This July 4th marks 250 years since the American founding. For the Jewish community, the anniversary is not merely a national commemoration but a moment of gratitude and pride. Jewish history across two millennia has been defined by exile, persecution, massacres, and expulsions. The United States stands apart as the one diaspora society in which Jews achieved full legal equality, rapid economic and cultural integration, and the ability to maintain religious and communal identity without state coercion or fear of collective punishment. That achievement rests on the specific character of the American constitutional order.
The First Amendment’s guarantees of free exercise of religion and prohibition on religious establishment represented a decisive break from European models. In those systems, Jewish existence depended on the sufferance of a Christian sovereign or established church. Rights were privileges granted or revoked according to political convenience. In Muslim nations, the Jewish communities there were treated as second-class citizens, forced to pay the jizya tax in order to live in relative peace—a peace that was always at risk.
America’s framework treated religious liberty as an inherent right belonging to individuals, not a concession from the state. This distinction mattered immediately and practically for the small Jewish communities already present in the new republic.
President George Washington articulated the principle with unmistakable clarity in his August 18, 1790, letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. The congregation, composed largely of Sephardic Jews whose families had fled the Inquisition, had addressed Washington during his visit. He replied:
“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Washington deliberately rejected the language of toleration. The new government would not merely refrain from active persecution; it would extend the same protection to Jews as to any other citizens and ask only that they fulfill the ordinary duties of citizenship. The Touro Synagogue in Newport could stand openly as a house of worship because the newfound nation did not require Jews to hide to be safe. This guarantee attracted Jewish immigrants for the next century and a half.
The 19th and early 20th centuries tested that guarantee repeatedly. Successive waves of Jewish immigrants—German Jews arriving in the middle decades of the 1800s, followed by roughly two million Eastern European Jews between 1880 and 1924—encountered a society that offered legal equality and economic mobility on a scale unknown in the Pale of Settlement or under Russian or Romanian rule. Jews entered trades, built businesses, and moved into the professions with remarkable speed. They established synagogues, schools, and mutual-aid societies.
This is not to claim that America was a utopian society from the get-go. Antisemitism was present in social exclusion, university quotas, and governmental policies. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which imposed national-origins quotas, effectively ended large-scale Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe at the worst possible moment. That legislation was passed out of fear that the American creed could not handle the massive influx of immigration coming from the rest of the world, but it did not take into account that some migrants, especially Jews in pre-Nazi Europe, had to either flee or die.
Yet the ideals themselves remained magnetic. No European country offered a comparable combination of constitutional protection and economic dynamism. Jewish immigrants and their children responded by embracing the opportunities the system provided while preserving communal institutions. This created thriving communities within America from coast to coast.
The Holocaust exposed both the limits and the ultimate strength of the founding ideology. The United States maintained the restrictive immigration regime of the 1920s while Nazi Germany implemented the Final Solution. Rescue efforts were hampered by bureaucratic obstruction and public indifference. The voyage of the St. Louis in 1939 stands as a lasting symbol of missed opportunity. These failures are documented facts. At the same time, American military power destroyed the Nazi regime, and American forces liberated the concentration camps. General Eisenhower ordered extensive photographic and film documentation precisely to forestall future denial. After the war, through the Displaced Persons Acts and related measures, the United States admitted hundreds of thousands of Jewish survivors and refugees—more than most other nations. Jewish communal life in America recovered with extraordinary rapidity. The same constitutional order that had proven inadequate during the catastrophe now protected a community determined to rebuild in freedom.
The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 opened a new dimension in the relationship between the United States and the Jewish people. President Truman extended de facto recognition within minutes of Israel’s declaration of independence. Over subsequent decades, that recognition evolved into a strategic partnership grounded in shared democratic institutions, intelligence cooperation, technological development, and a recognition that a sovereign Jewish homeland served both moral and security interests after the Holocaust. American diplomatic, economic, and military support has been consistent across administrations of both parties for most of Israel’s history. Israel has functioned as a reliable ally in a volatile region and as a laboratory of innovation that benefits American interests.
In recent years, that bipartisan consensus has eroded, most sharply on the political left. Anti-Zionism has moved from the margins of progressive discourse into mainstream institutions—universities, media organizations, and segments of the Democratic Party. Much of this rhetoric presents itself as policy criticism or solidarity with Palestinians. In practice, it frequently applies standards to the Jewish state that are not applied to any other nation, denies Jewish historical connection to the land, and employs language that revives classic antisemitic motifs of control, dual loyalty, and collective guilt. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and the subsequent war revealed the extent of the shift. Campus protests, congressional testimony, and official data on antisemitic incidents documented a sharp rise in hostility that could no longer be dismissed as fringe.
This development received concrete electoral confirmation in recent New York Democratic primaries. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America and supported by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani won several races by making opposition to Israel and American support for Israel a central theme. Their campaigns employed the language of “liberation” and “decolonization,” framing the Jewish state as an inherent aggressor while offering little comparable scrutiny to surrounding regimes.
The hatred for Israel and the Jewish people is mirrored in their hatred for America, much like the history and ideology of the modern State of Israel mirrors the history and ideology of America. When DSA members discuss their issues with Israel, they use the language of colonization, racism, and fascism—the very same language they use to describe America. Their hatred of one is the same as their hatred of the other.
A separate but real threat exists on the fringes of the online right. Explicit antisemitic networks promote conspiracy theories about Jewish influence, minimize or deny the Holocaust, and recast “America First” as a doctrine that treats both Israel and American Jews as inherent obstacles to national renewal. These voices remain marginal within elected Republican politics and mainstream conservative institutions, which have largely maintained strong support for Israel and condemned antisemitism. Their amplification through social media, however, gives the Jewish people supernatural powers, with the ability to control every world event and even the weather. “Low-IQ antisemitism,” as it is called, has no place in the Republican Party, yet those who practice it claim to be “right-wing.”
The coming generation of American Jews has its own series of challenges, separate but similar to what past generations have had. We must adhere to the founding principles that have allowed us to live freely and thrive in the diaspora. We must also be aware of the people, both on the mainstream left and the fringe right, who would happily strip those principles away for the express purpose of joining the ranks of the countless societies that have persecuted the Jewish people.
There is a tendency among the Jewish community to look at what is occurring today, both culturally and politically, and to determine that the time for Jews in America is coming to an end. Nefesh B’Nefesh is having record-breaking years helping American Jews get to Israel. That is all well and good; people should have the freedom of movement to the Jewish homeland. That is not to say that America is no longer a safe haven, though. It is, in fact, still the greatest country in the world and an amazing place for the Jewish people. The moment we forget that, it no longer remains true.
As the United States enters its 250th year, the Jewish community has substantial grounds for gratitude. No other diaspora setting in Jewish history has combined legal equality, economic opportunity, and religious freedom on this scale. Gratitude, however, is not a strategy. The task ahead is to defend and renew the constitutional inheritance that Washington described in Newport: a government that gives bigotry no sanction and persecution no assistance. If that inheritance is preserved against the pressures of identity politics on one side and ethnic demagoguery on the other, the Jewish community will continue to thrive in America for the next 250 years, or the coming of Moshiach, whichever happens first.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.
