Nicholas Lemann
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Articles by Nicholas Lemann
The Battle to Pass a Billionaire Tax
It wasn’t so long ago that Silicon Valley was, to use its own language, a major node in the Democratic Party’s network. The Valley’s origins were in developing electronic equipment for corporations and the military, but with the dawning of the age of the personal computer, half a century ago, it began to adopt the vernacular of anti-organizational hippie culture.
The Collective Identity Crisis of Jewish America
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load. I have a letter that my father wrote to the rabbi at Temple Sinai in New Orleans, where he was a third-generation member, 60 years ago. We were part of the local Jewish establishment; our family had arrived in Louisiana from Germany back in 1836. I was 12, the age when Jewish boys would typically be preparing for a bar mitzvah.
How One Forgotten Novel Helped Me Return to Judaism
How One Forgotten Novel Helped Me Return to Judaism Nicholas Lemann reflects on Remember Me to God, a little-known 1957 novel that helped him understand his parents’ identity. (Joseph McKeown/Picture Post/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images) When I was growing up, we practiced Judaism only barely. ‘Remember Me to God,’ by Myron S. Kaufmann, helped me understand why—and led me to choose differently for my own children.
'Returning': Exploring assimilation and the search for Jewish belonging - review
ByGLENN C. ALTSCHULERJUNE 6, 2026 13:32 Throughout his childhood in Louisiana, Nicholas Lemann never attended a bar mitzvah or a brit milah; he never tasted bagels, lox, latkes, tzimmes, or gefilte fish, never consulted a religious text for guidance. His parents never lit Hanukkah candles, never mentioned the Holocaust, Israel, or the Six Day War. “How did we get this way?” Nicholas asks.
Book Review | A Nice (Southern) Jewish Boy
Breaking News Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries by Nicholas Lemann Liveright, 416 pp. When he was about the The post Book Review | A Nice (Southern) Jewish Boy appeared first on Moment Magazine. Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries by Nicholas Lemann Liveright, 416 pp. When he was about the age most Jewish boys might be studying to become a bar mitzvah, Nicholas Lemann’s father took him aside for a man-to-man talk—but not about being called to the Torah.
In three centuries of Southern Jewish life in the Big Easy, no easy way to be Jewish
Roald Dahl’s house is falling down. It’s 1983, and the children’s author’s Buckinghamshire estate is undergoing a gut renovation. Its exposed plumbing and naked beams bespeak an unseemly core behind the author’s facade of prickly charm, cracking after publication of his incendiary review of the book God Cried, about the 1982 Lebanon War.
Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries | Jewish Book Council
Skip to main content Join a community of readers who are committed to Jewish stories Sign up for JBC’s Nu Reads, a curated selection of Jewish books delivered straight to your door! Review By – March 20, 2026 Jews have been part of America since its inception. Many people know this in the abstract, but it takes a book like Nicholas Lemann’s Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries to show just how linked Jewish and American history are.
The Unmaking of the American University
For Johns Hopkins, the first shot from the Trump Administration came on February 28, 2025. That day, a press release from the Department of Justice arrived, saying that the Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism would be visiting ten campuses, including Hopkins, to investigate potential violations of federal law. Nobody ever visited the university, but subsequent shots had far more severe consequences.
A Childhood in Jewish New Orleans
It's a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That's how Tom Stoppard's " Leopoldstadt" and Alfred Uhry's " Last Night of Ballyhoo" begin, and also Ian Buruma's memoir about his grandparents, " Their Promised Land." The idea is, as soon as you show that, you've got the audience's full attention, especially if it's a Jewish audience, because it's so peculiar.
How Can We Fix American Democracy?
Books & the Arts / November 11, 2025 The People’s Government How can we fix American democracy? How Can We Fix American Democracy? Preserving our democracy is as urgent a task as ever, but the question is how. Ad Policy Illustration by Lily Qian.
Dick Cheney’s Brand of Conservatism
As I think about Dick Cheney after his death, my memory offers up a snippet from an interview I had with Bob Michel when I was reporting for a New Yorker profile of Cheney that appeared in 2001. Michel now looks like a figure from a forgotten Republican past, an amiable congressman from Peoria, Illinois, who had voted for all the major civil-rights laws and who loved crafting legislative compromises with Democrats. In the eighties and early nineties, Michel was the House Minority Leader.
Letter to the Editor: In defense of the HEALS survey
We are writing in response to the recent opinion piece , written by Melanie Wall and seven other members of the CUIMC Stands Up collective about the Harmful Exclusion Alleviation Longitudinal Study commissioned by the Task Force on Antisemitism.
