A Journey Through Jewish American Heritage, Assimilation and Belonging

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, with Passover approaching, Jews across the globe prepare to celebrate, and many cities are heightening security around synagogues amid the war with Iran. Anti-Semitism has been surging since the October 7th attacks, and our next guest is part of the task force tackling it at Columbia University. In his new book, Professor Nicholas Lemann delves deep into his family’s history as the son of German Jews. And he joins Walter Isaacson to speak about reconnecting with his faith and the wider Jewish community’s relationship to Israel.

 

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna. And Nicholas Lemann, welcome to the show.

 

NICHOLAS LEMANN: Thank you.

 

 ISAACSON: You’ve written this very rich memoir and multi-generational history, much different from your non-fiction books of the past. What set you on this journey?

 

LEMANN: Well, I started to get interested in my family history. And that’s a thing that happens to most people later in life. And it doesn’t happen to all people later in life, but a certain subset of those over a certain age kind of get obsessed. And I think the reason for that is for a lot of your life, and for some people for their whole life, they think it’s just me on stage, you know, enacting my life, and that’s what really matters. But sometimes, you know, you start thinking, well, I’m actually a link on a chain, you know, and there’s people who came before me, and there’s people who came after me, and that’s what’s more important than what I did as an individual. So you wanna learn more about who you came from, so the people who come after you can know more. 

 

And then the other part of it, Walter, is that there was a it was like the proverbial elephant in the room. One of – you know, I’m from New Orleans, like you, so you know that I have a lot of cousins. And one of my cousins many years ago gathered up a lot of family papers and put them at Tulane University, where you teach, and it’s a really big archive. You work in archives, so you know the metric. It’s over a hundred linear feet of material. So I kind of knew it was there my whole life, and I thought, well, the one thing I’m not gonna do is look in this material. Then I decided, you know, that’s a little perverse, so I’m gonna go look in the material. And you know, the rest is history as they say.

 

ISAACSON: You know, we biographers like to think that clue number one to anybody is, it’s all about dad. And boy, is that the case in this book. Tell me about your father Thomas Lemann and his feelings about being Jewish and being a southerner.

 

LEMANN: Well, he was – you knew him, so we should note that. And he was a remarkable character. A brilliant and eccentric guy, a lawyer in New Orleans. On the Jewish front, he was, I guess what we’d call very, very assimilated. He would, we belonged to a reformed temple and he would take us there once a year, and that day was Thanksgiving. So he was into sort of leaving whatever restrictions and confines there were to being Jewish, particularly in New Orleans, and, you know, becoming a full member of the wider world, not being real ethnic. 

 

But on the other hand, he was very southern and proud to be a southerner. He lived in, I mean, it’s really remarkable. He died at the age of 97 in the same hospital where he was born. That hospital is where his mother worked as a nurse, and there was a plaque outside his room memorializing her service. And it’s the same hospital where I was born. So it’s a very, you know, traditional, non-mobile, if you will, un-American world. And we felt like we were very deeply, deeply rooted in the south. Now, one of the surprises of my research was that I had no idea of this, I found that my family actually had moved to New York before the Civil War and left the South. So I had to sort of process that. If we were so southern, why did we leave way back then? And then if we were so un-Southern why did we move back?

 

ISAACSON: There’s a story in your book that, you know, struck me, which involved an invitation you got to a junior Mardi Gras ball and your father’s reaction. Tell me that, and tell me how that informed the book.

 

LEMANN: Okay, well first of all, given that not all of the viewers will be from New Orleans, you have to do a little explaining like, you know, Pulitzer Prizes, Nobel Prizes, having your company do an IPO. The equivalent of that in New Orleans that we grew up in is these Mardi Gras social organizations. They’re the pinnacle of everything, and they matter incredibly to people. So that’s the context. And you know, I got an invitation to a sort of junior Mardi Gras ball that I didn’t respond to. I was like 13. And my father came to my room very seriously and said, you know, did you get this invitation? And he said, you know, you’re the first Jewish kid ever to be invited to this ball, and you need to accept, because it’s a step forward, you know, for our people. And we’re gonna stop – you know, these organizations typically didn’t let Jews in. And so, but we’re gonna, our generation’s gonna end that and we’re gonna be fully accepted. But you know, you’re allowed to invite a couple of guests. Don’t invite any Jewish guests, you know, ’cause you don’t want to, like, push this too fast. So that was when I was kind of officially introduced to this, you know, one of the endless variations of this struggle about assimilating what you give up, what you gain, what you might gain, et cetera. And it sort of went on from there.

