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, and graduated from Regis, a Jesuit high school in Manhattan, New York City. He went on to study at Harvard, where he majored in history.

He is a skilled editor and the author of numerous published articles, essays, and reviews on a range of historical and political subjects. He is also a man of considerable linguistic aptitude, having studied Latin, classical Greek, French, German, Spanish, and Italian, as well as some Irish and Japanese.

For some years he devoted his considerable talent to the Institute for Historical Review as a writer and book editor, and as editor of the IHR's Journal of Historical Review.

In recent years O'Keefe has written for The Occidental Quarterly, and since 2003 has served as Associate Editor of the "Journal of Western Thought and Opinion."

While working for the Institute for Historical Review, O'Keefe played an important role in defending the IHR against the legal assault of Mel Mermelstein, a California businessman who was interned in the Auschwitz camp during World War II. O'Keefe carefully went through a small mountain of documents, court records, newspaper articles, and other papers, digging for the nuggets of information that decisively discredited the man whose obsession tried to shut down and silence the Institute for Historical Review. Thanks to O’Keefe’s work, Mermelstein was finally defeated in court.