Nicholas Lemann with Jodi Kantor: Returning

Veteran New Yorker correspondent Nicholas Lemann join us for a conversation about growing up Jewish in the South, the unknown corners of New Orleans, and his searingly honest new memoir, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries in conversation with New York Times investigative reporter Jodi Kantor.

Growing up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege, Nicholas Lemann had an unconventional Jewish upbringing. Keenly aware of the contradictions of being Jewish in the South, Lemann chafed both at its strict racial hierarchy and at his relatives’ eagerness to be accepted in a subtle but distinctly antisemitic environment. Returning follows Lehmann as he rejects assimilated society, embraces religion, and chooses, along with his wife, to raise his children in a Jewish world.

In a conversation about the hidden roots of antisemitism, hear Lemann and Kantor discuss his family saga — a springboard to address some of the most urgent questions of our time, and an utterly indelible look at Jewish life in the 21st century.

“I remain haunted by this clear-eyed, original, entirely dazzling memoir.” — Stacy Schiff

“In this anguished, uncertain, moving, and driven memoir of his pursuit of personal reclamation, Nicholas Lemann writes as the historian of a family, a people, and an idea. How he comes―through love and introspection, and rising finally to a kind of (biblical?) poetry―to the restoration of purpose and integrity may not be intended as a guide for the perplexed, but it will not be surprising if it achieves exactly this.” ― Cynthia Ozick