Robert F. Kennedy Jr. smiled, threw up a stilted wave, and made eye contact with nobody in particular. He was shuffling into Puckett’s restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, earlier this month for a plate of midday meatloaf. No advance team had peppered the room with stickers or buttons bearing his name. No one had tipped off the local media. Flanked by his press secretary and a couple of plainclothes security guards, Kennedy made his way toward a large table back near the kitchen, where he and I were scheduled to meet for an interview. The roughly two dozen lunch patrons didn’t appear to clock him, nor did the waiter.

Kennedy’s independent campaign for the White House has a loose, confounding energy to it. Most presidential candidates would glad-hand at a place like Puckett’s; Kennedy didn’t bother. Rather than run on a policy slogan—“Medicare for all,” “Build the wall”—Kennedy has opted for something closer to mysticism. He uses the word existential in nearly every speech. He spends an inordinate amount of time on podcasts.

“You know, so much of life, we see from the surface,” Kennedy told me that day. “It’s like the surface of the ocean. There’s a storm going on, there’s winds blowing, and we get preoccupied with ambitions, with fear, with, you know, trepidation. And then if you sink a few feet below the ocean, it’s calm there. And that, I think, is where we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible, in that place where it’s peaceful, where you understand everything is kind of an illusion. We’re walking through a dream, and our job is to be kind to people, to be open, to be tolerant.”

Despite this hazy rhetoric, establishment Democrats consider Kennedy to be a concrete danger to the future of democracy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called Kennedy “a living, breathing false-flag operation” whose “whole campaign is being run by right-wing political operatives who have one objective: try to take down President Joe Biden.”

When I first interviewed Kennedy last year, many people derided him as a distraction who would quickly fade into obscurity. Five months out from Election Day, Kennedy is polling in the double digits and fighting for nationwide ballot access. His team insists that voters will be able to pull the lever for him in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many political observers have argued that, like past third-party candidates who have hurt Democrats, he is poised to draw more votes from Biden than from former President Donald Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that Kennedy has particularly strong support among young voters and Latinos, two groups Biden needs more than Trump. Yet he’s also drawing support from Republicans and conservatives. Many of these voters are willing to look past his conspiratorial, anti-vaccination statements. Some may share his views.

[Read: The first MAGA democrat]

While Biden and Trump fight for first place, Kennedy is zigzagging around the country, talking about our need to reconnect with the Earth and rediscover our shared humanity. Born and raised an East Coast Catholic, he now resembles an aging California hippie preaching New Age mantras. He’s not running a winning operation so much as he’s on a public self-actualization journey. And America will have to live with the consequences.

Like with Biden and Trump, Kennedy’s mental state receives armchair diagnoses on a daily basis. But, unlike Biden and Trump, Kennedy says he once had a parasitic worm in his brain. I asked him if he would consent to undergoing a cognitive test. “The cognitive exam is called the debates. I would gladly take it,” he said. “I take a cognitive exam every time I do a podcast—I challenge the other candidates to take the cognitive test with me.” He added that he’d release his medical records if his chief opponents did the same.

Three nights before our lunch in Tennessee, I showed up at Kennedy’s rally in Austin, Texas. Outside the venue I spotted one attendee with colorful markers scribbling out a homemade sign: WORMS NOT WARS. The man, a 39-year-old named Steven Kinsey, told me he had spent his entire adult life supporting Democrats, including Biden. But several months ago he happened to hear Kennedy on Theo Von’s podcast when the episode came up on shuffle. “I was like, ‘Oh, isn’t that that crazy Kennedy?’” he said. “So I just left it on for entertainment purposes. And I was blown away. I was like, ‘This isn’t the same guy that everyone says is wacko.’”

[From the May 2024 issue: Is Theo Von the next Joe Rogan?]

Kennedy’s rhetoric—whether you believe it to be wacko or compelling—is full of contradictions. He views himself as a pacifist—an anti-war candidate who nonetheless falls to the right of many liberals on key issues of the moment, including Israel in its war with Hamas. Kennedy told me he is “very pro-Palestinian,” but like Biden, he is steadfastly supporting Israel. “I think, for Israel’s future, for Gaza’s future, Hamas has to be gotten rid of,” he said. “I don’t see what happens in a cease-fire. I don’t even understand what people, you know, expect out of it.”

Kennedy made headlines in early May for saying he supported abortion rights up until the moment of birth. But over lunch with me several days later, he explained why he had already modified his position, supporting abortion rights only to the point of fetal viability. “I’ve had 40 years that show that I’m pretty indifferent to a political cost of whatever issue,” he said. “If I’m wrong about something, if somebody shows me facts, I’m going to change my mind.” When I asked whether he’d enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, he was cagey. “Maybe an early—you know—before viability,” he said. “Listen, I don’t tell people I’m going to do something I don’t think can be done.”

