A Surprising Perspective on American Jewishness

Nicholas Lemann, a longtime correspondent for The New Yorker, a former dean of Columbia’s journalism school, and a former writer for The Atlantic,  has spent decades writing about the  biggest American themes: race, the South, the rise and fall of the meritocracy. In his new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, Lemann shows that his fascination with those subjects is no accident. They have shaped the destiny of his own family since his great-great-grandfather, a German Jewish emigrant, settled in Louisiana in the 1830s. In telling the story of his ancestors’ relationship with America and Jewishness, as well as his own, Lemann offers surprising and sometimes unsettling new perspectives on what it means to be an American Jew today. I asked him about why he wrote Returning, how he unearthed his family’s secrets, and what he makes of his own religious journey. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

In your career as a journalist you’ve investigated all kinds of stories, but you write in Returning that your family’s history was “one investigation I made a point of not undertaking.” Why not, and what made you change your mind now?

I was born into a tightly enclosed world in New Orleans where everyone knew everyone else, not just in the present but going back three or four generations. There is not a natural fit between living happily in that kind of place and spending your career investigating and then publishing your findings, at least if your investigations are local. In MFA programs, I hear, you’re told to write about what you know. For me, a great appeal of being a journalist is that you can escape that dictum and turn your focus outward. In particular, my family owned sugarcane plantations in 19th-century Louisiana—it should be obvious why one might find it more comfortable not to investigate the details of that.

Many people, certainly including me, get more interested in their family history as they get older. It begins to seem more realistic to see yourself as a link in a long chain of generations. There’s also an urge to settle up accounts, to take on everything you’d been putting off reckoning with. Journalistically, I began to think I was being perverse, ignoring a hell of a story just because it was my own family’s.

Most of the classic American Jewish memoirs and novels share some archetypal experiences: arriving at Ellis Island, growing up in a tenement on the Lower East Side, struggling to “make it.” Returning doesn’t include any of those familiar landmarks. How is it different from the stories we’re used to?

From roughly the 1880s through the 1960s, a great divide within the American Jewish world was between, in shorthand, “German” and “Russian” Jews. Had your family come here from a European hometown that was east or west of the Elbe river? German Jews—my people—were far less numerous, most of them came to the United States earlier, and their typical first occupation was peddling, which entailed wandering through non-Jewish areas, not living in tenements. Russian Jews were poorer, more religiously observant, and, at least for many decades, in no danger of assimilating, partly because they didn’t want to and partly because they wouldn’t have been welcomed outside of Jewish circles. The German Jews were the founders of American Reform Judaism, which renounced dietary laws, bar mitzvahs, and Zionism. The Russian Jews made the German Jews very uncomfortable: They were too visible, too poor, too different. Their presence might be an obstacle to the full acceptance the German Jews felt was within their reach.

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The German Jews have pretty much disappeared as a distinctive group, so our story isn’t well known. But it has a present-day pertinence, I think, because at this moment so many American Jews are struggling with the sudden and dramatic erosion of what had seemed like a perfectly comfortable fit between being Jewish and being American. That was the German Jews’ struggle all through their heyday, and it’s a running theme of my book.

You can trace your family history back further than most Americans: Your great-great-grandfather settled in Louisiana in 1836, and there’s a town there named after your family, Lemannville. Growing up in New Orleans, did you feel like a genuine southerner?

I felt intensely southern and only faintly Jewish. But I was aware that being Jewish was far more important to other people than it was, at least officially, to us. In Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, the hero, Binx Bolling, tells us that there is an invisible Geiger counter in his head that rattles loudly whenever a Jew passes by. Our preference would have been to find a way not to set off the Geiger counter, but that seemed like a doomed enterprise. We wound up keeping ourselves apart from, and resolutely uninformed about, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and Jewish practice. What we knew about being Jewish was that we struck other people as being different from them, even though we thought we were the same.

I was raised during the heyday of the civil-rights movement or, to put it in a different way, during the dying days of the formal, legalized Jim Crow system. Southern life was essentially about race, and the South had the whole country’s attention. Being southern was important. In those days, southern white liberals seemed to be a growing category (from a small baseline), and one that was available to me personally. That was one reason it was easier for me to identify myself as southern than as Jewish: There was no equivalent attractive Jewish category that I knew enough about to be able to join it.

You were able to find traces of your family in an incredible range of sources, including credit reports from the 1840s, letters from a Supreme Court justice, and a novel by a high-school classmate in which you appear as a character. How did you go about researching the book, and what was the most surprising thing you discovered?

