Natan and Jew­ish Book Coun­cil are thrilled to announce the Sum­mer 2026 Natan Notable Book: Return­ing: A Search for Home Across Three Cen­turies by Nicholas Lemann (Liv­eright Pub­lish­ing, 2026). 

Twice a year, Natan Notable Books rec­og­nizes recent­ly pub­lished or about-to-be-pub­lished non-fic­tion books that promise to cat­alyze con­ver­sa­tions aligned with the themes of Natan’s grant­mak­ing: rein­vent­ing Jew­ish life and com­mu­ni­ty for the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, shift­ing notions of indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, the his­to­ry and future of Israel, under­stand­ing and con­fronting con­tem­po­rary forms of anti­semitism, and the evolv­ing rela­tion­ship between Israel and world Jewry.

In Return­ing, Lemann traces his family’s his­to­ry, from the arrival of his great-great-grand­fa­ther in the Unit­ed States from Ger­many in the 1830s through five gen­er­a­tions of Lemanns who made their home in the Amer­i­can South. A vet­er­an jour­nal­ist who has long con­tributed to the New York­er and Dean Emer­i­tus of the Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty School of Jour­nal­ism, Lemann spent years writ­ing about oth­er his­to­ries, oth­er fam­i­lies, before turn­ing his atten­tion to his own. Trac­ing that his­to­ry through pub­lic doc­u­ments, arti­cles, and archival cor­re­spon­dence, Lemann tells the sto­ry of a fam­i­ly who suc­ceed­ed as Amer­i­cans by mov­ing far­ther away from their Jew­ish roots. It is Lemann him­self who revers­es that jour­ney, return­ing to a Jew­ish iden­ti­ty and reli­gious obser­vance that had become for­eign, and, in the process, find­ing the con­nec­tion that was miss­ing from his ear­ly life. 

But it’s Lemann’s thought­ful exam­i­na­tion of the forces that led to his fam­i­ly only attend­ing syn­a­gogue on Thanks­giv­ing, of his own dis­com­fort with the social and racial stric­tures and hier­ar­chies that com­prised the cul­ture of the Amer­i­can South in which his fam­i­ly set­tled, that give the book sig­nif­i­cance beyond just the his­tor­i­cal facts. Natan Notable Books pan­el mem­ber Matthew Hiltzik shared that ​“Nicholas Leman­n’s Return­ing is a com­pelling sto­ry that explores iden­ti­ty, fam­i­ly his­to­ry, accep­tance, and the impor­tance of embrac­ing our Judaism with pride. This touch­ing sto­ry of reclaim­ing her­itage near­ly lost to assim­i­la­tion speaks to the shift­ing, evolv­ing nature of Jew­ish iden­ti­ty and is espe­cial­ly time­ly giv­en the glob­al rise in anti­semitism in a post-Octo­ber 7 world.”