Being Jewish in America

June 22, 2026 in Library Corner

By Robin Jacobson

It began as an ordinary afternoon in a local hair salon. The stylist was briskly snipping away at my overgrown hair, when someone turned on the TV. Violent images from the ongoing Middle East conflicts suffused the room. Suddenly, my stylist was looming above me, demanding, “Are you Jewish?”

Fearfully eyeing the scissors flashing by my face, I gave zero consideration to bravely engaging in a bridge-building conversation. Instead, I tersely replied, “Yes, I’m Jewish,” and immediately switched the subject to the salon’s new ocean-themed décor. Thankfully, the haircut was nearly done. I skipped the blow dry and rushed into the street with my hair still wet.

Later, at home, I calmed down. Surely, I had never been in danger and had only imagined the stylist’s hostility? The whole salon episode was an overwrought, post-October 7 emotional reaction, existing only in my head. Or was it?

In his moving and multi-layered memoir, Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries, renowned author-journalist Nicholas Lemann notes that many American Jews are anxious, even though they formerly felt safe and accepted in the United States. They worry about rising antisemitic incidents. And they also fear that fierce differences over Israeli policies will permanently splinter Jewish families and institutions.

Lemann understands these anxieties but is puzzled by his friends’ nostalgia for what they recall as the “golden age of American Jewry.” In contrast, Lemann’s New Orleans family never experienced any such “golden age”; they were perpetually uneasy about being American Jews, notwithstanding that they had prospered for generations in Louisiana. Their strategy was to never act “too Jewish.”

Nonetheless, Lemann, a former dean of the Columbia Journalism School, departed from his parents’ example of avoiding overt Jewish behavior to serve as co-chair of Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism following October 7. This intense experience reinforced his conviction that living an American Jewish life is complicated; it is rarely smooth and friction-free.

A New Orleans Jew

The Lemann family story in Louisiana began in 1836 when Lemann’s great-great-grandfather Jacob emigrated from Essenheim, Germany. Although Jacob and his family returned to Germany during the Civil War, they resettled in Louisiana afterwards, buying ruined plantations, operating a general store, and growing in affluence. Lemann’s grandfather became a prominent New Orleans lawyer. Still, the Lemann family socialized mostly with other German-Jewish families.

Nicholas’s parents, Barbara and Thomas Lemann, craved to be fully accepted into mainstream New Orleans society. They hosted Christmas dinners and Easter Egg hunts. Above all, they yearned to participate in the elaborate system of Mardi Gras balls, which had long been barred to Jews.

The Ever-Contentious Issue of Zionism

Barbara and Thomas belonged to a Reform synagogue but, bizarrely, attended services only on Thanksgiving. When Thomas discovered that the religious school had discussed Israel with its students, he ended Nicholas’s Jewish education.

Thomas’s objections to Israel had nothing to do with Israeli policies or Arab-Jewish conflicts. Rather, the Jewish state’s existence offended his deep-seated conviction that Jews were neither a people nor a tribe who belonged in a separate homeland. He wanted Jews to be regarded as comparable to Episcopalians  or other practitioners of a mainstream religion.

Now deceased, Lemann’s parents were spared the knowledge that their youngest grandson was recently physically accosted in New York City by a thug who noticed his Star of David necklace and taunted him as a “dirty Jew.”  Would they have wrung their hands, crying “I told you so?”  Regardless, Nicholas has chosen to live as an observant Conservative Jew, finding that Judaism makes his life immeasurably richer, even if more vulnerable.