I don’t think I was any more research-obsessed than on previous book projects, but there was a lot to dig up. I could draw on what must be one of the most extensive sets of documents about a single American Jewish family, going back to the early 19th century. I also went to the part of Germany where my family came from and found more material there, with the help of a guide. It’s amazing how much you can usually find if you’re willing to be persistent.

What surprised me most, I think, was how actively Jewish my family was, in the generations above my parents’. It surprised me because, as I’ve said, I was raised to think of Jewishness as a very light-duty, almost vestigial identity. My great-great grandfather married a teenage Catholic girl, who was what we Louisianans call a Cajun. But they sent their eldest child, my great-grandfather, to a Jewish boarding school in New York, and then moved temporarily to New York, where my great-great grandmother converted to Judaism and had a Jewish ceremony. The family kept returning to Judaism (and also returning to the South), as I have—hence the title of the book.

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More broadly, the longer I worked on the book, the less archaic 19th-century terms like the Jewish question and Jewish emancipation seemed to me. In the long sweep of Jewish history, the idea of being smoothly integrated into the wider world stands as a brief period, and one with a substantially unhappy history. In the 21st century, these issues do not feel as if they have been successfully resolved and relegated to the past, for me personally or for us as a people.

A term that comes up a lot in the book is court Jew, especially when you write about your grandfather, Monte Lemann. What is a court Jew and how did he fit the type?

Court Jew is a mainly pejorative term in the Jewish world, denoting someone who leaves his people to curry favor with non-Jews in power. I would give it a more benign interpretation. It’s a role that recurs constantly in our history, including in the Torah: As early as Genesis 12:18, Abraham is having an audience with Pharaoh. Joseph had a whole career at court in Egypt. Moses was raised there. Court Jews offer the court special and valuable skills—typically, in the real-life version, as financial advisers, like the most famous court Jew, Mayer Amschel Rothschild.

My grandfather was a prominent lawyer in New Orleans, whose expertise was valuable to his clients (some Jewish, most not) and a variety of not-explicitly-Jewish causes he served. I came to see that court Jews, beginning with the biblical ones, need not dissociate themselves from their people—they can, and should, return. One thing I learned doing research for my book is that my grandfather traveled to Washington, D.C., in 1939 to testify in Congress in favor of a bill, which never came to a vote, that would have allowed Jewish children from Germany to come to the United States—something almost everybody in Louisiana, including its senators and congressmen, opposed.

In the last part of the book, you write about your own return to Jewish identity and observance, and you refer to “Jewish skills”—the kinds of knowledge that synagogue-going Jews grow up taking for granted. What was the process of acquiring Jewish skills like for you?

It’s very easy for somebody who was raised the way I was to be frightened off by an encounter with reasonably observant Judaism. I have zero literacy in Hebrew, and at the time when I started going to services, I was familiar with the Shema prayer and that’s about it. Jews don’t have a pope; Jewish practice comes in many varieties, and many Jews choose to be Jewish purely as an ethnic identity, without a religious life. For me, being religiously Jewish is important. Jewish practice is active and communal. At first, like Blanche DuBois, I had to depend on the kindness of strangers. Of course it made all the difference to be married, beginning in 1999, to Judith Shulevitz, who is the daughter of a rabbi. (Shulevitz is a staff writer at The Atlantic.) From then on I had a guide. The man-bites-dog story, if you will, here is that I now attend Saturday-morning services more regularly than she does.

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At the very end of Returning you talk about the October 2023 Hamas attack in Israel and the response to it in the U.S., including at Columbia University. As a longtime faculty member and a former dean of the Journalism School, you were asked to lead the university’s investigation into anti-Semitism on campus at an extremely fraught moment. Did that experience inform the writing of the book?

I finished the first draft just before I was asked to take on this role at Columbia, so, officially, the two are not connected. But I was actively revising while the Columbia storms were raging. I was raised outside the reach of what people are now calling the golden age for American Jews: We were prosperous and established, but deeply aware that the price of acceptance was not coming across as “too Jewish.” I’m not sure I would have accepted the university’s invitation if my father had not died a few months earlier, because my doing this would have upset him a great deal, as it did some of the living members of my family. The experience wound up reinforcing what I had already begun to feel: that being Jewish in the wider world has never been, and will never be, an entirely easy or comfortable fit—and that being Jewish in the Jewish world is a source of great comfort and meaning.