Coming to America

Summary

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Podcast Summary: “Coming to America” – The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Date: July 8, 2026
Host: John Podhoretz (Commentary Magazine)
Guest: Nicholas Lemann, author, journalist, and memoirist
Main Theme:
A deep dive into Nicholas Lemann’s new memoir Returning—an exploration of multigenerational Jewish American identity, assimilation, family history, and the enduring complexities of faith, community, and belonging in America.

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Episode Overview

This episode features a wide-ranging, nuanced conversation between John Podhoretz and Nicholas Lemann. The main focus is Lemann’s memoir Returning, which traces his family’s 190-year journey in the United States, starting with their arrival before the Civil War. The discussion weaves together the themes of migration, assimilation, Southern Jewish experience, the interplay of ethnicity and American identity, and Lemann’s own path back to a more engaged Jewish life. The conversation is intimate, reflective, often poignant, and occasionally wry—rich in both personal anecdote and cultural commentary.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins: Jewish Immigration to the South

• Family Beginnings: Lemann’s ancestor, Jacob Lemon, emigrated from Essenheim, Germany (1809), to Donaldsonville, Louisiana, during the antebellum sugar boom ([02:20–05:00]).
  • “It was a super boom town, Donaldsonville, because it was the center of sugarcane plantation country during a big boom period…” – Nicholas Lemann [04:00]
  • The Jewish immigrant trajectory here is distinct: not the classic urban, northeastern ghetto story, but integration into small-town Southern life as business owners serving mostly non-Jewish populations ([05:00–06:30]).

2. Cultural Integration, Marriage, and Religious Continuity

• Transitions: Jacob married a local Cajun woman, Marie Berthelot, who later converted to Judaism upon the family’s move to New York; they were remarried in a Jewish ceremony ([06:32–08:47]).
  • “They were remarried in a Jewish ceremony… we came across a copy of the Ketubah from back in the 1850s…” – Nicholas Lemann [08:10]
• Strategic Moves: The family moved to New York to access Jewish life, education, and community—only to later briefly relocate back to Germany during the Civil War for pragmatic (business and draft avoidance) reasons, then return to Louisiana to rebuild after the war ([09:34–11:50]).

3. Assimilation and Identity Challenges Across Generations

• Social Complications in the 20th Century: As the family became prosperous and more Americanized, maintaining Jewish identity grew more ambiguous, especially after the “heyday” of German-Jewish enclaves ([13:24–24:51]).
  • “You could see at any point how any one of the people who came before you could have effectively out migrated from Judaism.” – John Podhoretz [13:45]
  • Lemann’s grandfather was deeply enmeshed in the German Jewish world, enjoying privilege and forming lifelong connections (notably with Felix Frankfurter) but the subsequent generations felt increasingly “homeless” between WASP society and new Eastern European Jewish immigrants ([24:00–24:51]).
  • “We were sort of homeless in a way because we started assimilating like crazy… we didn't want to associate with the Eastern European Jews and the wasps didn’t want us to associate with them.” – Nicholas Lemann [24:30]

4. Religious Life: From Assimilation to Return

• Reform Judaism and Minimal Observance: Lemann’s parents embodied the highly-assimilated, ultra-liberal Jewish model—”Thanksgiving Jews”—with little religious observance and strong aversion to Zionism or even discussion of the Holocaust or Israel ([25:10–27:02]).
  • “It’s all about the dream that being Jewish is totally consistent with being American…not particularistic…That was our life.” – Nicholas Lemann [25:42]
• Personal Rediscovery: Lemann’s curiosity about his own heritage grew, particularly in college and young adulthood. The mystery and “forbiddenness” of Jewish practice became alluring. Eventually, as a parent, he rejoined synagogue life and initiated his children into Jewish rituals ([28:03–30:46]).
  • “The lure of the forbidden was anything Jewish, kind of the opposite of Philip Roth…” – Nicholas Lemann [28:03]
  • “Giving them the sort of equipment to be Jewish, that seemed important to me…obligation to keep the chain going. One more link.” – Nicholas Lemann [29:49]

5. Complexities of Assimilation and Social Barriers

• Lemann reflects on the costs and limits of assimilation—his father’s pursuit of belonging in upper-class New Orleans, and the “doors” that never quite opened due to enduring social and institutional antisemitism ([34:02–35:57]).
  • “My father's partners and close friends all would go to…a downtown lunch club called the Boston Club, which to this day, to my knowledge, doesn’t allow any Jews to enter, even as guests…” – Nicholas Lemann [35:29]
• Family tensions emerged as Lemann reengaged in Jewish practice, especially when he decided to have his son bar mitzvahed against his father’s strong discomfort ([36:58–37:55]).