In the early 2000s, Kennedy helped popularize the idea that vaccines cause autism, a theory that remains scientifically unproven. Last summer, he falsely claimed that the coronavirus pandemic may have been “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, and that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” are most immune from the virus. Nevertheless, he rejects the anti-vax label. “First of all, virtually everything that the press has written about my opinion of vaccines is wrong,” he told me. He said he believes that his position on vaccines is “aligned with what 99 percent of Americans feel.” In a bit of revisionist history, he said his stance boils down to “If people want vaccines they should be able to get ’em. I’m not going to do anything to interfere with that.” He told me that he wants people to have “the best science” on risk and efficacy. “And that’s all I’ve been saying for years. And that the people who are injured by vaccines, there’s a certain amount of people who are injured, and that we ought to be listening to them, not telling them that they’re fine and gaslighting them.”

Kennedy has practically zero chance of winning the White House and turning these policy positions into laws. As of now, he won’t participate in the first presidential debate in June. During our lunch, I asked him which state he most believes he’ll win, or, more generally, if he has a viable path to 270 electoral votes. He mentioned a few spots where he’s gaining traction, but couldn’t answer either question definitively. “I’m only peripherally involved in that part of the campaign,” he said of state-level plans—he was saying, in other words, that he’s not involved in the part of the campaign that’s concerned with trying to win the election. He deferred my nuts-and-bolts queries to his campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law.

“You know, there’s a mathematical answer,” she told me by phone last night. “But there’s also an answer that really has continued to transcend math all the way through.” She referred to this as “the America that almost was and what could be,” paraphrasing the author Charles Eisenstein. “Part of what I think a lot of observers, at least at this stage in the cycle, get wrong, is looking at national races rather than looking at individual states and how together they deliver a new leader to the White House,” she said.

I asked her which individual states her campaign will win.

“Well, you know, John, I would love to tell you that list,” she said. “One of the aspects to our electoral map that’s extremely important is not signaling where we’re going to be focused, ensuring advertising rates and attention and so forth are affordable and achievable there. So I can’t share the states with you except to say that Bobby is speaking to all Americans, and most especially to Americans who’ve been completely ignored by the map of the two-party system for decades and decades and are ready to have a say in the system.”

I asked her again. She eventually said that her team has a list of 29 states, but refused to share any of them, raising the possibility that Kennedy’s opponents may try to infiltrate their campaign. “Where we see the strongest numbers right now is, you know, the matter of a lot of internal polling. I’m sure the other campaigns are doing their own internal polling. But in the balance of resources, it wouldn’t be wise for us to spend a lot of hours on polling and then share them publicly.”

Though Kennedy will almost certainly lose the election, he could still affect its outcome by being a spoiler. The Democrats sense this. The DNC recently hired the veteran operative Lis Smith to lead a team focused on attacking third-party candidates, Kennedy in particular. Outside Kennedy’s rally in Austin, a black box truck drove laps around the venue. Among the rotating messages on its exterior about Kennedy and his running mate: WHY IS TRUMP’S TOP DONOR SPENDING $20 MILLION TO PROP UP RFK JR. AND NICOLE SHANAHAN? Beneath Photoshopped images of the two candidates in MAGA hats was a disclaimer: PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

The Democratic pollster and strategist Ben Tulchin has recently been looking closely at two swing states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Arizona, in particular, Tulchin’s data indicate that Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden than he is to Trump, especially among young people and Latinos. “I’ve been raising the alarm with the Democratic Party and anyone who will hear me in the Biden campaign,” Tulchin told me.

At the national level, though, a clear picture has yet to emerge. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me in an email, “There is no evidence in the current polls that conclusively points to RFK pulling more support from either side.” He continued, “The problem is, of course, with expected close outcomes in a few key Electoral College states, any small spoiler effect that’s hidden in the polling margins can have major consequences. Sample polling may not be precise enough to find it, unless you can interview every voter. That type of polling is called an election.”

Kennedy keeps steadily attracting not just independents but a mix of Democrats and Republicans alike. This aligns with what I’ve noticed at his events—a diverse generational cross section: crypto bros, cowboys, crunchy hippies. Kennedy looks out from the stage and sees it, too—all the wide-eyed voters looking back.

To stiff-arm the spoiler characterization, Kennedy refers to his own polling that shows he’d defeat either Biden or Trump in head-to-head matchups. “I’m not a spoiler, because I can win,” he told me flatly.