 

ISAACSON: This book is basically about the assimilationist instinct. That took you all the way back to Germany four or five generations ago. How does that assimilationist instinct for Jews – and for that matter, every other ethnic group probably feels an assimilationist instinct – how did that inform your book?

 

LEMANN: Well, you know, it’s a trade off. That is and you see this going back into, I mean, in a funny way, the story of assimilated Jews really begins with one person, which is a man named Moses Mendelssohn, who rode into the gates of Berlin on a donkey in 1743. And he was really the – I mean, Jews did not live outside the exclusively Jewish world, including my family. In those days my family, we didn’t have last names, which was typical of Jews. So there, there’s this whole story in Germany before you even get to America of Jews trying to join the modern world and called the Haskalah. And you know, there’s two sides to the story. One is, would the rest of the world let us join? And the other is what would we lose if we did join? 

 

So there’s these struggles that just go on forever, and as you say, they go on for all ethnic groups. You know, go, go watch The Godfather for the 50th time. You know, it’s an American story.

 

ISAACSON: What are the lessons about desiring to assimilate that seems sometimes to lead to great tragedies, especially in Germany in the 1930s? What do those lessons about the desire to assimilate have for today when there’s been a rise of antisemitism both in Europe and the United States?

 

LEMANN: So there was this long running process in Germany of what’s called German– Jewish emancipation, which was not completed until 1871. That was when Jews became completely, you know, full citizens with full rights of the German nation. And then by 10 years later, there was a very active antisemitic movement in Germany that sort of built and built and built until you got the Nazis. 

 

So in America today, you know, you have a half roughly of the Jews in the world – there aren’t that many – living in Israel, and you have a tremendous amount of anti-Israel sentiment both on the left and the right. And so, you know, most American Jews were raised to think that, you know, Israel is our homeland, and even if we don’t live there, it’s part of our identity. But especially if you’re younger, you really get challenged on that and kind of asked are you a Zionist? And so people like my kids really struggle with that. It’s, almost every family I know has some kind of internal dissension over that. It’s a tough time, not just because of the antisemitism, but again – although there’s that – but the internal, you know, questioning of how to, how to do citizenship in the US and other countries. Is assimilation a good idea? Are you accepted in the wider world? Those are all really tough questions that a lot of us are dealing with right now.

 

ISAACSON: After the October 7th, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel you were asked to serve as the co-chair – you’re sitting there at Columbia University now – of the antisemitism task force there. What in your research and in your book helped inform you for that work on antisemitism?

 

LEMANN: Well, I guess first of all working on the book very much led me to accept this assignment and informed the way that I understood the assignment, not just in terms of asking what previous members in the family would have done in this situation, but also understanding how rich and complicated and contentious the history of Zionism is in the Jewish community on all aspects. And that helped me sort of understand the conflict we were having on the campus much better. So, you know, all of that helped. And then as I was revising the book, it probably was in my mind that, you know, watching, you know, issues pertaining to being Jewish, go from a pot that simmers to a pot that was on full boil and what it felt like to be in the middle of that. It made it feel as if the, you know, going back to what we were talking about, about assimilation, that the process of being a Jewish American isn’t a settled matter and isn’t just simple and all the old conflicts around this aren’t part of the past. They’re part of the present too. And we just, you know, at least I have to wrestle with them a lot. 

