The panoram­ic sto­ry of the 1980s, explor­ing the tri­umphs and fail­ures of the decade that shapes our world today, from a Pulitzer Prize win­ning reporter who wit­nessed the trans­for­ma­tions first­hand. The book tells the sto­ry of the 1980s through five peo­ple whose deci­sions trans­formed Amer­i­can busi­ness, media, and pol­i­tics. Sev­er­al are Jew­ish: Evan Wolf­son, a Jew­ish law stu­dent at Har­vard who wrote a paper in 1983 argu­ing that same-sex cou­ples had a con­sti­tu­tion­al right to mar­ry — and spent the next thir­ty-two years build­ing the move­ment that won gay mar­riage; Karen Nuss­baum, who found­ed 9to5 — which inspired the hit movie and built the country’s most impor­tant labor move­ment for work­ing women. The 1980s also saw the col­lapse of the Black and Jew­ish alliance dur­ing Jesse Jackson’s two cam­paigns for pres­i­dent — a rup­ture that still echoes today. Jew­ish lives and Jew­ish strug­gles are woven into the coun­try’s sto­ry, as they always have been. The 1980s built mod­ern Amer­i­ca. Under­stand­ing how we got here is the first step to fig­ur­ing out where we go next.