Trump rallies brim with a dystopian, campy Americana. Biden rallies barely exist. Kennedy rallies, meanwhile, tend to feel like giant house parties. Opening acts usually include cover bands, and many attendees mingle while sipping drinks. Inside the downtown-Austin venue, nearly 1,000 people milled about multiple bars and listened to a band cycle through crowd favorites: Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” and, in an ironic twist, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”

One of the first speakers that night was the regenerative-farming influencer Ryland Engelhart. He quoted the mystic poet Rumi and affectionately likened the RFK Jr. campaign to Noah’s Ark—“a big foolish project.” Engelhart told the crowd that he had been sitting on the toilet scrolling through his phone when he first discovered Kennedy and his message. He spoke wistfully about a recent fundraiser that ended with Kennedy joining his donors in a sweat lodge. He paraphrased another Rumi line at the end of his speech: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Then offered a 2024 addendum: “There is a president beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I will meet you there.”

[Read: The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus]

Shanahan made a rare public appearance that night. A Silicon Valley businesswoman and reported billionaire, she has no political experience and is not a natural public speaker. Most of her message was not about the election, but about topics such as healthy soil and the danger of forever chemicals in food. “A lot of our most innovative solutions come from outside conventional politics—they are in the realm of what’s been called ‘alternative,’” she said. “Yes, I know that sounds so radical. It shouldn’t. I have seen the power of these little alternative ways of thinking in my own life. I have used alternative health practices to restore my health, my fertility … I know what is possible when you think with an alternative, creative mindset.”

When Kennedy took the stage, he told the crowd, “Every time I see her speak, I fall a little bit more in love with her.” He went on, “Most of the presidential candidates we have today, they sound like they’re doing a satire of Veep. And that’s not what you hear from Nicole—you hear a lecture about soil!” He warned that the more Americans spend on medicine, the unhealthier we get. “What is it that is causing us not to see that?” he asked. “What is it that is causing us to constantly feed this beast that is making us more and more sick all the time? It’s the corrupt political system. It’s the subversion of our democracy.” His message built toward a call-and-response finale. “If Nicole and I get into office, everything is going to change,” Kennedy said.

“Don’t you want everything to change?”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted.

“Is there anything that you want to keep the same?”

“No!”

Some of the people most concerned about Kennedy’s impact on the election are members of his own family. Last year, a few Kennedys began speaking out against what they saw as the dangers of his campaign. His brother Christopher Kennedy recently characterized RFK as “unreachable,” a “true believer” with “fringe thinking,” “crackpot ideas,” and “unsound judgment.” On St. Patrick’s Day this year, dozens of Kennedys gathered at the White House and took a family photo with Biden—an unsubtle message to RFK.

I asked Kennedy what had gone through his mind when he saw that photo. He stared off at a refrigerator along the wall separating the restaurant’s dining room from its kitchen. He wiped his eye. He leaned forward with both elbows on the table. All told, it took him 34 seconds to formulate his answer. Kennedy acknowledged that he has family members who are “not enthused” about his candidacy, and some who are supporting him. “I don’t harbor resentments anymore,” he said. “I just don’t. I think they’re corrosive. They’re like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.”

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

He told me that he had expected to be polling well among his fellow Baby Boomers, because they were the ones with the most nostalgia for his father and uncle—the Camelot era. But so far, he said, younger people were his strongest bloc of support, people who likely didn’t think much about that history. I asked if he felt primarily like a Kennedy, someone carrying on a family legacy, or if he saw himself as just Bobby.

“Where do we get our sense of self?” he asked. “It comes from the principles which are the boundaries of that entity. The principles, the places where we say to ourselves, ‘I would never do that.’ And it comes from, you know, feelings that are the product of our history and our culture and our genes. You know, I grew up in this family. That lucky event, for me, has been one of the formative features and forces of my life. And has crafted everything I believe in as a person. It’d be hard for me to separate myself from my family.”

He characterized the past year of campaigning as “a very intense lesson on all the things that you’re supposed to learn in the course of your life.” Running for president, he said, teaches you how to process antipathy. “You got a lot of hatred coming in, and anger, and then, you know, the opposite of that, too.” The goal he chases is to treat “everything as an imposter,” even the adulation. But he seems to have a harder time with that last part.

“I think one of the inspiring things for me is how many people have put hopes in me for change. And I’m sure if you interview some of these people who are following me, it’s extraordinary to me that so many people show up,” he said. “A lot of them come to me crying and just voice their hopes. And it feels like a big responsibility.” He told me that this has changed him in a “fundamental” way. “It’s made me try to be the person that, you know, people hope I am.”

