The Return of the Native

This is a tumultuous time for American Jews. Start with the documented rise in antisemitic attacks in North America, Europe, and Australia, even in locales where Jews felt safe. In December, two gunmen shot up a Hanukkah ceremony at Bondi Beach near Sydney; in March, a gunman rammed a truck full of explosives into a Michigan synagogue while dozens of children were inside. (The explosives never detonated.) All this comes amid the fallout from October 7, 2023, and Hamas’s attack on Israeli soldiers and civilians. Many of the families slaughtered lived in liberal kibbutzim, inside a part of 1948 Israel that is undisputed unless you believe any Israeli state is illegitimate. What followed the Hamas pogrom was the Jewish state’s violent, deadly response, continued fighting on the Gaza moonscape—and now the entire Persian Gulf—dividing Jews in Israel and the diaspora.  

So, Nicholas Lemann’s terrific, researched account of his Louisiana family’s history in America and his own Jewish evolution lands at an important time for American Jews. Returning is the Lemann family story of assimilation and material success in America, and the author’s engagement in middle age of rich Jewish observance. It is told with historical rigor but also novelistic detail. Don’t think of this as a Jewish book, but as an American story with relevance beyond the 2 percent who call themselves Jewish. It is a case study in how, in a free country, Americans choose to wear their religious and ethnic identities, and how the majority culture also influences, even bludgeons, those decisions. It’s right up there with memoirs as diverse as Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, her account of growing up Black and privileged in Chicago, or Richard Rodriguez’s very different Hunger of Memory, about his underprivileged childhood and Mexican American identity. It invites comparison with broad Jewish histories, such as Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers or Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd, but I’d say, also with Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Frank McCourt’s memoirs, even Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father. We all decide how ethnic or religious we’ll be, just as the outside world sets its parameters about how it sees us and cajoles us. 

Returning is not a book about current politics. The emeritus dean of the Columbia University School of Journalism, Lemann, illuminates a constant in Jewish life over the three centuries the book covers and indeed back to its Abrahamic roots: How do we stay safe as a minority? How do we prosper? And how do we navigate our extensive religious dictums with a wider world that has different ideas about pork chops, working on Saturdays, and the divinity of Jesus Christ?  

But neither is the book apolitical. Lemann submitted a draft of Returning before October 7 but revised it during the tumult that followed. The shockwaves from the heinous attack on Israelis and foreign nationals—not just Jews but Bedouins and Nepalese and Americans—reverberated in Lemann’s personal and professional life on Morningside Heights. He co-chaired Columbia’s task force on the university and antisemitism, a topic of national interest given the encampment of anti-Israel protestors on the campus blocks away from the nation’s media hub. (This may be the most thankless job aside from being chair of the Democratic National Committee.) The report is a very good piece of investigative work and shows a supple understanding of the line between free speech and harassment, which can be blurry. It was personal for him, too, not just because of his late-in-life religious practice. One of his sons was accosted during the months of protests inside and outside of Columbia’s gates. One anti-Israel protestor, seeing a flash of Lemann’s son’s Star of David necklace, dubs him a “Dirty Jew,” which shook the young man.  

Lemann, a familiar name in American letters and especially to Washington Monthly readers, is revealing a very personal side of himself after a life spent as a reporter and someone who, as a young man, he writes in Returning, identified with the detached journalist narrator in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, the great political and southern novel, modeled on Louisiana’s Huey Long. The president of the Harvard Crimson, Lemann, was a friend of his New Orleans contemporary Walter Isaacson, a wunderkind editor here before going on to The Washington Post, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and Columbia. He’s authored books on everything from the Black migration north to meritocracy and the SATs to the difficult world of contemporary capitalism to white terrorism during Reconstruction. But despite recurring themes of race and the South, none was memoir, and not every author can pull off the switch from scrutinizing society to self-scrutiny. But Lemann did. When Returning came out earlier this spring, it received deserved praise from The Wall Street Journal, Air Mail, The Forward, and The New York Review of Books. Hugh Hewitt celebrated it on his radio show, and Lemann took center stage at the 92^nd Street Y with Jodi Kantor. Oddly, The New York Times seems not to have reviewed it.  

(While Lemann is a Monthly contributing editor and sits on its board of directors, I should say that we’re friendly but not friends. I didn’t know his kids’ names until I read the book, and we’ve never had a meal, except at large gatherings.)  

