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A zombie is haunting America, the zombie of communism. Pronounced dead and discredited after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is back. Former Senate candidate Graham Platner and influencer Hasan Piker did not lose, and probably gained, adherents by having called themselves communists. Meanwhile, as Stu Smith recently wrote in The Free Press, a majority of the Democratic Socialists of America governing board “openly identifies with communist ideology.”

As a Russian specialist, I cannot help wondering: How is this possible? Do these people really have no problem with the history of the ideology they’re claiming? With Joseph Stalin’s Gulag that took the lives of millions, his artificially induced famine that deliberately starved several million peasants, and the secret police’s form of interrogation that routinely included torture? Do they actually want to revive Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror that claimed the lives of a quarter of Cambodia’s population?

Three quarters of a century ago, questions like these led to one of the most important volumes to emerge during the Cold War. Now largely forgotten, The God That Failed (1949) was once so widely read that the volume’s title became a catchphrase for any movement that attracted intellectuals to a quasi-religious ideology claiming infallibility.

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In 1983, four years out of college, I was living in Rochester, New York, covering part of western New York for the Associated Press. I had a meager social life, which left time for serious reading. That year, I bought a book that challenged and thrilled me. It was Douglas Hofstadter’s 777-page Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

I read Gödel, Escher, Bach closely and patiently. When I got stuck on a complicated passage, I powered through it; there was no other option. I entered Hofstadter’s world and didn’t leave it until I got to the last page.

GEB, as its fans call it, is about the miracle of consciousness: how our sense of “I” can arise from the workings of neurons and axons that are individually unintelligent. Hofstadter said systems (including brains) gain awareness when they become self-referential in a certain way. According to him, the emergence of “I” comes from a “strange loop,” where you traverse levels of a hierarchy and wind up back where you started. To get the tricky idea across, he appealed to M.C. Escher’s hands, which draw each other into existence; Bach’s fugues, which loop back on themselves, as though the music were listening to itself; and the mathematician Kurt Gödel, who cleverly manipulated formulas into making statements about their own provability.

The sentence “I am a liar,” for example, is self-referential and paradoxical. If you really are a liar, then you must not be a liar, whereas if you’re really not a liar, then you must be a liar. GEB is filled with this kind of material.

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In the spring of 2019, I reconnected with my mother and stepfather after a decade-long estrangement. My life was cracked and misshapen, nearly unrecognizable, after I was ejected from the world of mainstream arts and letters at the peak of the #MeToo movement for boorish behavior when I was a young man. I hoped to reclaim a sense of self that wasn’t fragmented—a sense of home I hadn’t known before but badly needed.

My mother and stepfather grew up in an industrial town outside Philadelphia, and they both worked off and on in factories that once thrived in that region. They came from broken homes, surrounded by other broken homes, and many of their friends and relatives were ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. They were ravaged, too. Life in a gray refinery town, working in warehouses with constant earplug-piercing levels of noise, would drive anyone insane.

My stepfather loomed as a constant threat. The mood swings were volatile, and all the more so considering that he was six feet, eight inches tall. He didn’t talk; he screamed, and the apartment walls were full of holes from his fists. That’s the world I was raised in—my mother and father divorced when I was 3—and I left as soon as I could, in my late teens, to start a new life far from that place and those people.

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No surprise, my mom wanted to go out with a bang.

She passed away exactly one year ago—on July 4, 2025. She loved this country. So did my dad, who died a year before her. They almost lived to see America reach 250 years. No one would have celebrated harder.

My parents weren’t born here. They grew up in India, where they led lives of privilege: Mom lived in a large house, in a respected family, where everything was taken care of, while Dad came from a similar background and was well educated, a rarity back then. But they lacked something far more important: freedom. As a woman, Mom was able to earn a law degree, but she was prohibited from fulfilling her dream of becoming a judge. That was a level too high for women in India at the time.

So, in 1964, three years after their wedding, they moved to Canada, where my father accepted a doctoral scholarship at the University of British Columbia. Five years later, they relocated to the only country where they could truly realize their dreams.

