16 Facts About Susan Jacoby

Susan Jacoby's 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism, The Age of American Unreason, was a New York Times best seller.

Susan Jacoby is currently a panelist for "On Faith," a Washington Post-Newsweek blog on religion.

Susan Jacoby explored these roots in her 2000 book Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for Her Family's Buried Past.

Susan Jacoby won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1974 to research and write about the new Americans: immigration into the US.

Susan 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.

One of the most important events in which Susan Jacoby believes secularism played an enormous part was the writing of the United States Constitution.

Susan Jacoby has explained that it is a false claim that the founders of the United States intended the government to be religious.

Susan Jacoby believes instead that they were strongly in favor of the separation of Church and State, and that they purposely omitted the word God from the Constitution, partly influenced by the horrors that occurred in places such as France under non-secular rule, as well as inspired by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.

Susan Jacoby 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.

Susan Jacoby has said that the separation of church and state offered people the possibility to disagree with their church without having to oppose the established political order, which would have been impossible under a system where church and state were united.

Susan Jacoby has pointed out that the presence of some religious elements in the governmental scene of the United States is a matter of customs and not of laws, and that many of those elements are more recent than people tend to believe.

Susan Jacoby has cited as an example the Pledge of Allegiance, only written in 1892 and which did not include the expression 'Under God' until 1954.

Susan Jacoby believes that accepting the importance of secularism in the civil rights movement does not deny the role religion played in it, and while she has admitted that "the driving force in the early civil rights movement were the black churches of the South", she has pointed out that the movement was not intrinsically religious, and that in fact, the white churches of the South were strongly opposed to it.

Susan Jacoby has highlighted the link and similarities between secularism and feminism.

Susan Jacoby has noticed that both movements gain and lose strength throughout history and are constantly renewed or revived by later generations.

Susan Jacoby has used as an example the case of Thomas Paine, whose ideas were prominent in the 18th century but which were almost forgotten by later generations until the last quarter of the 19th century, when they were revived by Robert G Ingersoll.