 

And, you know, there’s, there’s conversations – there’s a conversation at Columbia. There’s a pretty hot-blooded conversation in the religious community I belong to, kind of, internal to Jews about, about how we’re supposed to feel about Israel, about Zionism, about peoplehood, about all those things. So there’s just a lot on the table right now that, you know, the world seems so different from the way it seemed on October 6th, 2023 when, you know, Israel was supposedly about to sign an agreement with Saudi Arabia, and it had signed these other agreements. The Egypt agreement had held. And you sort of thought, okay, Israel’s accepted. Now clearly it’s not.

 

ISAACSON: President Trump recently sued Harvard and renewed his attack on Harvard saying there had been so much antisemitism on campus. You’ve dealt with it at Columbia as part of the antisemitism task force. Columbia has tried to navigate that. But do you think what President Trump is doing has some merit to it and is it the right way to approach it?

 

LEMANN: Well, so first of all, it’s made life much more difficult for our task force once President Trump came back into office because he gave, you know, any effort to combat antisemitism on campus, a bad name. The way I would put it is the way a liberal university like Columbia works is we honor people’s ethnic identities. And if something happens that makes a substantial number of the people in an identity group very uncomfortable – and we did polling that supported this – the university says, you know, okay, we’re here to listen to you and try to, you know, attend to your concerns in a way that’s consistent with our values. So, you know, some of my relatives who lived on past my dad weren’t happy with my doing this. And they’d say, you know, it’s only antisemitism if you get up in the middle of the campus and say, I hate Jews. Well, nobody did that. 

 

But they did say in effect, I hate Israel. And most American Jews identify in some way with Israel. And so it’s, it’s very, very impactful on Jewish kids, especially more observant Jewish kids to have this, you know, really massive, very harsh critique of Israel as the worst country in the world taking place, loud and proud with hundreds of people wearing masks in the middle of your campus. And so I think that’s a problem that needs to be addressed and we tried to address. You know, whether that’s something that President Trump cares about. I don’t know. I mean, he clearly doesn’t care about it if other, you know, if, if it’s a group of women saying this, if it’s a group of African American or Latino students saying this. So, you know, I’m somewhat skeptical that this resides deep in his heart as an issue.

 

ISAACSON: Has this whole process since October 7th made it harder to be very anti-Israel without being accused of being antisemitic and anti-Jewish?

 

LEMANN: Well, it depends on who’s doing the accusing. I think in the Jewish world that I’ve come to or returned to and that I live in it’s – outside of that world, I think most of, many of my friends who are not Jewish, have a very, very, very harshly negative view of Israel. And it’s become harsher in the last couple of years. They don’t see that as antisemitic at all, or most of them don’t. But most of my Jewish friends that I belong to a synagogue with, it seems like, you know, in universities we use the term unconscious bias, seems like an example of unconscious bias, or at least it makes them feel uncomfortable. Because, you know, in the Jewish world I live in now, which is pretty observant, everybody has family in Israel. Everybody’s kids have spent significant time in Israel studying. They themselves are back and forth to Israel all the time. So to say to them, you don’t truly understand your Jewish identity, which is completely unconnected to Israel, it’s sort of like, what world are you talking about exactly? That doesn’t feel like you’re describing my life and my soul and my consciousness.

 

ISAACSON: And the other big lesson at the end of your book is the comfort that comes from reembracing, returning to your tribe.

 

LEMANN: Yeah. So I want to say that, you know, ’cause again, as we’ve covered, I’m in a lot of troubled and agonized and painful conversations about this. And it’s a good note to end on. I love being Jewish. It’s a source of wonderful enrichment and joy and meaning in my life. It takes up hours of every week. And it’s a very, very positive thing. So, you know, without all these fights that we’re all having about Israel and Zionism, I just, you know, I just wanna say that. You know, I’m having a Seder, it’s a real high point. You know, I don’t want to feel like the debates about our place in the world in our various locations vitiates the meaning of prayer and observance and community ’cause it doesn’t.

 

ISAACSON: Nicholas Lemann, thank you so much for joining us.

 

LEMANN: Thanks Walter. Great to see you and thank you.