It’s hard to know who that person is, or what he stands for. Kennedy told me that he believes the worst things Trump did as president were instituting lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic and walking away from a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. He referred to Biden’s border policy as “a catastrophe.” He wants voters to distrust the government, yet he also wants to run the government. Kennedy remains a magnet for the disillusioned. His philosophy isn’t profound, but his supporters seem to know that he’s saying something, and that it’s a little dangerous and alluring. In an election with two deeply unpopular major-party candidates, that message—even if it doesn’t add up to much—is resonating.

In the summer of 1948, a young American, a Bennington College graduate visiting Paris, lost her purse in the Jardin des Tuileries. Inside it were her passport and ticket home. Many travelers in her situation would panic. She decided it was a sign that she wasn’t meant to leave France. She quit her job at Doubleday, then the biggest publisher in New York, and moved into a friend’s aunt’s apartment, where she launched a clandestine supper club to support herself. Perhaps she’d “open a small restaurant,” she wrote to her horrified parents. In another letter, she reassured her father that although she knew she’d made a risky choice, “one has to take chances and there are many advantages to be had. Anyway, I am an adventurous girl.”

That girl was Judith Jones, one of the most important editors in American history. She pulled The Diary of Anne Frank out of a slush pile during her second stint at Doubleday—in Paris this time, in 1949—a discovery for which her male boss took credit. Eight years later, she moved to Knopf, where she worked until 2013, publishing authors such as John Hersey, Sharon Olds, Sylvia Plath, Anne Tyler, and John Updike. She was an avid cook—that supper club of hers was a hit—and, as an editor, single-handedly elevated the cookbook to its contemporary status, working with all-time greats including Julia Child, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, Edna Lewis, Irene Kuo, Claudia Roden, and many, many more.

According to The Editor, a new biography of Judith Jones by the oral historian Sara B. Franklin, Judith was also an avid worker, a visionary editor devoted to her job. (Franklin, who interviewed her at length, calls her Judith, which creates a compelling sense of intimacy on the page; I’m going to follow suit.) The Editor focuses primarily on Judith’s cookbooks, for which she is best remembered now, but more important, it draws out the connections among the varied projects Judith chose. Many of her authors, such as Plath and Olds, wrote about what Franklin calls “the frictions between women’s private and public lives,” digging into the tensions between who women were supposed to be publicly and who they were. Judith’s own life illuminates these same tensions. The Editor presents her as both a case study and an agent of change in American conceptions of femininity inside and outside the home. But it also reads, more often than not, like a love story: a great, sweeping seven-decade romance between a woman and her work.

I never met Judith, but my interest in her is personal: My step-grandmother, Abby Mandel, was one of her authors. Around the time Julia Child got famous, Abby was a divorced Jewish mother in greater Chicago. She’d been cooking for her family—siblings first, then children—since age 8, and after recruiting Child to star at a fundraiser she was hosting for her alma mater, Smith College, she grew fascinated by the idea of cooking professionally and moved to Paris for culinary school. After training at La Varenne and in kitchens across Belgium, France, and Switzerland, she returned to Chicago and began writing features and food columns for, among other outlets, the Chicago Tribune and Bon Appetit. Soon enough, those columns turned into cookbooks, edited by Child’s editor at Knopf: Judith.

Abby died 16 years ago this August, having not just written six cookbooks—including a series of Cuisinart books that taught home chefs how to use the new gadget and caused James Beard to call her the Queen of Machine Cuisine—but also founded Chicago’s pioneering Green City Market, which Alice Waters once called the “best sustainable market in the country.” Abby had, in every sense, impeccable taste. She was devoted to her projects. She was demanding, charming, generous, diligent, and rigorous about every single thing. I miss her more with every year. I, like Abby, love to work. I feel a true passion for my job, which might seem like a surprising statement in a social moment of work creep: Remote jobs, smartphones, and side hustles mean your work can follow you everywhere you go. Women in straight relationships, meanwhile, still tend to work a “second shift” at home, cleaning and cooking and caring more than their male partners. I don’t want endless labor, and yet I think of the French doors connecting Abby’s office and kitchen, remember her developing recipes with 6-year-old me perched on the counter, and wonder what advice she would have given me about braiding my work into my life.

Judith, by Franklin’s account, was constantly blending the two. She befriended her authors, tested their recipes in her own kitchen, managed their egos with the same strategy of delicate persuasion she used on her husband, Dick Jones, a writer she met while living in Paris. Judith saw no reason not to use her feminine wiles at work.