The New Orleans That Hurricane Katrina Revealed
Everybody loves New Orleans. It’s only the fifty-fourth largest city in the United States—down from fifth largest two hundred years ago—but it occupies a much larger place in the national mind than, say, Arlington, Texas, or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There’s the food, the neighborhoods, the music, the historic architecture, the Mississippi River, Mardi Gras. But the love for New Orleans stands in contrast to the story that cold, rational statistics tell.
Why I Dug Into My Family’s Past
Welcome back to Ancient Wisdom, our Sunday series in which writers over 70 tell us how they are aging gracefully. Last week, tennis great Chris Evert, 70, wrote about surviving cancer—and how it changed her. This week, Nicholas Lemann, 70, explains why he’s obsessed with his family’s history. Within the all-encompassing vastness of the aging process, there’s one corner that is blessedly unrelated to the theme of declining health, or, for that matter, to any other form of decline.
Henrietta Szold & the Return to Zion | Nicholas Lemann
Last year the Tel Aviv Museum of Art mounted an exhibition, entitled “Shattered Hopes and Roads Not Taken,” of a dozen monumental drawings by the Israeli artist Netta Lieber Sheffer, who lives and works in Tel Aviv. The drawings are an expression of a wish on the Jewish left that history had not made Israel the prosperous, powerful, ethnically restricted, violence-plagued, and widely despised state that it is today.
Why the Democrats Can’t Sell Bidenomics
In today’s newsletter, how Joe Biden came to guide the largest economic overhaul since the New Deal, and why it seems to have been completely overlooked. Plus: The Administration has passed legislation spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing and infrastructure across the country. “The biggest mistake we made, we didn’t put up signs saying ‘Joe Did It,’ ” Biden said.
Joe Biden’s Economic Plan Is Investing Trillions of Dollars in America
Among Joe Biden’s afflictions and miseries, his wormwood and gall, there are the insults (about his diminished capacities), and then there are the compliments unpaid (about his achievements). We are exposed to more of the first, but it seems that to him the second are more painful.
Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?
21 hours ago The Electoral College isn't worth saving — even if it blocks a Trump win The polls show a close race, one where Donald Trump’s electoral lead is fading even as Kamala Harris could potentially lose the popular vote.
Thinking the unthinkable about the First Amendment
Editor’s note: The following article was first published in Dædalus vol. 153, no. 3, Summer 2024 (“The Future of Free Speech”). It has been lightly copyedited to conform to CJR house style but is otherwise presented as it appeared in that journal. The First Amendment’s press clause has long played second fiddle to the speech clause.
Institutional neutrality does not exist-and it shouldn’t
On September 11, Barnard President Laura Rosenbury established a formal position of “institutional neutrality” for the college, stating that from now on, Barnard and any of its academic departments would be forbidden from voicing support for “a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective.” While this may appear like a strategic move in the eyes of administrators or donors to Barnard, I see through this...
Missing the point of our listening sessions
In listening sessions last semester, the Task Force on Antisemitism heard from nearly 500 students. Our second report offered a selection of the heartbreaking testimonials we heard. The overwhelming reaction from Columbia colleagues has echoed our own: profound sadness and concern about our Jewish and Israeli students and a determination to protect the rights of all of our students. still graduate, something Thaddeus does not contest.
HIGHER ADMISSIONS
A top-notch political memoir and serious exercise in practical politics for every reader. In the first volume of his presidential memoir, Obama recounts the hard path to the White House. In this long, often surprisingly candid narrative, Obama depicts a callow youth spent playing basketball and “getting loaded,” his early reading of difficult authors serving as a way to impress coed classmates.
Columbia’s incoherent antisemitism task-force report
In 2017 the theologian Paul J. Griffiths quit his chaired position at Duke following a dispute over diversity-training sessions.
Don’t Scrap the SAT. Make It Fairer.
Through all these decades of controversies about admissions and about affirmative action, there has been the idea, shimmering like the mirage of a desert oasis on the horizon, that there might be some way of selecting students for elite universities that everyone would agree is fair. It’s the ever-elusive admissions equivalent of the Holy Grail, or the universal solvent, or the Northwest Passage. The main conservative version of this is to eliminate consideration of race in admissions.
Can the 1980s Explain 2024?
If you’re reading this, you probably remember the utter shock you felt on Election Night 2016, when it became apparent that Donald Trump was going to win. What may be harder to imagine today is that in the liberal world, the shock level was almost that high on Election Night 1980, when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter.