6. Intellectual Traditions and Unconscious Continuities

• Lemann describes how his father redirected his own “Jewish” intellectual energy into secular classical learning, studying Greek epics with a Catholic priest ([40:14–41:08]).

7. Love, Family, and Jewish Life in Adulthood

• Lemann’s marriage to Judith Shulevitz, daughter of one of the first female Conservative rabbis and author of The Sabbath World, brought Jewish observance further into daily life, solidifying his return—even if “not final, but...the thing that solidifies this journey” ([41:08–42:17]).

8. Modern Jewish Identity and October 7th

• The episode ends with reflections on the current charged moment for Jews in America after October 7th, 2023, and Lemann’s involvement in antisemitism monitoring and policy at Columbia University ([43:33–46:39]).
  • “In the very…weeks after October 7th, when our campus sort of became a site of national news, the then new president called me in and asked me to be one of the co-chairs of the task force on antisemitism…” – Nicholas Lemann [43:40]
  • Lemann underscores both the difficulties and new solidarities of Jewishness in this tense moment, but also the importance and joy of “returning” to active Jewish life ([47:34–49:01]).
  • “Being Jewish, being actively Jewish is a great source of joy to me every day. It’s not like a burden, it’s a joy…” – Nicholas Lemann [47:45]
  • “Those who are worried about the perils of assimilation through generations…the book is called Returning. It’s possible to return.” – Nicholas Lemann [48:10]

9. Memoirs, Identity, and the Jewish American Story

• Podhoretz frames Returning as an essential counterpoint to his own father Norman Podhoretz’s memoir Making It—juxtaposing the classic urban, Yiddish-speaking, immigrant narrative with Lemann’s southern, sometimes deracinated—yet ultimately reengaged—Jewishness ([49:01–53:58]).
  • “This is a way of providing a more fulfilled portrait of American Jewry…” – John Podhoretz [51:24]
  • “If you come back to faith or go to faith, it’s also some acknowledgment that there was something missing that you needed…” – John Podhoretz [53:36]
  • Lemann notes the allure of the New York intellectual world—echoing Making It and Willie Morris’s North Toward Home—but realizing that professional and social success did not ultimately fill the “emptiness” that faith did ([53:58–54:37]).

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Notable Quotes & Key Timestamps

• “It was a slavery plantation system.” – Nicholas Lemann [04:39]
• “We had such a well developed and established culture that somebody like my grandfather could live entirely within a German Jewish world and be almost completely secular but still be very Jewish because everybody he hung out with was a German Jew.” – Nicholas Lemann [22:30]
• “You could say at any point how any one of the people who came before you could have effectively out-migrated from Judaism.” – John Podhoretz [13:45]
• “All you need is the idea. Shopify handles the rest.” – [Ad omitted]
• “The lure of the forbidden was anything Jewish…” – Nicholas Lemann [28:03]
• “I want to really stress that being Jewish, being actively Jewish is a great source of joy to me every day. It’s not like a burden, it’s a joy.” – Nicholas Lemann [47:45]
• “Those who are worried about the perils of assimilation…the book is called Returning. It’s possible to return…so if people in your family seem to be drifting away or being pushed away, don’t give up hope.” – Nicholas Lemann [48:10]

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Important Timestamps

• [02:20] – Family origin story: immigration and settling in Louisiana
• [06:32] – Jewish-Cajun intermarriage and religious conversion
• [09:34] – Civil War: transatlantic migration and property retention
• [13:24] – The risk and resilience of Jewish identity over generations
• [22:30] – German Jewish cultural enclave in America
• [25:10] – Radical assimilation: the “Thanksgiving Jew” household
• [28:03] – Lemann’s personal rediscovery of Judaism
• [35:29] – Ongoing social barriers despite assimilation
• [43:40] – Campus antisemitism post-October 7th, 2023
• [47:45] – The joy of Jewish practice and hope for returning

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Final Thoughts

Returning is positioned not only as a family history but as a testament to the possibility—and the personal richness—of returning to one’s roots. Lemann and Podhoretz offer complementary counterpoints to accepted American Jewish narratives, ultimately affirming complexity, continuity, and joy in the Jewish American experience.

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Recommended: Read Nicholas Lemann’s “Returning” for an evocative, layered story of American Jewish life, difference, loss, and what it means to come home.

Transcript

[A]

Foreign.

[B]

Expect the worst Some breach and pain

[A]

Some die of thirst no way of knowing which way it's going Hope for

[B]

the best, Expect the worst, Hope for the best. Welcome to a special edition of the Commentary magazine daily podcast. I am talking today with Nicholas Lemon. Nick is author of Is it Nine Books, Is that right?

[A]

Who's counting?

