Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby (; born June 4, 1945) is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller. She is an atheist and a secularist. Jacoby graduated from Michigan State University in 1965. She lives in New York City.

Life and career Jacoby, who began her career as a reporter for The Washington Post, has been a contributor to a variety of national publications, including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, The Nation, Glamour, and the AARP Bulletin and AARP: The Magazine. She is currently a panelist for "On Faith," a Washington Post-Newsweek blog on religion. As a young reporter she lived for two years in the USSR.

Raised in a Catholic home (her mother was from an Irish Catholic family), Jacoby was 24 before she learned that her father, Robert, had been born into a Jewish family. Jacoby explored these roots in her 2000 book Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past. (Robert Jacoby's brother was the great bridge player Oswald Jacoby. It was also named an Outstanding International Book of the Year by The Times Literary Supplement (London) and The Guardian. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1984) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. in 1974 to research and write about the new Americans: immigration into the U.S.

In The Age of American Unreason (2008) Jacoby contends that the dumbing down of America, which she describes as "a virulent mixture of anti-rationalism and low expectations", is more a permanent state than a temporary one

In February 2010, she was named to the Freedom From Religion Foundation's Honorary Board of distinguished achievers. Also in 2010, she was awarded the Richard Dawkins Award by Atheist Alliance International.

Ideas Center for Inquiry Libraries Director Tim Binga and Susan Jacoby display a letter in Robert G. Ingersoll's hand.

Jacoby has spoken about the important role secularism played in the development of political and social events in the history of the United States, and she has argued that this fact is often written out of American history by the religious right.

The idea that a secular government is, in fact, necessary for the existence of religious liberty, has also been defended by Susan Jacoby. She has suggested that the religiosity of the American people, as well as the proliferation of different religious denominations in the United States, are examples of situations that have occurred precisely thanks to the existence of a secular system.

Books Moscow Conversations (1972) The Friendship Barrier: Ten Russian Encounters (1972, British edition) Inside Soviet Schools (1974) The Possible She (1979) Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge (1983) Soul to Soul: A Black Russian American Family, 1865-1992 (with Yelena Khanga) (1994) Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past (2000) Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (2004) The Age of American Unreason, Pantheon (2008) Alger Hiss and the Battle for History (2009) Never Say Die (2011) The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (2013) Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion (2016) Why Baseball Matters (2018)