Cathy Young

Cathy Young (born Ekaterina Jung; 1963) is a Russian-American journalist, author, and commentator known for her libertarian-leaning critiques of modern feminism, advocacy for free speech and due process, and analyses of Soviet-era experiences. Born in Moscow, she immigrated to the United States with her family in 1980 at age 17 and became a naturalized citizen. Young earned a B.A. in English from Rutgers University in 1988, with induction into Phi Beta Kappa. She authored Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (1989), a memoir of her childhood under Soviet communism, and Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality (1999), which promotes gender equity through mutual cooperation rather than zero-sum conflict. As a contributing editor for Reason magazine, former columnist for The Boston Globe, and research associate at the Cato Institute, Young has written extensively on excesses in movements like #MeToo—emphasizing the need for evidence-based accusations and presumption of innocence—and on threats to open discourse from both ideological extremes.

Ekaterina Jung, who later adopted the name Cathy Young, was born in Moscow on February 26, 1963, into a Jewish family during the Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union. As an only child, she was raised by college-educated professional parents: her father, a record engineer, and her mother, a music teacher. The family enjoyed a middle-class comfort uncommon in the USSR, residing in a private two-bedroom apartment in a desirable neighborhood, owning a dacha for summer retreats, and securing her enrollment in a privileged school.

Cathy Young, born Yekaterina Jung in Moscow on February 26, 1963, to parents of Jewish descent—a mathematician father and a translator mother—grew up in the Soviet Union under typical intellectual family circumstances without dissident affiliations. In 1980, at age 17, her family traveled to the United States on a tourist visa and elected to stay, effectively defecting from the USSR. They settled in New Jersey, where Young began adapting to American life amid the stark contrasts between Soviet totalitarianism and U.S. democratic freedoms, including access to uncensored information and consumer abundance.

Young's adaptation accelerated through enrollment at Rutgers University in New Jersey shortly after arrival, where she pursued studies that bridged her Soviet upbringing with American intellectual traditions. This transition fostered her rapid integration, as evidenced by her subsequent fluency in English and engagement with U.S. journalism, drawing on firsthand knowledge of authoritarianism to inform her critiques of similar tendencies in free societies. By the mid-1980s, she had established roots in American academia and media, embodying the émigré success story of leveraging opportunity in a nation that absorbed over 100,000 Soviet Jews and others via such irregular pathways during the late Cold War era.