My parents made their home in rural South Carolina, started a family, and worked hard to make a new life for themselves. Mom was a social studies teacher, and Dad was a college professor—but as the only Indian family in town, we faced adversity and discrimination. When my parents tried to find a home, no one would rent to them—and when they were finally able to buy a place, there were strings attached: They weren’t allowed to have alcohol; they couldn’t host black people; and they had to give the previous owner the right to buy the house back if they ever sold it.

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Antisemitism comes in many varieties, but it may be useful to divide it into two broad categories: populist and elite. Populist antisemitism is loud, conspiratorial, and regularly violent. Elite antisemitism, which is the variety I have regularly encountered, is genteel, private, and exclusionary. It takes place in rooms with closed doors, where, probably, it is expressed in euphemisms, not direct statements. Being proximate to populist antisemitism generates fear. Being proximate to elite antisemitism generates suspicion, suppressed anger, self-doubt.

I have spent the last several years investigating my family’s history, going back five generations—something I was able to do because the Lemanns have been living in Louisiana for the past 190 years and have been compulsive record keepers. My great-great-grandfather came to New Orleans, alone, from the village of Essenheim, Germany, started out as a peddler, and wound up as the prosperous owner of a small-town dry goods store and a string of sugarcane plantations during the post–Civil War era. During my childhood, none of this seemed like a long-ago past; I regularly visited these establishments.

But not everything I wanted to know was in my family’s papers. In particular, I wanted to understand why my parents, both born in 1926, were as adults so eager to play down their Jewishness, as if that were the price of full acceptance. Having come to maturity at the dawn of what was supposed to be an era of multicultural tolerance and ethnic pride, shouldn’t they have felt free to embrace being Jewish, as the generations of our family preceding them had been?

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“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. . . . If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.”

So wrote my uncle, Martin Luther King Jr., in his famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

I was only 1 when he wrote these words. But today, on Juneteenth, five years since the day was made a federal holiday, those words remain profoundly relevant. Juneteenth officially commemorates the end of a dark chapter in American history: June 19, 1865, when enslaved blacks in Galveston, Texas, learned of their freedom. That day came a full two years after the Emancipation Proclamation—a long, arduous delay resulting from slaveholders deliberately withholding the news, and a shortage of Union troops to prevent them from doing so.

Yet equally as important as that history is Juneteenth’s demonstration of how the principles that inspired America’s creation—democracy and freedom—can, like Dr. King said, be temporarily compromised, but never ultimately replaced or defeated.

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When Europeans first arrived in the Americas, indigenous populations had almost no resistance to the many pathogens that had sailed with them. The results were catastrophic. Half a millennium later, by contrast, the inhabitants of the United States and Canada believe they have developed powerful antibodies, ensuring that most of them are immune to the most contagious and debilitating pathogen of all: football.

The quadrennial World Cup began on Thursday, yet an impressive number of Americans could not care less about the event they are co-hosting with Canada and Mexico. It is not just that they insist on calling the game “soccer” (originally an English contraction of Association Football). It is more that their attention is elsewhere: specifically, on the NBA finals, where the Knicks are just one win away from making history—not to mention hockey’s Stanley Cup. Soccer, meanwhile, is the favorite spectator sport of just one in every 20 Americans, according to Gallup, an improvement on the 2 percent in polls between 1937 and 2004, but still lean pickings—and a rounding error compared to the 41 percent for the NFL and college football. Even among young Americans ages 18 to 29—many more of whom have played the game than their parents and grandparents—soccer is the favorite of just 8 percent, compared with 28 percent for football and 13 percent for basketball.

How, then, to explain to an American the addictive power of the game most people on Earth call football? Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch: A Fan’s Life (1992) is surely the best book on the subject.

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I had my first and only encounter with Barry Goldwater when I was 5. He was traveling through southern Indiana on a train tour as he campaigned for president in 1964. On a morning about a month before he lost the election, he stopped in my hometown of Columbus, Indiana. My mother gave me and my brothers train conductor hats and loaded us onto a hay wagon so that we could take in the big event. I don’t remember much else.