Like many powerful women of her generation, she did not describe herself as a feminist. She thought the movement encouraged women to “adopt stereotypically masculine traits in a ‘strident or angry way,’” which she considered counterproductive. She also bristled at the critique that Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique, leveled at her first star, Julia Child: that cooking is fundamentally grunt work, and that by making it fun, Child was really just helping to keep women at home, working without pay.

[Read: The key to Julia Child’s success hid in plain sight]

Judith saw things quite differently. In her childhood home, a “woman of standing” was not meant to “dirty her hands” with chores, cooking included. But once she got into the kitchen, she was enamored of the “sensual richness” of even dull or challenging prep tasks; after she and Dick, also a home chef, married, cooking together became “the anchor of their domestic life.” (It also led to  domestic equality: Along with cooking, Dick did more chores than Judith did.) Franklin consistently links the physical pleasures of the kitchen to both adventurousness and adulthood; the word sensual crops up constantly (Olds, a poet famous for her writing about sex, told Franklin she was thrilled to discover, in Judith, an editor who was a “fellow sensualist”). Judith plainly felt that a grown woman should know how to enjoy getting dirty and exerting herself.

Of course, it’s a function of Judith’s whiteness and upper-class background that she got to opt into cooking. Historically, women rarely get to choose their own relationship to domestic labor, a fact Franklin draws out in more ways than one. She describes the Black southern chef Edna Lewis, one of the most talented authors on Judith’s list, fighting to make this point in The Taste of Country Cooking, which juxtaposes recipes with stories of her enslaved grandmother, who had to lay bricks all day while her children waited in their cribs. (Lewis herself, though venerated as a chef, had to hire herself out as a private cook and domestic worker well into her 60s because magazine editors and restaurant owners so habitually underpaid her.) Franklin also writes about the great suppression of women’s labor after World War II, when working women were “ousted en masse from paid jobs” so men who’d been at the front could take those roles back.

Judith came of age precisely at that moment. She had to fight to hang on to jobs in publishing; the fact that she managed to do so suggests the gap between her experience and that of working-class women her age. It also reflects her grit, her talent, and her devotion to her job. She was her household’s primary earner nearly her whole marriage; she pushed through years at Knopf when she got treated like—and referred to as—a secretary, even though she was editing Updike; she not only remained in publishing until her late 80s, but also took on the role of author, writing a handful of books at the end of her career. Franklin describes Judith’s 2009 cookbook, The Pleasures of Cooking for One, as a display of the skills—and the philosophy—Judith learned as a cookbook editor. It was a “manual for living as much as cooking.” At its core was the joy Judith took in food, which she saw as both a way toward a happily physical, unconventional, grounded life and a “worthy purpose in and of itself.”

Judith’s passion for cooking has helped countless Americans cook for fun, exploration, and connection. At the start of her career, this would have seemed highly unlikely. In the 1950s, major manufacturers pushed convenience foods using ads that cast cooking skills as “old-fashioned and obsolete” and promised to wrap everything up so the “‘poor little woman’ wouldn’t soil herself” with dinner prep. Judith decided to use her editorial power to resist—and maybe even counteract—this trend. She wasn’t against practicalities; she did, after all, work with Abby, the Queen of Machine Cuisine. But she hated the thought of cooking getting dismissed as a tired mess or what Franklin calls a “gendered trap.” Although she would not have used this language, she seems to have espoused a different kind of feminism from Friedan’s, one that embraces possibility rather than condemning anything traditionally considered women’s work. An interesting parallel with romantic love is hiding here: Although some feminists have tried to reject men, others have argued that straight relationships can be potential opportunities for radical repair and progress. For Judith, the kitchen was a place where radical progress could happen. She wanted to share her passion for food, which meant getting the American public on board with the idea of cooking as a “gateway to the wider world and a richer, more autonomous life.”

[Read: Eight cookbooks worth reading cover to cover]

Julia Child was Judith’s first companion in this project, and her most influential one. Gradually, though, Judith created a whole community of kindred spirits in her cookbook authors, nearly all of whom were women—and not “little housewives,” as Judith said to Franklin. They were a group of curious, courageous thinkers who, with Judith’s guidance, turned food into an intellectual project, writing books that, far from denigrating cooking as drudgery, presented it as a daily necessity that also, per Judith, “empowered you, that stimulated you.”

My own romance with food, which began when I was a college student with my first dorm kitchen, owes a lot to Abby—and everything to Judith. I make the biscuits from The Taste of Country Cooking all summer, every summer. My copy of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook is held together with painters’ tape. Claudia Roden’s The Book of Jewish Food has gotten me through the holidays I’ve spent away from home. And the rest of my cookbook collection, contemporary titles that cross the country and globe, is clearly in Judith’s lineage: books that teach me cultural history along with culinary technique, that deepen my understanding of the United States and of the many diasporic communities that influence American cooking.

