Tamar Jacoby
Tamar Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes extensively on immigration and citizenship. She is a leading conservative voice in the media and elsewhere in favor of immigration reform, and works to organize the center-right behind reform proposals taking shape in Washington.
Her 1998 book, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (Basic Books), tells the story of race relations in three American cities—New York, Detroit and Atlanta. The Economist magazine called it “arguably the most important study of race relations in America since Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was published in 1944.”
A more recent book, Reinventing the Melting Pot: The New Immigrants and What It Means To Be American, was published by Basic Books in February 2004. A collection of essays by a diverse group of authors—academics, journalists and fiction-writers on both the right and the left—it argues that we as a nation need to find new ways to talk about and encourage immigrant absorption in American society.
Ms. Jacoby’s articles and essays have been published in a variety of periodicals, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and Foreign Affairs.
In addition to her published writings and media commentary, in the past few years she has been working behind the scenes in Washington to help develop immigration policy, writing policy papers, testifying in Congress and working with a range of congressional offices.
Before joining the Manhattan Institute, from 1987 to 1989, she was a senior writer and justice editor for Newsweek, where she wrote weekly articles on criminal justice, the Supreme Court and other law-related topics. Between 1981 and 1987, she was the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page. Before that, she was assistant to the editor of The New York Review of Books.
In 2004, she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She is a graduate of Yale University and has taught at Yale, Cooper Union and the New School University. She divides her time between Washington and the New York area.