An interesting aside: He doesn’t write much about his tenure at the Monthly. Still, I was grateful that he refreshed my memory of a bit of, as the kids say, problematic rambling from our shared and beloved mentor, Charles Peters, who founded this magazine and offered a taxonomy of the many Jewish editors who have worked here on a scale of being “Jewy Jews,”—that is, ranging from assimilated to easily identifiable. Lemann correctly views this observation as a reflection of both Peters’ puckish humor and a Depression-era West Virginia background rather than a revelation of something sinister. (That’s how I took it, too.) On Charlie’s Jewish meter, Lemann was the most Gentile. “Practically white,” I would joke with one of my co-editors here back in the 1980s. I confess that when I first met Lemann in the Monthly’s dilapidated offices near Dupont Circle, with his tortoise-shell glasses, preppy mien, big reputation, unlit cigar, and what appeared to be a futuristic Toshiba laptop with orange-glowing DOS text, I had no idea he was a fellow tribesman.  

Now I know better why. The Lemann family story is about wrestling with, ignoring, and embracing Jewish identity. 

The story of the Lemanns in America begins with Jacob Lemann, who emigrated from the Rhine towns of western Germany. Like a goodly number of Jewish ex-pats from the region, he made his way South, in his case to Louisiana and the sugar cane country around Donaldsonville. A peddler, he opened a store as thousands of other Jews did in the American South and around the country. An adroit businessman, he grew the enterprise and became successful. He marries a Catholic woman, Marie Berthelot, who converts and becomes Miriam. So far, so good. 

One of the more striking moments in the book is Nicholas Lemann reading the R.G. Dun & Company credit reports on his family, housed at Harvard, where he, his father, and his grandfather went to college. (Yes, R.G. Dun would become part of Dun & Bradstreet, the famed analysts of corporate finance.) Over time, its credit reports about Jacob and his family enterprise become more glowing. “Success bought respectability,” Lemann notes in Returning. In 1848, one credit agent writes of Jacob, “Can’t give him much of a character [reference] as he is a Jew.” Four years later, another Dun agent calls him “a man of good character.” The references glow brighter as Jacob leaves Louisiana in 1856 for New York City, twenty years after his penniless arrival. His son, Bernard, attends a Dutch Reformed school, Collegiate. (Still one of New York’s elite private schools.) The family has a home in Newport, Rhode Island, to boot.  

But assimilation is not a smooth journey. Bernard is a worldly young man with a deep interest in both Jewish affairs and broader world affairs. He listens to opera. He sees Shakespeare plays. To avoid conscription into the Confederate Army, he takes a long European tour, effectively avoiding the Civil War. When Jacob and Bernard return to Donaldsonville during reconstruction, the Radical Republican mayor of the town, a Jew and a relative, is murdered, likely by an ex-Confederate who claimed the title.  

Amid the credit reports and the extensive financial records of his family, Lemann learns that his forbearer, Jacob, owned slaves. He traded them. He used them as collateral. He won them when planters defaulted on the credit his business had extended to them. As a Jew, Jacob Lemann’s origin story, like all Jews, has a little something to do with Pharaohs and bondage and Passover and deliverance by a merciful God. If the contradictions troubled Jacob, there’s no evidence of that. While Jews were never central to the slave trade or slave ownership, a modern calumny, there assuredly were Southern Confederate Jews, most notably Judah Benjamin, a U.S. Senator and member of Jefferson Davis’s cabinet. Lemann situates the slaveholding Jew within the broader Jewish-American story—these were not men who saw a contradiction between their own experience of persecution in Europe and their willingness to profit from the enslavement of others. Whether that blindness was a function of ambition, of the South, or of a community so anxious to belong that it adopted loathsome values, Lemann leaves open. But he does not look away, and his willingness to hold his own family to scrutiny is important. 

For his part, Jacob’s son, Bernard, leads a Jewish life, marrying into another wealthy German-Jewish family. Bernard’s son, Lemann’s paternal grandfather, Montefiore Mordechai Lemann (known to everyone as Monte), decamps Donaldson with his parents, moves to New Orleans, attends Harvard and Harvard Law School, and opens a firm with a law school classmate (a gentile) whose father serves on the state Supreme Court. Monroe & Lemann becomes one of the city’s top firms.  