My daily life, too, is in a debt of sorts to Judith, something I saw plainly as I read The Editor. For me, as for Judith, food and books are routes to exploration. I garden because I cook; I walk to the farmer’s market in the D.C. summer heat because I cook; I learn about sustainable agriculture because I cook. In a way, yes, this is work on top of the work I do at my desk all day, but it’s pleasure and education, too. Just like writing, it opens my brain up. It makes me an adventurous girl, and for that, I have Judith Jones to thank.

The End of the Golden Age

Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to end an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish, Franklin Foer wrote in the April 2024 issue.

Franklin Foer’s article on the end of the Golden Age for American Jews makes an excellent and painful connection between the rise of anti-Semitism and the decline of democratic institutions throughout history. I was a child in Communist Romania in 1973 at the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. Some of my teachers made my life miserable in school simply because I was Jewish. My parents had to bribe them with American cigarettes to stop them from tormenting me. Three years later, my family and I defected to the United States. The U.S. was known around the world for its democratic institutions, and we wanted to get away from a country where anti-Semitism ran rampant.

No one born here can imagine what it was like to be free, to be Jewish and dare to admit it. But that was America in the 1970s and ’80s. Today’s America frightens me: I’ve lived in an authoritarian state before; I understand viscerally what’s at stake in this year’s election. For the first time in 48 years, I think twice before telling people I’m Jewish.

Monica Friedlander
Cambria, Calif.

I am a 96-year-old Holocaust survivor. I was born in Berlin in 1928 and observed the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. There is a world of difference between those days and the United States today. In Germany, anti-Semitism was sanctioned, even encouraged, by the authorities. Police officers stood by laughing when boys beat us on our way to school. The government passed laws forbidding us from owning radios, newspapers, telephones, even pets. The world knows how that ended: I was liberated from Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945. I think Franklin Foer’s article is a bit over the top.

Walter L. Lachman
Laguna Niguel, Calif.

Although an interesting review of 20th-century Jewish entertainers and intellectuals, Franklin Foer’s assessment ignores the street reality.

I was born and raised during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years. Growing up, I was given a bloody nose by other kids more than once on my way home from school. They shouted anti-Semitic slurs and attacked me for “killing their God.” When I served in the military, my roommate asked whether I had horns, and if it “had hurt when they took them off.” When I applied for a job at a prestigious law firm, I was told, “We do not hire your kind.”

I went on to enjoy a successful career. But the underlying prejudice has always been present. The fact that we Jews have been entertaining and creative does nothing to eliminate the basic prejudice against us as “the other.”

Benjamin Levine
Roseland, N.J.

The night before I read Franklin Foer’s article, a stranger tore my mezuzah off my doorframe. I was upset—but so was my non-Jewish roommate. In that, he was part of a broader American tradition: At the founding of our country, George Washington promised the Jews of Rhode Island, “To bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

The Jewish American Golden Age predates the 20th century, and has outlasted it. Not only has America been the best place in the diaspora to be a Jew, but the scale of Jewish participation and inclusion is larger than many realize. The highest-ranking American armor officer to die in combat was the legendary Maurice Rose—a Jewish major general who died fighting the Nazis in Germany. Foer quotes Thomas Friedman saying that the Six-Day War made American Jews realize they could be tank commanders—but Jews have been tank commanders as long as America has had tanks.

In Columbus, Georgia, where I live, shortly after the October 7 attacks, the mayor and city-council members attended my synagogue. People from all over the country reached out to express their sympathy and support. A friend stationed in Syria checked in after Iran launched missiles toward Israel, concerned about my Israeli family and how I was dealing with American anti-Semitism. America’s continuing warm welcome isn’t just anecdotal: The Pew Research Center recently found that Jews are viewed more positively than any other U.S. religious group.

Anti-Semitism may be on the rise, but it is and remains un-American. My great-great-grandfather, a Jewish refugee, arrived in New York on the Fourth of July. According to family lore, he saw the fireworks and thought they were for him. In a way, they were. This July, I look forward to celebrating the Golden Age’s 248th anniversary.

Jacob Foster
Columbus, Ga.

I was disappointed reading “The End of the Golden Age.” I think the Golden Age is now, as so many American Jews rise up to say “Not in our name.” We are recognizing the difference between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. It’s time for everyone to recognize it too. Criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza is not anti-Semitism. American Jews and Israeli Jews will be safe when we can recognize the resilience and survival of both Palestinians and Jews and see how our struggles are interconnected.