[B]

Eight, Nine, whatever, whatever. Many Books, contributor to the New Yorker, author of the Promised Land. And we're here today to talk about his remarkable new memoir, Returning. This joins, in my estimation, the annals of singular American Jewish memoirs, stories, family stories, individual stories, stories of the immigrant experience, stories of assimilation and acculturation and faith in the middle of a country that has been very good to Jews but has also challenged Jews to maintain their Jewishness when there are all kinds of seductions that might be pulling them away from it. And all of this is very much the subject of Returning. So, Nick, you tell a very singular story about your paternal family's 190 years in the United States. So that this is a. Your family came here before the Civil War, before the first great. The Jewish immigration to the United States from Germany. And you're the founding father of your family in America. Who was he?

[A]

He was a man named Jacob Lemon, and he was born in Essenheim, Germany, a village outside of Mainz, which is outside of Frankfurt. He was born in 1809, same year as Abraham Lincoln. And he came to the US alone at the age of 27.

[B]

Did he speak any English when he came to us?

[A]

I really doubt it. Yeah, I don't think so.

[B]

And he ended up in this town, right? Is it Donaldson, Louisiana?

[A]

Donaldsonville.

[B]

Donaldsonville, Louisiana. How did he. Of all the places and all the gin joints in all the world, how did he end up in Donaldsonville, Louisiana?

[A]

Well, first of all, just to orient you, you're a movie fan, right? So you see everything. Have you seen Sinners?

[B]

Of course.

[A]

Okay, so my son called me. The book of mine that you mentioned before is set partly in Clarksdale, Mississippi. So he called me and said, you have to see Sinners because it's set in Clarksdale, Mississippi. And starts there's this title card saying Clarksdale, Mississippi. And I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, that's not Clarksdale, Mississippi, but it looks familiar. So it actually was filmed in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, my family's home hometown, as a stand in for Clarksdale. And if you really look like when there's a shot down the street at the end, there's a white building that's our family store, former Store.

[B]

So your family.

[A]

I'll answer your question.

[B]

Go ahead.

[A]

Yeah, it's kind of like saying, gee, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, why did you choose to move to Menlo Park, California in 2004? Because it's not for a very attractive to us today reason. But it was a super boom town, Donaldsonville, because it was the center of sugarcane plantation country during a big boom period when this little part of Louisiana was manufacturing or growing and manufacturing something like 90% of the sugar consumed by Americans.

[B]

Amazing.

[A]

And of course, it was a slavery plantation system.

[B]

So your family, like, this is one of the. This is part of the American Jewish story that is to me in many ways more interesting than the classic Jew comes to America, moves to a ghetto, you know, second generation goes to college. And because this is the American Jewish experience where somebody is a. Comes to do business and either pedals or figures out a way to start selling goods to the overwhelmingly gentile population that among whom he is living. And that is your family story too, right? The opening up.

[A]

I mean, I should say it's just like those things about a fish doesn't know he lives in water. I don't think of it as being as unusual a story as you do, because I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of driving through the deep rural south, but it used to be, and to some extent still is, every little town, no matter where it is, has a little dry goods store called Cohen's or Levy's or something like that.

[B]

The juice store. Yeah, as it was often called.

[A]

Right. So it wasn't like my great great grandfather was a total one off. He was, you know, one of a whole bunch of. Not as big a bunch as like the Fiddler on the Roof people, but a bunch of Jews who came here, interestingly, mostly as single men, as seen in the Lehman trilogy and so on, and started as backpack peddlers and then started dry goods stores and then the rest is history.

[B]

So your forefather married a Cajun woman.

[A]

Right.

[B]

And then did something very interesting that helps explain how you are here today as a Jewish man in 2026 with his wife.

[A]

Right. So I think what you're prompting me for is so my great great grandmother was named Marie Berthelot, and she was a teenage girl. And Jacob, my great great grandfather, married her sometime in the late 1830s. And around late 1840s, early 1850s, after they had become prosperous, they started relocating to New York. And I think this is almost certainly in at least substantial part so that they could live A Jewish life as they couldn't in Donaldsonville. And I hadn't known this before I started working on the book, by the way. So my great grandfather Bernard was sent first and he enrolled in a Jewish boarding school run by the famous Rabbi Isaacs and lived there with other Jewish boys who were lifelong friends of his. And then the parents moved up and bought a house. Miriam, my great great grandmother, converted and became. Well, she was Marie and she became Miriam. They were remarried in a Jewish ceremony. And you know, you knew my late mother in law, right. So when it came time for me to get married to her daughter, we came across a copy of the Ketubah from back in the 1850s and she said, you know, you don't read Hebrew, but actually they were married at Congregation Anshesed, where I'm a member. Different location, but you know, some things never changed.