Monte Lemann is an occasional adviser to Franklin D. Roosevelt and a friend of Supreme Court Justice and New Dealer Felix Frankfurter. While he testifies before Congress for the U.S. to admit more refugees from Europe—it didn’t—he nevertheless lives in a hyper-assimilationist world. He also worries about the unwashed Eastern European Jewry threatening the genteel German-Jewish world that Jews like the Lemanns had made. In Returning, Nicholas writes that his forbearers believed “that Jews could be Jewish in ways that would not strike non-Jews as strange and threatening—that we could join the wider world without being penalized for being Jewish, and without penalizing ourselves by giving up too much of what we were.” The German Jews of uptown New Orleans feared the Jewish rabble: “To combat anti-Jewish prejudice, would be to do something about [the unwashed Eastern European Jews], not to do something about prejudice.”  

But people are complicated. Monte was progressive on civil rights, despite having been raised in Donaldson. He chastised Louisiana Senator Russell Long for signing the Southern Manifesto vowing to defend segregation, helped push city fathers to hire more Black police, and devoted himself to the historically Black Dillard University.  

The affluent Uptown Jewish New Orleans of Lemann’s youth had peculiar rituals that distanced it from the rest of the tribe, and his family had its own as well. Monte’s son, Thomas Lemann, or “Father,” as he’s called in Returning, was a prosperous attorney who didn’t deny his Jewishness, let alone seek to become a Christian as many Jews have. He followed his father to Harvard and Harvard Law and also to Monroe & Lemann. But in the hyper-assimilationist world of New Orleans in the 1950s and 1960s, the grand Temple Sinai on St. Charles Avenue took on the nomenclature and style of WASP houses of worship, adding new meaning to the old joke that the Jews live like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. It called its Bar Mitzvahs “confirmations,” echoing the gentile culture.  

Nevertheless, Father found it too Jewish at times. Nicholas’s dad managed to earn a reprimand from the rabbi for celebrating Christmas in grand style—though not religiously, with a suckling pig, no less—and not Hanukkah. They attended Temple annually—on Thanksgiving. And Nicholas dropped out of its Hebrew school before getting “confirmed.” For most of his life, Father has had no interest in Zionism or the Holocaust and little interest in the cultural Judaism most of us Ashkenazi (or European) Jews are steeped in. As Lemann writes in Returning, 

I went off to college, never having tasted any of the familiar Jewish foods: bagels, lox, kugel, matzoh, gefilte fish, latkes, babka, and so on. Many of the foods of my childhood, like gumbo and jambalaya, which still exert an inescapable tug, are triply treyf because they use pork, shellfish, and butter all in the same dish. 

No wonder Father hides baskets of kippot or yarmulkes at Nicholas’s wedding and his mother’s funeral. We learn that a persistent fear of being too Jewish haunted Thomas Lemann, being mistaken for the pushy, Eastern European sorts rather than the genteel German extraction. In a touching yet slightly horrifying scene, a young Nicholas becomes the first Jew invited to one of the many elite “Krewe” parties that spring up in the city during Mardi Gras, a famously big deal in Catholic New Orleans, arguably as much a Caribbean city as an American one. The father comes to his bedroom, and the moment is weighty as he implores his son to accept the golden ticket but not to bring any Jewish guests—he’s allowed to bring a couple who will sit in the balcony as the reverie proceeds—because the Gentile hosts, and presumably everyone else, will see it as the aggressive, arriviste trait of the unwashed Jews trying to get more of their own in. It’s Edith Wharton for the Israelites, like the endless obsession with status and manners in The Age of Innocence.  

We come to see how Thomas, with whom he expresses great sympathy, embraced what Lemann calls this “deracinated” Jewish identity. He was on campus during the drastic retrenchment of Jewish admissions at Harvard as quotas were imposed in the 1940s. And he had a fine-tuned antenna for what was acceptable. He comes across as a wonderful man—big-hearted and curious with a penchant for global travel (except to Israel, which ne never visited), great art, and good living. Wealthy, Lemann’s boyhood home had its own name when most of us just had an address. The father called it Quercus, after the Latin name for Live Oaks. They had a butler. But having attended Harvard in the postwar era of Jewish quotas, Father’s anti-Zionism, and distancing himself from Jewish life rendered his Jewishness invisible to those who might use it against him. Lemann treats this generational logic with sympathy, but he doesn’t excuse it. The willingness to assimilate, he suggests, came with a price: a kind of spiritual hollowness without real safety. As Germany showed, when the boxcars are being filled with Jews, no Nazi made distinctions among the “vermin.” Assimilated German Jews, even heroes in the Kaiser’s army, were pushed into ovens with the same speed as the Polish Shtetl dwellers.  