R. Toran Ailisheva
Oakland, Calif.

Franklin Foer interprets a survey—“nearly one in five non-Jewish students said they ‘wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who supports the existence of Israel as a Jewish state’ ”—to mean that they were saying they wouldn’t be friends with most Jews. I would challenge this interpretation.

As a Columbia graduate, and as someone who can actually read the Yiddish on The Atlantic’s cover, I do not question the Zionist dream of a haven for Jews. But I question the need for a predominantly religious state, which I fear will inevitably lead to a theocracy, intolerant even of Jews deemed insufficiently Orthodox. Israel is headed in that direction.

Elliott B. Urdang
Providence, R.I.

We were surprised and dismayed that The Atlantic would publish Franklin Foer’s article about the rise of anti-Semitism without any accompanying articles discussing the concurrent rise in anti-Palestinian racism. Students who protest the brutal war crimes committed in Gaza or advocate for the freedom and dignity of the Palestinian people are being silenced and persecuted. We hope The Atlantic will publish stories that highlight efforts seeking peace and justice for all. Right now, we need solutions. We need voices supportive of our shared humanity, not inflammatory rhetoric that will lead to further polarization and alienation.

Samar Salman
Ann Arbor, Mich.

Christina Kappaz
Evanston, Ill.

Franklin Foer replies:

A writer’s deeply ingrained instinct is to want their stories to prove prophetic. In this instance, I desperately hope that I will be proved wrong. Sadly, in the aftermath of publishing this article, I have heard too many stories like Jacob Foster’s, of mezuzahs ripped from doors in the night. One of the most ubiquitous critiques of my story, echoed in R. Toran Ailisheva’s letter, is that my argument equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Many mainstream Jewish groups take that stance, but it is not my contention. I explicitly stated that there are strains of anti-Zionism that paint a vision of life in a binational state, where Palestinians and Jews peacefully coexist. That vision strikes me as hopelessly quixotic, but it isn’t anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, criticisms of Zionism are rarely so idealistic. They are usually cast in ugly terms, depicting a dangerous Jewish cabal guilty of dual loyalties, betraying the hallmarks of classical anti-Semitism.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War,” Anne Applebaum examines how autocrats in China, Russia, and other places have sought to discredit liberal democracy—and how they’ve found unlikely allies on the American far right. Our cover draws inspiration from constructivist propaganda artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Klutsis. The angled imagery and ascending lines evoke the style of a Soviet propaganda poster, updated with liberalism’s new rivals.

— Paul Spella, Senior Art Director

This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

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The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has described our times as the “Age of Authenticity,” meaning an era when people are willing to publicize their secrets and indulge their urges, even if such a drive for personal truth involves transgressing traditional boundaries of self-control. Once, this type of exhibitionism was the preserve of a few celebrities, but now anybody can get in on the act: The quest for authenticity has spawned salacious memoirs, reality-TV shows of escalating disinhibition, and cathartic self-disclosure on social media.

Such revelations are supposed to be good for us, because suppressing our thoughts and desires is considered unhealthy and unnatural. In psychology, this way of thinking is sometimes called self-determination theory, according to which we are happiest when we obey our inner drives.

I would grant that living inauthentically and being repressed do not sound like a recipe for well-being. But the age of authenticity does not seem to have made us happier, either. Quite the reverse. Some scholars, such as Taylor and the historian and theologian Carl R. Trueman, have argued that American society has become far more expressively individualistic over the past few decades. Yet the average level of happiness has consistently fallen, even as reported levels of depression and anxiety have exploded.

One possible explanation for this paradox is that the lowering of self-control was an understandable but significant error in our collective thinking, and it took us in exactly the wrong direction where happiness is concerned. Although understanding how this happened won’t turn our whole culture around, it can help you be happier in your own life.

[Ed Yong: Self-control is just empathy with your future self]

From a psychological perspective, a useful hypothesis of how self-management works is that two systems in the brain govern it: the behavioral activation system and the behavioral inhibition system. The first one excites the desire for rewards and other positive stimuli, and arouses your interest in doing things. The second one creates an aversion to punishment and negative consequences, and tells you not to do things.

Generally, you can think about each system in this way: If the activation system rises or the inhibition system falls, self-control may decrease. Alternatively, if the inhibition system rises or the activation system falls, self-control may increase. And what works for an individual also scales by analogy for the group or community.

