IIJS was pleased to welcome Prof. Nicholas Lemann, on Tuesday, October 13, 2026, for a discussion of his new book, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, joined in conversation by IIJS Prof. Jeremy Dauber.
Nicholas Lemann, a veteran New Yorker correspondent, grew up in New Orleans, the son of German Jews in a world of gilded privilege. Yet in contrast to his parents’ generation, which always sought to downplay their religious background, Lemann was intrigued by his roots, thinking he wanted to be like Jack Burden, the ever-curious reporter in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
And like his fictional hero, who gets drawn into a web of Southern political intrigue, Lemann in Returning delves deeply into the family story—from their arrival in the 1830s as peddlers from Germany, to their becoming plantation owners and department store owners after the Civil War, to their emergence as aspirants in the aristocratic world of New Orleans, where they could never quite belong.
Nicholas Lemann was born and raised in New Orleans. He began his journalism career there as a 17-year-old staff writer for an alternate weekly paper called the Vieux Carre Courier. He graduated from Harvard College, where he was president of The Harvard Crimson, in 1976, magna cum laude in American History and Literature. He has worked as a reporter and editor at The Washington Monthly, Texas Monthly, The Washington Post, The Atlantic (where he was national correspondent from 1983 to 1999) and The New Yorker (where he has been a staff writer for twenty-five years), and contributed to many other publications. From 2003 to 2013 he was dean of Columbia Journalism School, leading a period of significant growth and change for the school, and since then he has been a professor there. At Columbia he has also helped launch Columbia Global Reports, a publishing venture that he continues to lead, Columbia World Projects, and the Knight Columbia First Amendment Institute. He is currently one of three co-chairs of the university’s antisemitism task force. His books include The Promised Land (1991), The Big Test (1999), Redemption (2006), Transaction Man (2019), and, most recently, Higher Admissions (2024). He is a member of several honorary societies, including the American Philosophical Society, the New York Institute for the Humanities, the Society of American Historians, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he serves as co-chair of the academy’s Commission on Reimagining Our Economy.
Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and, for a decade, directed the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University. He is also currently the Mendelson Professor of American Studies and the director of Columbia’s Center for American Studies. For twelve years, he co-edited Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History with Barbara Mann. His books include Antonio's Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment and the Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature (Stanford University Press, 2004); In the Demon's Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern (Yale University Press; 2010); The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem (Schocken Books, 2013); Jewish Comedy: A Serious History (W.W. Norton, 2017); American Comics: A History (W.W. Norton, 2021); and Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press: 2023). His most recent book, American Scary: A History of Horror from Salem to Stephen King (Algonquin: 2024), was named a best book of 2024 by the Boston Globe. He is an elected member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.
The discussion is available to view in full below.
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