What’s So Great About Meritocracy?
DUCKWORTH: Does anybody ever say that?! * * * DUCKWORTH: I’m Angela Duckworth. MAUGHAN: I’m Mike Maughan. DUCKWORTH + MAUGHAN: And you’re listening to No Stupid Questions. Today on the show: is meritocracy a fair system? DUCKWORTH: What it shines a light on is how much all of life is a lottery! * * * MAUGHAN: Angela, I’m super excited to talk to you today. We’ve got an amazing question from Patrick Gilmartin, which I almost want to just say in a British accent the whole time.
The Next Targets in the Fight Against Affirmative Action Original
The selective schools have undoubtedly been planning their post-affirmative-action approach to admissions, which will include beefing up their staff so that they can make qualitative, rather than quantitative, choices, based on reading applicants’ folders. Many Black and Latino applicants will take solace in the lifeline Chief Justice John Roberts threw them in his majority opinion—referring to racial experiences in application essays will still be permissible.
Why Israel’s Government Is Attacking Its Public-Broadcasting System Original
What’s happening in Israeli politics is a heightened version, in a small space, of a broader phenomenon, maybe the dominant phenomenon of twenty-first-century politics worldwide: the rise of ultranationalist, populist, religious, democracy-eroding leaders and political parties, in, among other places, India, Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and, of course, the United States.
112th: Adam Kirsch with Nicholas Lemann
Join us at Book Culture on Thursday, March 2nd at 7pm for a reading and conversation for The Revolt Against Humanity: Imagining a Future Without Us with the author, Adam Kirsch. Nicholas Lemann will join in conversation. In order to facilitate this in-person author event, we will be partially closing the second floor starting at 6:45pm. Please review our COVID-19 Safetyguidelines and register for the event using the link below.
The New Political Economy | Washington Monthly
In the immortal Federalist No. 10, James Madison wrote, That was back in 1787, before there was a ratified Constitution, when the U.S. government barely existed. But Madison’s framing is instructive in a number of ways. He evidently assumed that the main source of political strife in the new nation would be clashes among economic interests, and that the main task of government would be adjudicating these disputes.
January/February/March 2023
Posted inMagazine Gannon University started out in a working-class community during the boom years of the 1920s. John Mark Gannon, a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, who returned from the Vatican to become the Catholic bishop of Erie, had long been conscious of what he called the “cruel inequality” of higher education. “Those whose parents are wealthy may […] Posted inMagazine Posted inMagazine Posted inMagazine Posted inMagazine Posted inBooks Posted inBooks Posted inBooks Posted inBooks
The Democrats’ Midterm Challenge
Content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. One morning in late August, I went to an American Legion post in Manchester, New Hampshire, to watch Senator Maggie Hassan campaign. Hassan, who previously served as governor of New Hampshire, is running for her second term in the Senate.
The Democrats’ Working-Class Deficit
It’s no surprise that Democrats are up against it this fall. The president’s party generally does worse in midterm elections. Inflation is at a 40-year high. The mainstream media trumpet that crime is up. And the centerpiece of President Biden’s domestic agenda has been torpedoed by united Republican obstruction—and, until the recently brokered spending deal, by the Democratic Senator Joe Manchin III.
The Democrats at a Crossroads
In 2002, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira published The Emerging Democratic Majority. In it, they argued that natural demographic trends would make the long-term dominance of the Democratic Party almost inevitable, a prediction that proved immensely comforting to American liberals. Judis and Teixeira assumed that the Democrats could maintain their enormous majorities among minority voters.
Would the World Be Better Off Without Philanthropists?
Out of concern for the welfare of our community and staff, The Community Foundation office at 70 Audubon is closed to visitors until further notice; Foundation staff are available by phone and email during normal business hours Monday through Friday between 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. to conduct business. For up-to-date information about The Foundation’s response to COVID-19, please visit: www.cfgnh.org/covid-19. To contact a staff member, view our staff directory.
Would the World Be Better Off Without Philanthropists?
Organized philanthropy, like most things, looks different on the inside than it does from the outside. “Philanthropy” comes from the Greek for “love of humanity,” and public perceptions of it have usually centered on donors and how humanity-loving they really are.
Thomas Piketty's equality programme
Although Piketty favours much higher income tax rates, policies that redistribute property rather than income are the heart of his programme Topics Inequality | United States | world economy Thomas Piketty begins his latest book by genially mentioning the entreaties he gets to write something short — previous books have been around 1,000 pages long — and ends it by expressing the hope that he has given “citizens,” rather than economists, new weapons in the battle against inequality, which is...