So which combination makes us happier overall—more of the behavioral activation system and less of the behavioral inhibition system, or the other way around? The answer is that both combinations are effective. A team of eight psychologists showed this in a 2018 study on self-control in the Journal of Personality. The team fielded a series of undergraduate surveys. The researchers found that low levels of self-control were associated with the lowest levels of subjective well-being. Moving to a higher level of self-control increased the undergraduates’ happiness.

Interestingly, in a separate study within the paper, the researchers also found that low-to-moderate levels of self-control—that is, a slightly below-average level of self-control—were associated with the lowest levels of momentary well-being. Yet a complete lack of self-control was associated with slightly higher momentary well-being. This is no wonder: Letting completely loose is commonly associated with very short-term bouts of pleasure.

This implies that if you are a somewhat reserved, self-controlled person, you can raise your sense of well-being in one of two completely contrasting ways: by being more authentic and impulsive or by being more punctilious and modest. Given that choice, the former sounds a lot more fun. The idea that most people would choose disinhibition and that authenticity would become the spirit of the age makes intuitive sense.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The link between self-reliance and well-being]

The trouble is that the let-it-all-hang-out approach is restricted to momentary well-being, and has consequences for others. In 2011, scholars at Arizona State University studied the correlation of low self-control with irresponsible behavior that makes life worse for others. They found that low self-control, although potentially enjoyable to the one shedding inhibitions, is associated with criminal offending, academic fraud, binge drinking, drunk dialing, public profanity, and (weirdly) public flatulence. All of these behaviors have negative social consequences, some more serious than others, but any will affect the well-being of others.

I would hazard this as a partial explanation at least for our national happiness funk: American culture has gone the wrong way about getting happier—by encouraging each of us to relax self-control to get happier, the unfortunate result is that we have become unhappier as a whole, and are now stuck that way. By seeking the short-term mood payoff that comes from disinhibition, we have become unapologetic, drunk-dialing, cussing, farting fraudsters who make one another miserable.

That is a broad statement, and not intended to be taken literally. But if you think the characterization is preposterously extreme, have you looked at your social-media feed lately?

For your own well-being, and everyone’s, increasing self-control might be much better than lowering it. To propose this at a societal level is nothing new; writers have been doing so for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, for example, exhorted “all well-bred people” to “forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.” But he had a broader vision, too, for how to realize greater collective happiness. “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will,” he advised, “and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The case for restraint in all things]

As Franklin suggests and the aforementioned research shows, even if others don’t mend their ways, controlling yourself more is a strategy that will raise your individual well-being. It can be hard to go against unfortunate social trends, so here are a couple of helpful things to keep in mind.

First, be aware of the forces around you that may lower the activity of the inhibition system in your brain and thus push you toward lower self-control. According to scholars at the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, three bad influences to watch out for are excess alcohol, anonymity, and social power. None of these necessarily leads to antisocial behavior, but they easily can—and so take you in the wrong direction for happiness. (For instance, have you ever come across someone who’s happy to have said or done something drunk that they would have been embarrassed to say or do sober?)

Similarly, who expects to find people being their best, most magnanimous selves when posting anonymously on social media? In fact, scholars who have studied anonymity on social media have found that although most users behave benignly, a small subset may demonstrate antisocial, even psychopathic, behavior. If you’re seeking to boost your self-control, shun any social media forum where your identity is hidden. Instead, accept responsibility for everything you say.

Social power—meaning, your capacity to influence others—is a trickier subject. If you possess, say, an ability to publish material that many other people will read, see, or hear, you should ask yourself whether your desire to attract and retain an audience is leading you to abandon your privacy. Does what you reveal about yourself evoke in people a frisson of interest but also lead them to hold a low opinion of your taste and manners? How much better to err on the side of self-control.

And consider the social influence we invest in leaders. We reduce our own well-being when we hand power to vulgarians. Just as it feels freeing to shed self-control but ultimately leads to negative consequences, so following leaders who act without constraints and break norms might feed our id but inevitably takes us individually and collectively down a dark path.

[Read: The paradox of effort]

You might think that because I am arguing that the happiest path is one in which we sublimate our true feelings and desires through greater self-control, I am advocating in effect for inauthenticity. But that’s not my intention; rather, I am arguing for authentic self-improvement. The choice to act in a particular way boils down to a choice of who we will be as people—the famous “As If Principle” in psychology shows that we become a certain way by acting as if you already are that way.

This is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that “virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions.” One important choice we have is to behave with either controlled grace or uncontrolled entitlement. Neither option is in reality more authentic than the other because, in becoming who we are through our choices, both paths are equally authentic; both embody who we’ve chosen to be as people. But only one path, that of controlled grace, leads to greater happiness for one and all. So the beautiful truth is that we can elect to become authentically better than we were—and happier to boot.