Behind the Cover:

In this month’s cover story (p. 20), Franklin Foer writes about the end of what he calls the “Golden Age of American Jewry.” Rising anti-semitism, on the right and the left, threatens to undermine an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans— and it could in turn destroy the liberal order they helped establish.

For our cover design, we drew inspiration from the aesthetic traditions of Yiddish-theater posters, adapting their colors, typefaces, photo treatments, and intermingled languages. (Special thanks to David Roskies at the Jewish Theological Seminary for his Yiddish expertise.) From the mid-19th century through the outbreak of World War II, Yiddish theater companies flourished across Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in London, Paris, and New York. For Jewish immigrants to the United States, the critic Jesse Green has written, Yiddish theater offered “a keepsake of home, and yet also a means of acculturation.” Their comedies, dramas, and melodramas explored communal and cultural concerns but also looked outward, taking up the stories of Jews in America.

On the cover, we sought to assemble a cast of icons from the Jewish Golden Age. Along the top row, from left to right, are Saul Bellow,

Bob Dylan, Susan Sontag, Leonard Nimoy, Henry Winkler, and Betty Friedan. In the center is Barbra Streisand, surrounded, clockwise from the top right, by Lenny Bruce, Ruth Westheimer, Steven Spielberg, Adam Sandler, Jonas Salk, Gilda Radner, Winona Ryder, Ralph Lauren, and Philip Roth. Along the bottom row, from left to right, are Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jerry Seinfeld, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Louis Brandeis, and Cynthia Ozick.