Thomas Piketty’s Radical Plan to Redistribute Wealth
nonfiction Thomas PikettyCredit...J Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images April 19, 2022, 3:00 p.m. ET A BRIEF HISTORY OF EQUALITY By Thomas Piketty Thomas Piketty begins his latest book by genially mentioning the entreaties he gets to write something short — previous books have been around 1,000 pages long — and ends it by expressing the hope that he has given “citizens,” rather than economists, new weapons in the battle against inequality, which is his master subject.
Talking Money/The Heavy Hitters
This story is from Texas Monthly’s archives. We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record. Read more here about our archive digitization project. Talking Money A real estate glossary. doggy: term of opprobrium applied to a deal that won’t make any money. letting the tail wag the dog: buying a doggy deal because you have the financing locked up. New York minute: ten seconds.
The Supreme Court Appears Ready, Finally, to Defeat Affirmative Action
The message is clear: the Supreme Court wants to consider decisively departing from a long string of decisions that have permitted the use of race as a plus factor in admissions. These have been close decisions, made on narrow grounds, usually with a moderate conservative Justice holding the balance of power. Now there are no moderate conservatives on the Supreme Court.
George W. Bush Is Right About Trump, but Still Wrong About the World
George W. Bush, the least visible of our five living ex-Presidents, turned up in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the site of the crash of United Flight 93, for a commemoration of the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and gave brief remarks that brought him a measure of unaccustomed liberal love. Without explicitly naming names, Bush compared the Al Qaeda attackers back then to the Capitol rioters of January 6th.
Bob Moses’s Pioneering Fight for Voting and Education Rights
The moniker “civil-rights leader,” which appeared in some of the headlines noting the passing of Bob Moses on Sunday, at the age of eighty-six, is literally accurate: he was one of the most important figures in the civil-rights movement during its peak period, in the middle years of the nineteen-sixties. But one should not get the impression that Moses was a stentorian, march-leading type. He had a kind of reverse charisma. He came across as not just quiet but almost painfully shy.
Can Affirmative Action Survive?
White establishment liberals of Conant’s generation almost never considered race when they thought about the American future.
Nicholas Lemann | The New Yorker
Daily Comment Bob Moses’s Pioneering Fight for Voting and Education Rights Both battles had the goal of enabling ordinary people to exercise more power, over their own lives and in society more broadly. July 26, 2021 Annals of Justice Can Affirmative Action Survive? The policy has made diversity possible. Now, after decades of debate, the Supreme Court is poised to decide its fate.
Michael Wolff on Donald Trump’s Last Days (for Now)
nonfiction Donald and Melania Trump depart the White House, Jan. 20, 2021.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times July 12, 2021 LANDSLIDE The Final Days of the Trump White House By Michael Wolff Forty-five years ago, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” came out, it was a different world: There was no cable news, no internet and no social media, and the political establishment offered at least the illusion of being in control.
The Last Battle Over Big Business
Ralph Nader, now eighty-seven years old, has been a public figure for more than half a century. Many people know him as a long-shot left-wing Presidential candidate in four successive elections, from 1996 to 2008, and as the possible spoiler of a Democratic victory in 2000, when he got almost a hundred thousand votes in Florida and Al Gore lost the state by five hundred and thirty-seven. “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors,” Joe Biden told the Times back then.
The Larger Lesson of Liz Cheney's Ouster
The Larger Lesson of Liz Cheney's Ouster It is to her credit that she stood up to Trump, but, with the Middle East erupting again, let's be careful that we don't also embrace her bellicose foreign-policy views. Read Full Article »
The Larger Lesson of Liz Cheney’s Ouster
Nobody should mistake Liz Cheney’s expulsion from the leadership of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives for a sign that she is headed out of her party, to some unknown, possibly moderate political destination. Cheney grew up in a firmly conservative and politically partisan household, and never noticeably rebelled.
The Most Economically Liberal Legislation in Decades
The Most Economically Liberal Legislation in Decades Biden's bill is a sign that our democracy isn't completely broken, and may convince Americans that government can solve problems. Read Full Article »
The Stimulus Bill Is the Most Economically Liberal Legislation in Decades
Traditionally, every new Democratic President starts out by passing a big economic package (and every new Republican President starts out by passing a tax cut). Jimmy Carter’s, in 1977, cost twenty billion dollars. Bill Clinton’s, in 1993, was mainly a tax increase, aimed at eliminating the federal deficit. Barack Obama’s, in 2009, which passed during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, cost eight hundred billion, some of it spending increases, some tax relief.
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