Years passed before I could even begin to comprehend Goldwater’s significance as a founding father of American conservatism. I started my journey in politics in the late 1970s as a college Democrat. Beginning after the 1980 election, however, after hearing the voice, vision, and optimism of Ronald Reagan, I knew my future lay in the conservative principles of the Republican Party.

Goldwater roared back into my life in an unexpected way. In 1988, I ran for Congress as a Republican and lost to an incumbent. Two years later, I ran again and suffered another defeat. During that second effort, a would-be constituent gave me a gift: a vintage copy of The Conscience of a Conservative, Goldwater’s slender volume of political thinking. I had known about this book, but only by reputation. Following its initial publication by a small press in Kentucky in 1960, it became a surprise bestseller. It inspired millions, giving shape and form to a set of ideas that fueled a rising political movement. It also elevated its author, making a senator from Arizona a national figure.

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The play is now the subject of a new production, “Dreyfus in Rehearsal Again,” in New York City—and for two nights only, on June 2 and 3, it will feature BHL himself. You can purchase tickets here.

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Do you know Jean-Claude Grumberg?

He is one of the rare French playwrights to have entered the classical repertoire while still alive.

The son of a Jewish tailor deported and murdered at Auschwitz, Grumberg spent his life speaking not about the heroes of history but about its survivors, its ghosts, and that post-catastrophe humanity that continues to joke, love, breathe, and work.

He produced a masterpiece, L’Atelier (The Workshop), which brings together, in the Sentier district of Paris, seamstresses in the years after the Second World War talking about clothes, boys, and vacations, while also knowing that, behind the sewing machines, hovers the shadow of the Holocaust.

He created another masterpiece, Dreyfus in Rehearsal, which I remember seeing in 1974 at the Odéon Théâtre in Paris for its premiere. It portrayed a theater troupe in 1931, in a Lithuanian shtetl during the rise of Nazism, attempting to stage a play about the Dreyfus Affair.

He is one of those creators thanks to whom France still understands that antisemitism, in all its forms and colors—from barracks nationalism to a form of progressivism that has become delirious, is never merely an opinion but a monstrous crime.

Now, do you know Yonatan Esterkin?

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Strange young man that I was, I first encountered Herman Wouk by way of Gore Vidal, whose collected essays I purchased from the Crown Books at Springfield Mall in Northern Virginia when I was about 15. The son of a retired Army officer and a public school administrator, I had no idea who Vidal was, but it had an arresting cover with Jasper Johns’ American flags, and the essay I happened to flip to (a review of Robert Graves’ translation of Suetonius) had lots of sex. Sold.

Back at home, I turned to a stunt-essay that had run in 1973 in The New York Review of Books, in which Vidal reviewed all top 10 New York Times fiction bestsellers. The utterly cynical and nasty (and frequently funny) polemicism, implicitly in defense of Art and Language, was thrilling. His attitude toward his authors was that of a Kriegsmarine captain conducting unrestricted U-boat warfare in the waters off Nova Scotia: no prisoners.

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“My dad is coming home.”

Of all the lines in the new trailer for Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, those two generated the fiercest criticism. Other aspects looked more promising: The brief glimpses of the movie’s visuals showed that it had all the brooding grandeur of past Nolan favorites like Interstellar and The Dark Knight Rises. This in itself is a welcome change from the last major Odyssey movie, Uberto Pasolini’s The Return (2024)—a mopey, demythologized retelling of the poem’s closing scenes. But Nolan’s trailer still fell catastrophically flat for many viewers. There are devotees of ancient epics who already seem convinced Nolan will turn this 2,700-year-old legend into shallow pablum with all the idiocies of modern Hollywood.