Lemann eventually realizes that this sterile Jewish life has left him with a spiritual void, which is filled after his divorce from Dominque Browning, the Condé Nast and Washington Post Company editor, by his introduction to the writer, Judith Shulevitz. (An introduction made by her boss and another Monthly alum, our mutual friend Michael Kinsley.)  

Shulevitz is the impetus and partner in his new, more fulfilling Jewish life. (Now at The Atlantic, she’s the author of a wonderful book on the Sabbath.) Their relationship led Lemann to observe, big time: three-hour services on weekends. Real Sabbaths (mostly). It was a far cry from Temple Sinai, where Lemann abandoned his Jewish education. Before they’re married, Shulevitz insists on Jewish day school for their children, deliberately structuring their lives around Jewish time and community. Lemann is honest that this new identity didn’t come in an epiphany, but was a reorientation that took time. Early in their dating, her horror at his mixing meat with milk—key to the bolognese sauce the divorced Lemann made for his sons—is a signal moment. Where Lemann had spent decades in an ambivalent relationship with Judaism—curious about it intellectually, detached from it personally—Shulevitz embodied a different possibility. Their relationship pushed Lemann toward a more demanding form of observance than anything in his upbringing had prepared him for, Not a sudden conversion but a gradual reorientation—less a lightning bolt than a slow recognition that the life he was building with Shulevitz answered something he had not known he was missing. As Burden says in All the King’s Men, his story “is the story of a man who lived in the world and to him the world looked one way for a long time and then it looked another and very different way. The change did not happen all at once.” 

One interesting thing about Lemann’s embrace of a more muscular Judaism is that it’s not about finding God, or G-d, as we Jews are instructed to write. After reading the book, I’m not sure if Lemann believes in a divine being, although he calls the Torah “eternal.” But that in a way reveals a larger point: In America, we each make our own peace with our religion and our ethnic identity.  

Allow me a personal story to elaborate on the point: My late uncle, a wonderfully learned physician and a centenarian before he died, studied religion and history deeply. When I asked him in his 90s if he believed in God, he said, “I’m still thinking about it.” An anticommunist socialist, he got himself off the blacklist in the 1950s thanks to the intervention of Norman Thomas, his friend and mentor, a socialist presidential candidate, who was a neighbor of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who intervened on my uncle’s behalf. (His grandson, Evan Thomas, would be my boss at Newsweek.) My father, born in the same year as Lemann’s (1926), embraced his Jewish identity but never attended services. My grandfather, also born the same year as Lemann’s paternal one (1884), was anti-religious and pro-Zionist as a youth, but became orthodox after his family, left behind in what is now Belarus, was murdered by the Nazis. His wife lamented his religiosity. “I married a free thinker,” she would say nostalgically about his atheism. We all find our own way. Nicholas Lemann doesn’t fit a preconceived notion of the ostentatiously courageous journalist in, let’s say, a war zone sporting a flak jacket. But throughout his career, he’s shown great intellectual courage in his writing about race and the South and as a co-author of Columbia’s antisemitism report, which made lots of people mad. Interestingly, he writes that he probably would not have taken the task force gig were his father still alive. (When Lemann wrote about Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report on race and poverty in his book, The Promised Land, feelings were still raw.) But it takes a special kind of gumption to hold your clan up to scrutiny, and I’m sure not every Lemann was happy about his unflinching family portrait, the clan’s anxieties about religion and status. But for a journalist devoted to culture, history, and politics, to turn the lens inward at this level of detail is an act of courage at a time when the reaction to it was hardly guaranteed to be favorable, despite his reputation and connections. This is, let’s say, a challenging time to write about being a Jew. But Lemann had clearly been burning to tell this story. We should be grateful that he did.