Nick Lemann
Image by Getty Images
Journalism has undergone a turbulent few years. With business models imploding, foundational ideas in question and the advent of digital publishing, every corner turned has brought a crisis. Nicholas Lemann, 59, who stepped down this year from his decade-long post as dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, has attempted to meet these challenges and chart a new course.
Lemann, a longtime New Yorker staff writer specializing in profiles and political reporting, has left the school in a particularly good place. By most accounts, he transformed the school to meet the substantial challenges of the future. In addition, he left it in sound financial shape. He recently accepted the largest gift in its 100-year history: $18 million from the estate of Helen Gurley Brown for the creation of a media innovation institute.
Lemann spoke to the Forward in April about growing up as a Reform Jew in New Orleans: “In the synagogue [Temple Sinai] I was raised in, for example, it was this kind of super-Reform Judaism that was no kosher laws, no bar mitzvahs, no tallit, no kippot. We had a choir. It was meant to be like an Episcopalian church, but Jewish, our little realm of Judaism.”
Now he’s just as likely to be found in synagogue on a Saturday morning. But his connection to tradition is largely driven by an exploration of Jewish food. Proof of this evolution is his own recipe, shared with the Forward, for gefilte fish, or as he put it, “Gefilte Fish With a Human Face.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