After all, besides the appearance of words like “dad” and “daddy” in the script, the cast includes such names as rap star Travis Scott and transgender actor Elliot Page. It seems Nolan wants his version to feel contemporary, as he thinks Homer’s original did for the Greeks: He told Time magazine that Scott was cast because the Odyssey was “oral poetry, which is analogous to rap.” Page probably isn’t playing the mighty hero Achilles, as the online rumors had it, but seeing a biological female play any male hero feels like yet another insertion of identity politics into a beloved part of the Western canon.

This is also what has made some people—including Elon Musk—upset to see the black actress Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy, a ravishing Greek beauty described in the poem as “white-armed” (leukōlenos). Some of these criticisms seem overwrought to me; a few have been outright racist. But at the same time, it’s true that Hollywood has recently been in the grips of a nasty obsession with race and gender, which often takes the form of subverting classic tales. It’s still too soon to say for sure, but there are worrisome signs that Nolan may dumb down Homer’s language and smear his story into the muck of contemporary political obsessions.

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So begins one of the most famous pieces in American journalistic history. While other reporters stumbled over each other after Kennedy’s assassination, trying to get to the vice president, the First Lady, or anyone else in power, the author of this piece, Jimmy Breslin, spent his day with Pollard, a man paid $3.01 an hour to dig graves. Pollard, it turned out, could do more than most pundits to capture the nation’s profound grief.

Breslin was someone who understood that history couldn’t be written exclusively from the halls of power or the seats of scholarship. It had to be reported, observed through the eyes of the men and women who bore its consequences. This was an insight that propelled the legendary columnist throughout his decades-long career, and won him the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1986.

After this year’s Pulitzers were awarded on Monday, I found myself reflecting on the kind of work that led Breslin to win the award all those years ago.

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Last Saturday night, a 31-year-old computer science graduate—described by his professor as “a very good student”—checked into the Washington Hilton and attempted to assassinate the president of the United States and his cabinet.

Cole Tomas Allen had a job, was a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, and, by his own account, was acting on principle: the conviction that it was his duty to target officials he believed were destroying the country. Which is why the shooting he attempted is notable, not merely for what it was, but for what it represented: the logical end point of an education system that has mistaken zeal for truth.

Allen, after all, is only the latest highly educated person to attempt an act of violence. Think of the physics prodigy who perpetrated the December shooting at Brown University, or Luigi Mangione, the University of Pennsylvania graduate who allegedly killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. One survey shows that Americans with graduate degrees are about twice as likely to support political violence as those with some college or less. The problem of determining what is true and false, just and unjust, has always plagued mankind. But if even those educated at the most prestigious universities feel sufficient moral certainty to commit murder, we must conclude that the problem has grown so acute that it is rotting the civilizational pillars of our existence.

And so, the question is not only why so many of our countrymen are willing to commit violence. It is why so many of the willing are so highly educated.

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America existed then only as a smattering of fledgling colonies, of which the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the most prominent. As its first governor—elected in 1629 shortly before leading its settlers to the Americas—Winthrop was proud of his colony. But his message was not self-congratulatory or self-promoting; it was cautionary. If the Puritan colony failed morally, it would fail publicly. Those with wealth and power, he warned, were obligated to attend more to others and less to themselves. Or, in his words, “more enlargement toward others and less respect toward ourselves and our own right.”

Winthrop then quoted a Hebrew prophet who called on people “to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly.” He said “we must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together”—that is how we will live peacefully in society. Living as a city on a hill was a kind of communal test, and the world would take note of whether we passed.

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Maybe that’s why I, a millennial who grew up in the oft-idealized 1990s, find it so moving to read this short poem by Fujiwara no Kiyosuke, a court poet from 12th-century Japan. It perfectly captures the mood of wistful nostalgia that has pervaded so much of life for people of my generation. Here’s my translation of Kiyosuke’s poem:

If my life is long,

Will I remember these days,

Even these, fondly?

That lost world I suffered in. . . 

I look back on it with love.

It’s a tanka, or “short song,” a form that dominated Japanese verse from the 7th to the 12th centuries. Like its more famous cousin, the haiku, tanka proceeds in short verses with a set number of syllables each: five, seven, five, seven, seven. Because it’s so spare and simple, the art is in placing each word for maximum impact, so that a vast emotional landscape opens up within a tiny space. The more you run your mind across it, the more texture you find.