[B]

Unreal continuity. So the point about the Lemon family then is that you had this transit between the south and the North. Family planted in the south becomes prosperous. But there is this experience of your great grandfather and his brothers and others sent north for schooling and also to be able, I suppose, to meet a Jewish woman and find somebody to marry or, or it wasn't just going to be that you're going to plant yourself. They were players, plant themselves in Louisiana and stick in Louisiana.

[A]

Yeah. So I don't think they. I think the plan was we'll just move to New York and join this sort of German Jewish world in New York. And all of the things you just said would happen and they would be kind of running the business in Louisiana from afar and maybe transitioning out. But then the Civil War came along and so what they did, which I hadn't known either, was they moved back to Germany. They sent Bernard, the oldest son, my great grandfather, who was of draft age first, and then the parents and the other kids moved. And I think this was kind of a business decision. If they stayed in New York, the Confederate States of America would expropriate all their property. If they moved back to Donaldsonville, they probably were clear eyed enough to see that their property would be conquered by the Union and then expropriated. So you know, they sort of sent, sent out letters saying everybody, we're not on either side, so let us continue to own our properties. And they did. And then if you grew up like me in the south as a white person, the narrative was gone with the wind, the war ends, the south lies in ruins. But they decided, just as they decided the Civil War's onset was A time to leave the country. The Civil War's approaching end was a time to move back to Donaldsonville. And they had loaned money to a series of small plantations and by foreclosure, Sheriff sales, et cetera. In 1865, 66, 67, 68, they acquired a little string of plantations in Donaldsonville, reopened their store, and had this little kind of empire that really flourished for half a century. And vestiges of it still exist.

[B]

And at what point did your family then pick, or who was it who then picked up stakes or expanded the family's footprint out to New Orleans, where you.

[A]

Well, it started to happen in the late 19th century, I think. My great grandparents. First of all, there was a pretty robust. I mean, there was a genuine Jewish community in Donaldsonville, which is no longer true. There was a pretty robust Jewish community in New Orleans. So picking up on what you said about my great grandfather, his parents wanting him to marry a Jewish girl in New York, that didn't happen. But he married a Jewish girl in New Orleans whom he had met at the Purim Ball. So New Orleans in those days had that. I think they started relocating to educate their kids. My great grandparents had nine children who survived childhood, a large brood, and they decided to send as many as possible to college. And so they moved to New Orleans to get them educated well enough to be able to go to college and then to go to college. So they built a house there. And they were kind of back and forth between the two. My grandfather was born in Donaldsonville in 1884, but spent his adult life in New Orleans.

[B]

So the reason that I wanted to go into some detail about this is that you could see that at any point in the book, you could see at any point how any one of the people who came before you could have effectively out migrated from Judaism.

[A]

Yeah. And many of my relatives have. Right.

[B]

But that there was this almost stubborn, though it would seem slightly irrational connection to not the faith tradition necessarily, but the peoplehood of Judaism from which they would not exit. Now, partially, I think, and you make this very clear, there was no purpose in it, because it is not as though anybody that they ever knew would not have known that they were of Jewish stock. So there was no hiding it. There was no. There was socially. There was no converting out of being a Jew. You were a Jew. And so what would be the reason? But things start getting. In your book, things start getting very socially complicated as the 20th century comes and as your family establishes itself in New Orleans and as your grandfather ends up at Harvard. Is it your grandfather?

[A]

Yeah. So my grandfather, first he went to Tulane and got an undergraduate degree at a very young age, like 12 or some crazy. Like people did in those days. And then he was sent to Harvard to get a second undergraduate degree. So he was Harvard, class of. And in his cohort, something like four brothers, all went to Harvard.

[B]

And then he made this. Was it. He made this lifelong friendship. Was it he or was it. Okay, he made a lifelong.

[A]

A lifelong friendship. He went to Harvard. Then he went to Harvard law School, class of 06. And his sort of best friend in law school was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. And they were really intimate friends for, you know, over half a century. And it's a well recorded friendship because my grandfather spent his adult life in New Orleans and Frankfurter did not. So they were writing letters back and forth all the time. So it's very, very complicated, interesting, but very warm and close relationship.

[B]

So Frankfurter was one of the two or three most prominent American Jews of his time, one of the two Jewish members of the Supreme Court, a very august person, very politically involved. More politically involved than Supreme Court justices are. Now a New Dealer, sort of participating in the New Deal from the Supreme Court. And he enlisted your grandfather in certain

[A]

cases,

[B]

activities and causes, some of which were just simply sort of liberal causes and some of which were somewhat Jewish in coloration.

