America at 250: A Covenant Renewed

Why the Jewish Story Is Inseparable from the American Story

America did not ask Jews to stop being Jews in order to become Americans. It invited us to become more fully both.

This Fourth of July, as America celebrates its 250th birthday, that invitation is worth remembering. The nation was founded not upon bloodlines, monarchy, or ethnicity, but upon the revolutionary conviction that every person possesses inherent dignity and unalienable rights.  For nearly four centuries, America has offered Jews the extraordinary freedom to remain wholly Jewish while being wholly American.

Gratitude is one of Judaism’s defining virtues, and perhaps no community has had more reason to feel grateful for the promise of America. At a time when rising antisemitism has caused many Jews to question their place, and when support for Israel is too often portrayed as incompatible with American patriotism, this anniversary offers a chance to remember a deeper truth.

The Jewish story is inseparable from the American story.

We do not need permission to belong. We have earned our place—not through privilege or entitlement, but through generations of contribution, sacrifice, and service to the nation we proudly call home. America’s genius was never that it erased differences, but that it invited people of every faith and background to bring the best of their traditions into a shared civic enterprise. Jews embraced that invitation with extraordinary enthusiasm.

That simple idea transformed Jewish history. For centuries, Jews had faced an impossible choice: assimilate or be excluded, abandon their identity or surrender opportunity. America offered something different. Here, Jewish identity and American citizenship were not competing loyalties but complementary ones—and Jews could worship freely, build businesses, serve their communities, educate their children, and take part in public life as equals without relinquishing the traditions that had sustained them for millennia.

The relationship quickly became reciprocal. America offered freedom, and the Jewish people responded with gratitude, loyalty, and an enduring commitment to strengthening the nation that welcomed them.

From the earliest days of the Republic, Jewish Americans helped shape the country’s destiny. During the Revolutionary War, Haym Salomon risked his fortune to help finance the Continental Army and support the cause of independence. Jewish soldiers have served in every major American conflict since, with more than 550,000 serving in World War II alone, defending the freedoms that allowed generations of immigrants, including their own families, to flourish. Nothing demonstrates belonging more than the willingness to defend one’s country with one’s life.

Our contributions did not end on the battlefield. Emma Lazarus gave America one of its defining moral voices when her words on the Statue of Liberty welcomed generations of immigrants seeking liberty and opportunity. Justice Louis Brandeis reshaped American jurisprudence as the first Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court. Jonas Salk’s discovery of the polio vaccine spared millions of children from disease across the world. Ruth Bader Ginsburg left an indelible mark on American law. Jewish entrepreneurs helped build industries, create millions of jobs, and fuel American innovation from Main Street to Silicon Valley. Jewish scientists, physicians, educators, philanthropists, artists, labor leaders, and innovators have helped shape nearly every institution that defines American life. Relative to our numbers, few communities have contributed so broadly across the American landscape.

That record is no accident. For more than three thousand years, Jewish civilization has emphasized education, moral responsibility, family, community, charity, justice, and the dignity of every human being. Judaism teaches that faith is measured not only by prayer but by what we build, whom we serve, and whether we leave the world better than we found it.

Those values did not remain inside synagogues. They became hospitals that heal patients regardless of faith, universities that educate generations of students, museums that preserve our shared culture, and charitable organizations that respond whenever disaster strikes. The primary beneficiaries have not been Jews, but rather society at large.

The same values inspired Jewish participation in one of America’s defining moral struggles. During the Civil Rights Movement, rabbis marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. Jewish activists stood shoulder to shoulder with Black Americans in pursuit of equal justice under law. Andrew Goodman gave his life during Freedom Summer because he believed America’s founding promise belonged to every citizen. For many Jews, this was not simply political activism. It was Judaism expressed through citizenship.

The bond between America and its Jewish citizens was recognized almost from the beginning. In 1790, President George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new nation would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Across much of history, Jews had been merely tolerated. In America, they were welcomed as equal citizens.

America has not always lived perfectly up to that promise. Like every nation, it has known periods of prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion. Yet the enduring strength of the American experiment has been its capacity for self-correction—its willingness to return, again and again, to its founding ideals and strive to fulfill them more completely.

Today the charge has taken a new form. Some contend that strong support for Israel reflects divided loyalties or a diminished commitment to America. The accusation is not new. Throughout history, antisemites have questioned whether Jews could ever be loyal citizens of the countries they called home. The “dual loyalty” slander appeared in medieval Europe, resurfaced during the Dreyfus Affair, and has repeatedly been used to portray Jews as perpetual outsiders. Its modern vocabulary may have changed, but its underlying premise has not.

The truth is the opposite. American Jews have never experienced love of Israel as conflicting with love of America. The two commitments reinforce one another, because both nations are rooted in the conviction that democracy, religious liberty, individual freedom, and the rule of law are ideals worth defending. This reflects the same invitation America extended from the start. For many American Jews, attachment to the Jewish homeland is part of what it means to be Jewish—not a rival loyalty, but an expression of the very identity America invited them to keep.

That devotion has itself been an American Jewish contribution. For decades, American Jews have helped nurture one of the country’s most important strategic alliances—a relationship that has strengthened both nations and advanced American interests across the Middle East. For the bond between America and Israel is not merely emotional. It is profoundly strategic. Israel has become America’s most dependable democratic ally in the region—sharing intelligence that has saved American lives, pioneering missile-defense systems, advancing cybersecurity, developing life-saving medical innovations, and standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States against terrorism and regional aggression. One need not agree with every policy of every Israeli government to recognize an undeniable reality: when America has needed a steadfast ally in one of the world’s most dangerous regions, Israel has consistently answered the call.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, America declared that all people are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights. Long before those words were written in Philadelphia, the Jewish people had carried across continents a related conviction: that every human being is created b’tzelem Elohim—in the image of God—and therefore possesses inherent dignity and infinite worth.

Those two great traditions met on American soil, and the result has been one of history’s most extraordinary partnerships. America did not ask Jews to stop being Jews in order to become Americans. It invited us to become more fully both.  In return, Jews brought to this country a tradition that prizes learning, responsibility, family, justice, service, and hope—values that have strengthened America not because they are uniquely Jewish, but because they are universally human.

Rising antisemitism should not cause Jews to retreat in fear or respond with defensiveness. It should remind us of who we are. We know what we have contributed, and we know what we continue to contribute.

America has been enriched by countless communities, each adding something unique to its remarkable story. The Jewish people are proud to stand among them—not as guests, not as outsiders, but as partners in one of history’s greatest democratic experiments.

America’s founders understood that liberty cannot survive without virtue. Judaism has spent more than three millennia teaching that freedom is inseparable from responsibility. Perhaps that is why the partnership between America and the Jewish people has flourished for so long. Each, in its own way, believes that rights carry obligations, that dignity demands responsibility, and that the measure of a society is found not merely in its wealth or power, but in the character of its people. Patriotism is ultimately measured not by what we demand from a country, but by what we are willing to contribute to it.

As America begins its next 250 years, may we renew that covenant together—not only as Jews or as Americans, but as citizens committed to building a nation worthy of the ideals upon which it was founded. The next chapter of the American story has yet to be written. We are proud that the Jewish community helped write the first chapters. We are equally committed to helping write the next.