When America Roared: The Decade That Made Us
How five people's decisions across business, media, law, labor, and finance in the 1980s built the economic and political systems Americans are still living — and fighting — with today
Why the same decade that restored American competitiveness also planted the seeds of today's inequality, polarization, and institutional distrust
What Jack Welch, Mark Fowler, Karen Nussbaum, Evan Wolfson, and John Rogers have in common: they each changed the rules, and the rules stuck
How understanding that the 1980s simultaneously saved and broke America changes the way we think about fixing it
Eyewitness to History: Tiananmen, the Berlin Wall, and What We Missed
What it looked and felt like on the ground in Beijing in 1989 — and why the images the world remembers tell only half the story
How capitalism's apparent triumph at the Berlin Wall caused an entire generation of leaders to stop questioning the 1980s model just when the questions mattered most
The reporting decisions journalists make under pressure, and how those decisions shape what history remembers
Why the lessons of 1989 went invisible to the generation that lived through them — and why they are urgently relevant now
How History Happens: The Making and Breaking of American Institutions
Why the changes that reshape a society rarely look like revolutions — they look like regulation changes, corporate memos, and legal briefs that nobody reads at the time
How ideas move from the margins to the mainstream: the conditions that allowed the 1980s to rewrite the rules of business, media, and politics simultaneously
What makes institutional change stick — and why some transformations last for generations while others dissolve the moment the political wind shifts
The lessons the 1980s hold for anyone trying to build lasting change today, whether in a boardroom, a courtroom, or a community
Jews, Power, and Moral Choice: From Shanghai to Eastern Europe to the American Story
How Jewish families in Shanghai, Eastern Europe, and America navigated radically different questions of power, assimilation, and survival — and what those choices cost them
The Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988, the eruption of Black-Jewish tensions that surrounded them, and why the fault lines those campaigns exposed have never fully closed
Evan Wolfson, Karen Nussbaum, and the Jewish figures at the center of the 1980s transformation — what their stories reveal about Jewish identity in American public life
Four books, four eras, one recurring question: what does it mean to do the right thing when the stakes are existential?
Jewish Families and the Making of the American South
How Jewish families helped shape the culture, commerce, and civic life of the American South and the Caribbean
The untold story of Jewish influence on a region whose history has almost always been told through a different lens
What these families' stories reveal about assimilation, identity, and the enduring complexity of belonging in America
Where ...
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Keynote presentations
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Book club and community conversations
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University and journalism school lectures
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Business school and executive leadership programs
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Jewish Book Month events, JCC programming, and synagogue book groups
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Think tank and policy organization briefings
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Panel discussions and moderated conversations
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Literary festivals and author series
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Virtual and hybrid formats available for all of the above
Jonathan Kaufman has spent four decades reporting on the people and decisions that shaped our world — from the trading floors of 1980s Wall Street to Tiananmen Square to the Berlin Wall. That firsthand experience, combined with the research behind four books and more than a hundred original interviews, gives his presentations something most historians can't offer: the authority of someone who was actually there.
His talks draw on the same approach that makes his books work — character-driven storytelling that makes complex history feel immediate, personal, and impossible to put down. Whether the audience is a room full of MBA students, a synagogue book group, or a conference of journalists, Jonathan translates the forces that built modern America into something every person in the room can recognize in their own life.
He speaks on the 1980s and their consequences, on the Jewish experience in America and across the world, on the long game of institutional change, and on the craft of narrative journalism. Every engagement is tailored to the audience — and every one leaves the room with a clearer sense of how we got here, and what that means for where we go next."