[A]

Yeah. So my grandfather, who really was, you know, in our tradition, patriarchs and matriarchs are imperfect. And that's one of the things I like about our tradition, because so are week. But my grandfather was pretty close to perfect, I would say. He's a sort of exception to the rule. And he had an entirely admirable life, as far as I can tell. So Frankfurter enlisted him, you're right. In both early civil rights maneuverings, of which there were many, to sort of build to the Brown decision in 1954, and also in activities to try to bring unsuccessfully, in most cases, Jewish refugees to the United States and sort of call attention to what was unfolding in Germany.

[B]

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[A]

Yeah, it got very complicated. So and you know, many viewers will have grown up on hearing stories about the German Jews versus the Russian Jews and the cordial dislike between those two groups. So in my grandfather's heyday, that was really the heyday of German Jews in America. I mean, that you really can't find us anymore as a visible subculture. We're gone. But we were a big deal. You know, in 1967, Our Crowd was the number one bestseller, I think, for months.

[B]

Yeah, that was a book about the German Jews, the prominent German Jews of New York and elsewhere. And. Yeah, by Stephen Birmingham. Yeah, the huge bestseller.

[A]

So we had such a well developed and established culture that somebody like my grandfather could live entirely within a German Jewish world and be almost completely secular but still be very Jewish because everybody he hung out with was a German Jew. And he had this vast network of, you know, friends in New Orleans and around the country and endless numbers of relatives in his large extended family. And they were all German Jews. But that really started. That was not possible for my father's generation, really. And, you know, a couple of things happened. First of all, there was a consciousness among the German Jews that. Or mythology that everything was going really great for us until the Eastern European Jews came. And then we're sort of in this middle space where we're looking up to the wasps. Remember wasps? That was their heyday, you know, and we're trying to separate ourselves from the, as we, in our parlance, Russian Jews, and assured the wasps we're not like them. We're not like the other Jews. We're the good Jews. And yet we couldn't make the sale. So we couldn't take that last step into the upper reaches of WASP society in most cases. And, you know, doors were closed, you know, neighborhoods became restricted, universities adopted quotas, all that stuff. And within the German Jewish world, we sort of blamed that on the US Yudin and their bad behavior, giving the whole tribe a bad name. So we were sort of homeless in a way because we started assimilating like crazy and didn't have a very thick culture. And we didn't want to associate with the Eastern European Jews and the wasps didn't want us to associate with them. And so we sort of petered out.

[B]

Except. Except your father and, and. And your, and your, your mother, who, who came from New Jersey, right, your mother, and then moved down to Louis. But they were still Jews. They belonged to a. They were. They belonged to an extremely Reformed temple, right?

[A]

Yeah. So. So we belong to Temple Sinai in New Orleans. And my father, but my father Was like, even by the extreme standards of Temple Sinai, very bent on assimilation. And so we would go to Temple Sinai when I was a kid, once a year, and that was on Thanksgiving. This is all about the dream that being Jewish is a sort of totally consistent with being American and in a sort of universalistic way, you know, so what's good about Thanksgiving is good American holiday. It's not particularistic. So anyway, we would. We would that. That was our life. And then we even Temple Sinai became sort of too Jewish for my dad, which is not saying a lot. And we sort of drifted away entirely for much of my time.

[B]

And of course, the. The classic assimilated German Jew with complex feelings about his connections to his Judaism. Your father was not a supporter of the creation of the Jewish state?

[A]

No. I mean, I don't know exactly what he thought in 1948, but he definitely was not into Zionism at all. And, you know, people just don't believe this, but in our little world, people just didn't talk about Israel. They didn't go to Israel, they didn't talk about the Holocaust. These were kind of developments that did not comport with the whole way we constructed our identity. So we just chose not to deal with them.

[B]

And your father was a very prominent lawyer, was in New Orleans, and he raised you and your sister as a novelist of some great reputation. And you became inspired by one of the great Southern novels, Robert Penmore and All the King's Men. You were inspired to become a journalist in the mold of the narrator of of all the King's Men. And you followed your grandfather and your father to Harvard. And this is where your. This is where the remarkable call of the very ancient at some point starts to hook itself into your soul a little later, not than Harvard.

[A]

Right. So that's absolutely right. It's been a long, long process that's not finished yet. The thing is, first of all, you know, there's this whole story about Jewish boys and the lure of the forbidden. Well, for me, the lure of the forbidden was anything Jewish, kind of the opposite of Philip Roth or whatever. So I knew it was out there. And we weren't supposed to know about it, we weren't supposed to talk about it, but of course that made me intensely curious. So, you know, there's one way to sort of become Jewish. If you raised the way I was, that is really easy, which is just to sort of pick up the cultural stance. And I didn't do that in a sort of aggressive way. But, you know, that's the kind of thing where if you hum a few bars, I can sing along. But then the real stuff, or what I regard as the real stuff, was much more difficult because if you were me, and you know, sometimes I would walk into a synagogue on Yom Kippur or something and I had no idea what was going on at all. You know, I didn't know anything. And it just, it's hard to convey how forbidding that is, how high the wall is that you have to scale if you've never experience it at all. But I just started doing.

