"[...]#NicholasLemann’s terrific, researched account of his #Louisiana family’s #history in #America and his own #Jewish evolution lands at an important time for American #Jews. Returning is the #Lemann family story of #assimilation and material success in America, and the #author’s engagement in middle age of rich Jewish observance. It is told with #historical rigor but also #novelistic detail. Don’t think of this as a Jewish #book, but as an American #story with relevance beyond the 2 percent who call themselves Jewish. It is a case study in how, in a free country, #Americans choose to wear their #religious and #ethnic identities, and how the majority culture also influences, even bludgeons, those decisions."

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2026/06/11/the-return-of-the-native/

"#Returning, #NicholasLemann’s eloquent, achingly honest account of life within a tightly knit #German-#Jewish subculture whose collective response to #antisemitism was to fixate on fitting in with #gentiles. So axiomatic was the #NewOrleans community’s #assimilationism, and so profound its disdain for Eastern #European #Jews, that #Lemann never tasted lox until after he left home for college. And yet, well into adulthood, Lemann reevaluated, and rejected, the tradeoffs of his family forebears, in favor of a #kosher home, membership in a #minyan and #Shabbat observance.

Hence the #book’s title. Hence, too, its element of surprise: This deeply personal story is not what you might expect from Lemann, a practitioner of cool-headed “neoliberal” policy #journalism in its 1980s heyday, who went on to become a #NewYorker staff #writer, dean of the #Columbia #Journalism School and #author of four books on U.S. political and social #history."

https://momentmag.com/book-review-returning-lemann/

"Over the course of a distinguished #journalistic career, #NicholasLemann has #written #books on American meritocracy (“The Big Test,” 1999), capitalism (“Transaction Man,” 2019), the black migration to the industrial North (“The Promised Land,” 1991) and the racial terrorism that plagued Reconstruction (“Redemption,” 2006).

“Returning: A Search for Home Across Three Centuries” is a more personal project. Here the #NewYorker staff #writer and emeritus dean at #ColumbiaJournalismSchool turns his lens on himself and his prosperous #Louisiana-based family of merchants, plantation owners and lawyers, embedding them in the #history of the #American #South and of #German #Jewish #immigration and #assimilation. The panoramic view and shifting of perspectives broaden the #book’s interest but detract from its focus.

The search for identity and community does give this sprawling, ruminative memoir a thematic unity."

https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/returning-review-jewish-roots-in-the-south-294d4c34