Tamar Jacoby as Public Intellectual

Ideas and Lives

Tamar Jacoby is president of Opportunity America, a Washington-based nonprofit working to promote economic mobility – work, skills, careers, ownership and entrepreneurship for poor and working Americans. This interview chronicles her career, starting as a journalist as the deputy editor of The New York Times op-ed page and senior writer and justice editor at Newsweek and later as an author of several books, including the highly noted “Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration.” The interview covers her work on immigration reform, including her efforts to negotiate a legislative solution to the problem. Her subsequent emphasis on workforce issues has included work on community colleges apprenticeship and other strategies for widening opportunity in America.