[B]

You didn't know when to sit down, you didn't know when to stand up. You didn't understand why people were bowing or why they were taking three steps forward. And yeah, but what's interesting is that it was forbidding, but it did not alienate you such that you said, I'm never going back in there. This is like

[A]

I, you know, I joined a synagogue as a dues paying member when I was about 30 and a new father. And I think that's significant because I was very conscious about wanting my children to be Jewish, you know, in whatever way they chose. But giving them the sort of equipment to be Jewish, that seemed important to me. It just seemed. I mean, this is a big issue in all of our lives. But, you know, X generations of people you came from were just Jewish, you know, and then to so many people I know that feel safe, oh, well, that's then and this is now. So we can just like throw the whole thing out the window. It doesn't matter if it ends with us, as they say in the movies. And I just did not feel that way. I felt some obligation to keep the, keep the chain going. One more link.

[B]

But it is irrational in some sense or beyond rational making that decision. Secular jews of the 1970s and 1980s raised secular. Who weren't even sort of like locks and bagel Jews or Fiddler on the Roof Jews or, you know, were really excited to have consanguinity with Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud and didn't come from Yiddish as you didn't come from Yiddish. There was very little reward, even cultural reward, for going in the direction that you went. Probably most of the people that you knew who were like more Jewish than you in your Harvard class or in journalistic circles at the Washington Monthly and others were heading in the other direction, probably toward less Jewish and more or out marrying or whatever, but not you. And I think there is in the book this touch of the,

[A]

I don't

[B]

know what you would call It. I mean, this. Not supernatural, but this touch of a call from elsewhere that meant that you weren't alienated when you went into a. Into a forbidding synagogue.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, something was definitely pulling me in that direction. And I want to say, you know, you could say, I mean, you're sort of saying it was not the easy path. Maybe not, but it's been very rewarding. So no, absolutely no regrets about it.

[B]

And your family. And it's. Well, you also say that your mother, who moved to Louisiana with your father and participated in this life, the Thanksgiving Jew life. She, however, had grown up in a much more conventional Jewish way in Perth Amboyne, New Jersey.

[A]

Yeah, she did. And I found out only after she died. It's kind of hard to recreate how tightly the door on mainstream American Judaism had to be shut in our little world. So only after my mother died did I learn that she had actually, in high school, been a teacher in. Well, first of all, her family lived like two blocks from the shoal, which I never heard, and my grandparents never even told me where it was or mentioned it. And it was this powerful feeling that if you close that off, doors will open over here, and it's a real trade off. So my mother was a teacher in the shoal Hebrew school all through high school and was, you know, quite involved member at that age. And then, you know, it ended.

[B]

Fascinating. But was it. Was it true? Was this perception that you close this door so that these doors open? It didn't. It didn't. Doesn't sound like. Or didn't feel like reading the book, as though there were doors that your father had wanted to go through that he couldn't, or that the doors that he couldn't, or that he knew which doors he couldn't go through, so he didn't even bother to try. You tell this story about being invited to this exclusive social event in New Orleans, right? A ball. Is it a ball? And that your father made it very clear to you that though you could bring two other people, the last thing that you should do is bring anyone Jewish because it would be too. Too assertive or too. Yeah, clannish. So. So the door was supposed to open, but. But did he actually get any? Did he open doors that would have been otherwise closed to him if he had been.

[A]

I think it's. I mean, maybe not. Maybe not. New Orleans is really an outlier. Although, you know, some of us have the perception that doors might be starting to these days. But, you know, my father's partners and close friends all would go to lunch every day at a downtown lunch club called the Boston Club, which to this day, to my knowledge, doesn't allow any Jews to enter, even as guests. So he would go, you know, this is classic us as German Jews, he couldn't go to the Boston Club, so he would go next door to the Oyster Bar and have oysters every day. But that didn't win the Boston Club

[B]

over, you know, so, you know, classic Jewish story now in our day and where our kids have gone to school and all that, is that you have consciously Jewish parents who also want to raise their kids Jewish and then find themselves in the fascinating and unique bind that their kids get way more religious than they are, and then they have to deal with what might feel like a rejection of their lives by kids who are saying, you did not live your life seriously enough or follow the law closely enough, and they have to make their peace with that. And your dad kind of went through that with you, even though I don't think he knew it. He would have experienced it that way.