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Or so DuBose Heyward tells us in his classic 1939 picture book, The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes. A book for children, yes, but like all good children’s books, it’s also a book for the parents who read it to them.

It was never my plan to have a child before 30. My mother, my grandmother, and the mothers of pretty much every kid I grew up with in Manhattan were well into their 30s when they gave birth, and my friends and I assumed we would follow suit. Career now, family later.

But then I married a man 25 years my senior and started to rethink the timeline. At 27, I’d submitted my dissertation at Cambridge, was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, and had been profiled in The New York Times in an article with the print headline “The Aspirations of Solveig Gold.” Two months later, though, those aspirations moved to the back burner. I was pregnant.

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I didn’t know what the Cold War was, but I knew the Soviets were the bad guys. Everyone knew that.

Still, you could certainly make an argument in the early 1960s that there was no particular reason to conquer space other than scientific curiosity. Some people did make that argument. But President John F. Kennedy understood that it was more than that.

On the one hand, he knew that a serious space program was meaningful for our competition with the Soviet Union. “With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn . . . ,” wrote Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in his biography of Kennedy, “the dramatic Soviet achievements . . . were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific preeminence particularly.”

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The premise was simple: A teenage girl constructs a second, public-facing identity to preserve her authentic self. For 8–12-year-old girls like myself, it was as fantastical as it was captivating.

The show gave us scenes we could only dream of: your crush parachuting out of the sky in a tuxedo to profess his love for you; a rotating closet; a choreographed dance number to get your class out of detention; and a glittery Y2K Malibu Barbie lifestyle. And at the center of it, a girl with enormous energy, a Tennessee twang, and a face so warm and expressive you couldn’t look away. Every line was delivered as if the director had just said, “Now for this one, go as big as you can.”

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There is a story—perhaps apocryphal—that Theodor Herzl, on his way to the First Zionist Congress in 1897, carried under his arm the novel Daniel Deronda, by Mary Ann Evans, better known by her pen name, George Eliot.

Whether or not the story is true, the association is apt. We live in a time when the debate over Zionism has been crushed into a rhetorical bloodbath, when even some Jews have lost sight of the definition of the word. Amid the noise, Eliot’s novel captures the moral and emotional beginnings of a movement that now both captivates and enrages the world.

But first, let us backtrack. You might think, given how large a part university campuses play today in the dissemination of anti-Zionism, that there would have had to be some reckoning, between marches, with George Eliot’s pro-Zionist fervor. But that’s to give away my age. A well-read student body can no longer be assumed. Still less a student body that is familiar with the works of George Eliot. And even where the name of that greatest of Victorian novelists rings a bell, her politics vis-à-vis the Jews don’t.

Would it matter if they did? Well, it should. Every ideology has a history, and it is crucial, if we are to be intelligent and informed about ideas we find abhorrent, that we understand their origins, their onetime necessity, the hope they once inspired.

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On January 18, 1777, the Second Continental Congress ordered the printing of an authentic copy of the Declaration of Independence, with the names of the signers, so that each of the states could put the founding document into its archives. It was the first time that the country would learn the names of almost every signer of the Declaration. America was at war, and they needed to know the men leading the charge.

The lawmakers were meeting in Baltimore because British troops were in New Jersey, and getting close to Philadelphia, “the seat of war” and the nation’s then-capital. Baltimore was the home of Mary Katharine Goddard, the first female postmaster in the United States. The printing shop she had inherited from her family was just a few blocks away from the new Congress. Since the move south, Mary Katharine had printed a number of resolutions and notices for Congress, so when it was time to quickly print the country’s most important document, they called on her.

In just two weeks, she gathered the names and printed copies, and sent them to the 13 colonies. Earlier versions of the Declaration had circulated without all the signatories’ names to avoid British detection. Printing the version with nearly all the signers’ names was an act of defiance and extraordinary bravery.

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