[A]

Yeah, no, I mean, he definitely did. And, I mean, I should say in. In our world, there's some kids who go that way, and then, as you know, there's other kids who go the other way. So.

[B]

Right.

[A]

Yeah, it's a moment. Very charged moment right now. But, yeah, my father just did not. I mean, we. We never had any real breach and remained close until his death at the age of 97. But he was sort of mystified by my turn to Judaism, and the only time it ever came to a head was when my oldest child, who's now 41, I told my parents he was going to be at bar mitzvah. And unlike Jewish parents that you grew up around, he was horrified and really, really didn't want it to happen. And we had to have these elaborate negotiations about to get him to come to the bar mitzvah and stuff like that, so. But once that happened, three more bar mitzvahs followed.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

But explain this thing to me because you as an intellectually curious person, you've written books on, you've written books on the African American migration experience in the United States, you've written books on the sat, you've written books on and Americans and corporations. You have a wide ranging interest. And your father was intellectually very engaged and interested and scholarly. But he had this entire faith tradition, the most intellectual faith tradition in the history of the earth that was right there for him to engage in. And that's the door that he. One of the doors that he closed.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, as I look back on his life, I think he did a lot of sort of Jewish monkey things, perhaps unconsciously so, for example, like a lot of people that, you know, I think he had a beloved weekly study session for decades with a member of the clergy. But the member of the clergy was a Catholic priest and the texts were the Iliad and the Odyssey in ancient Greek. But there's something Jewish about it, even though it wasn't Jewish. So it's sort of like the Jewish postman always rings twice. There's something he would choose to do that sort of strikes me as Jewish in some way. But it was designed to be un Jewish.

[B]

So you feel this call, you join the synagogue, you bar mitzvah, your children, your second wife, your present wife, your future wife, daughter of one of the first female conservative rabbis in the United States. And your coming together with Judith Shulavitz, author of a really wonderful book about the Sabbath called the Sabbath World. That is, as you make clear at the end of the book, that is sort of like the final. Not final, but it is the thing that solidifies this journey. Cause this was a life that she was going to live. She was going to live a Jewish life.

[A]

Yeah. Although, I mean, you would never get her to say that, you know, because it's very complicated and zigzaggy.

[B]

Right.

[A]

So I could tell that about her, but she claimed that that just sort of surprised her when it happened.

[B]

Ah, okay. So. But you're. So bring us up to the. So, as I said, I think it's a very beautiful book. I'm not quite conveying the richness and complexity of the portraits that you paint of the life in Donaldsonville, this journey back and forth, this classic American success story, you know, sort of memoir of a successful family with this very quirky part of it that never quite adds up. But you end the book not only with an understanding that you've had a rich, that your life has been enriched, but that you've entered into. A world of trouble in some ways and that the thing. What we are living through, you might have somehow escaped had you not taken this journey. You could have kept yourself separate and apart from the emotions engendered by October 7th and. And things that you had to do professionally after October 7th. Can you talk a little about that?

[A]

Well, in the very, you know, I teach at Columbia University, and in the weeks after October 7th, when our campus sort of became a site of national news, the then new president called me in and asked me to be one of the co chairs of the task force on antisemitism that she created. And I said yes pretty unhesitatingly. I guess I could have said no, but she asked right after I had finished the first draft of the book. So I had a pretty clear picture of what the people I came from would have done in that situation because they were not my dad so much. But the previous generations went to really great efforts to be part of the community and do for the community. I mean, let's be honest, one reason I said yes was I had been involved for 20 years almost in kind of anti BDS activities at Columbia. And actually I thought, you know, I had a rosy view of how this all played out in the university. Fairly rosy, because I thought this is exactly how supposed to work. There's a group of us who are passionately opposed bds. There's another group that passionately favor it. We issue petitions, you know, we get signatures when we see each other in the hallway, we say hello, we know that we disagree. That's how the world is supposed to work. And so I thought that this task force would end up being sort of like that, but that was not the case. So, you know, I didn't totally know what I was getting into and what the whole mood of the campus and the country and so on would be like and how charged it would become.

[B]

And how did that affect. How does that. How did that affect the. As you were going back over the book and having to. Having to accommodate what you were learning after October 7th or sort of deal with it in the concluding.

[A]

I don't think it affected it that much. I mean, I had a wonderful editor named Bob Weil who made me rewrite the book entirely twice. But it was more on literary grounds than on account for life after October 7 grounds. So the architecture was there. Everything was in the place it ended up being. So it's really not one of these posts. Ten, seven books. Right. So it was more of a. It's been more. And continues to be more of a pretty profound experience for me personally, as it has been for many of us. And it's kind of less about the book than you might think.

[B]

It just sort of reminds me this joke I heard in the last day or so. Sort of like the world. Not this is a political version, but you could almost adapt it to your family in some odd way. A Zionist and an anti Zionist walk into a bar together and the bartender says, we don't serve Jews in here. So the world in which you sort of think you can keep yourself apart maybe, or you can define yourself. I'm an anti Zionist Jew, so you should let me be. And clearly that is not really necessarily going to be the case in the world after October 7th.

[A]

Yeah, well, we'll see that. That remains to be seen. But what I would like your viewers to take away as the message of my book, I mean, I'd like them to just read it as a story. But is number one. Yes. We're in a very charged moment and it's something we all think about and talk about and argue about nonstop. But I want to really stress the being Jewish, being actively Jewish is a great source of joy to me every day. It's not like a burden, it's a joy. Okay, so take that home with you. And second of all, those who are worried about the perils of assimilation through the generations, the book is called Returning. It's possible to return. And I see my family story is a little unusual, as you note, but people keep leaving and you think it's forever and then they come back. And so it's not just like a door that. Like those dog doors that you can go out and come in. So if people in your family seem to be drifting away or being pushed away. Don't give up hope.

[B]

Just to conclude on a personal note, returning functions almost as a kind of. Not answer to, but a kind of opening up of an entirely different kind of Jewish memoir from my own father's memoir, Making it, which is.

[A]

Which is a story as a kid.

[B]

Yeah. Which is a story of a child of immigrants, spoke Yiddish as a first language. And describes the experience of leaving the Brooklyn ghetto life and moving into the wider world as a brutal bargain. Because you have to leave behind some aspects of your family, the life that they want to live and all of that. This book, of course, written in the mid-60s, if you want to fully participate in American life and that there are costs as well as benefits, but that is the ultimate urban story. Someone who never left, basically, New York City until he was 19 years old, lived in New York City his entire life, had no sense of the kind of wild, multicultural richness that your family not only was born in with the marriage of a German Jew and a Cajun woman who then converts to Judaism, but goes through these two centuries a plantation slave holding, getting rid of slave, being part of the civil rights movement, all of that. And many people who are listening probably have read Making It. And you should understand, in my estimation, that this is a kind of way of providing a fulfilled portrait of American Jewry. That you have that classic showbiz Jew story of the kid from the ghetto. But then you have your story of being a somewhat deracinated, raised in a deracinated Jewish fashion. How that happened and then how you were pulled in almost.

[A]

And you could say that Norman's life also had the aspect of returning because at a certain point, for many different reasons, he left the Park Avenue salons that he's describing and Making it and, you know, went into a more Jewish cultural space. You know, I'm also thinking, as you're saying this, John, about a book that is similar, came out around the same time. I'm sure you've read it because your mom worked for him. Is Willie Morris's book North Toward Home.

[B]

North Toward Home. Yeah.

[A]

That was a real bible for me when I was growing up, you know, because he was Southern and he returned also.

[B]

Well, Willie, you know, it's interesting that my dad went with Willie Morris to Yazoo City, Mississippi, which was his home. And that experience played some odd role in helping him conceive of making It. Yeah. So he wrote his book. Willie wrote his book. And they were very close at that point. Yes. My mother worked for Harper's For Willie Morrison, these American. These just young American men dealing with sort of the young man from the provinces, as Lionel Trilling called them, like Rastignac and Pere Goriot, like the people who come from outside and then bring a new energy to a staid world that had set itself and was hardened and kind of calcified and this new lunatic, ambitious walls breaking, energy brought into it. Your story is again, more complicated because or less that kind of like ambition satisfied because you were from a successful family, you moved on into a different profession in which you too made yourself a great success. But obviously, if you come back to faith or you go to faith, it's also some acknowledgment that there was something missing that you needed, that you are. And as you say, it's a great source of joy to you that you were. That something filled you that that was empty.

[A]

Yeah. Yes, that's completely true. And just one more thing on making it. And north toward home. And me, even though I came from a successful family, the idea of sort of penetrating the New York literary, journalistic, intellectual world, which seemed very distant when I was growing up in New Orleans, you know, that was really alluring. As for your father and as for Willie Morris, and then there's some quality where you get there and you're admitted into the right living room and it's just not. It doesn't fulfill everything for you and you want something else.

[B]

Very, very, very true. Anyway, I really hope that everybody will conclude listening to this conversation and go get yourself whatever electronic or physical copy you can of Nicholas Lemons Returning, which is easily the best American book that I've read or best book that I've read published this year and maybe in many a year. So you will find yourself immensely enriched by the experience as Nick has been immensely enriched by his returning. So thank you. Thank you so much for being here. And I'm John Podhoritz. Keep the candle burning.