America Turns 250 With the Largest Jewish Diaspora. Will We Fight for It?

This week, America turns 250.

In the Jewish tradition, we have a word for what this moment calls for: hakarat hatov. Literally, recognizing the good. It is one of our most foundational obligations, not simply to feel grateful, but to name what we have been given and to act accordingly.

So let me name it clearly.

The United States of America has been the greatest host nation in the history of the Jewish diaspora. Full stop. The Jewish community in America is the largest outside of Israel. We have built here, schools, synagogues, hospitals, universities, cultural institutions, philanthropic organizations, on a scale and with a freedom that would have been incomprehensible to our great-grandparents. A recent open letter signed by Jewish leaders across the spectrum put it plainly: America, unlike so many others through Jewish history, did not merely tolerate Jewish life, but made possible its flourishing.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

The American experiment was never perfect. But its founding ideals created something unprecedented in Jewish history. In America, Jews didn’t simply survive. They were free to worship openly, to build institutions, to lead, to innovate, and to help shape the country itself. No ghetto walls. No quotas on what we could become. No government decree about where we could live, what we could study, or whether our children could dream as large as any other American child. Jewish scientists, educators, jurists, philanthropists, and entrepreneurs have helped shape nearly every field of American life. Jewish philanthropists have built hospitals, universities, museums, and social service organizations that serve all Americans, not only the Jewish community. When Jews have thrived in America, America has been the better for it.

Being deeply Jewish has never required being anything less than deeply American. America’s promise of religious liberty has allowed Jewish identity to flourish here in ways few generations before us could have imagined. That combination, full Jewish identity and full civic belonging, is historically rare. We should never take it for granted.

And yet, this 250th birthday arrives at an uncomfortable moment. Antisemitism is at historic highs. Jewish institutions operate under security protocols our grandparents never imagined. The mayor of New York City, home to more Jews than anywhere outside Israel, became the first sitting mayor since 1964 to skip the Israel Day Parade. In a single week this June, a Jewish man was critically wounded in a shooting in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal. A guilty plea was entered in a federal court in Brooklyn for a man who had planned a mass shooting at a Jewish community center, timed to the anniversary of October 7th. Jewish Americans navigating international travel are now reading government advisories about elevated risk at Jewish institutions worldwide.

The Jewish Journal noted it with characteristic understatement: “America’s 250th arrives at a time when things have been especially lousy for Jews.” The question before us is not whether America has been good to the Jews. It has been, extraordinarily so. The question is whether we are doing enough to ensure that remains true for the next 250 years.

This is the compact that has held for 250 years: America gave Jews freedom, and Jews gave America everything they had. Gratitude, in the Jewish tradition, is not a feeling. It is an obligation to act.

Hakarat hatov does not mean looking backward warmly at everything we have received. It means looking forward, clearly, at everything we are responsible to protect and pass on. The American Jewish story is one of the most remarkable in diaspora history. But it is not self-sustaining. It never has been. Every generation of American Jews has had to make a deliberate choice to build, to give, to engage, to show up.

And here is the truth that this anniversary forces us to face we are in the middle of a generational wealth transfer unlike any in history. Trillions of dollars will move from one generation to the next in the coming decades. The institutions that have made American Jewish life possible, the schools, the synagogues, the community centers, the Israel advocacy organizations, the cultural and educational institutions, depend on what this generation decides to do with that inheritance.

Too often, our philanthropic conversations stay in familiar territory. The hospital. The university. The arts institution. All of it worthwhile. None of it specifically Jewish. And while we write those checks, the infrastructure of Jewish life competes for a fraction of what Jewish wealth could direct toward it. The American Jewish story will not continue because it always has. It will continue because enough of us decide, right now, to fund what it takes.

I think about what it means to build something that outlasts you. I think about the Jewish immigrants who came to this country with nothing and built Orthodox shuls in tenement neighborhoods. Who sent their children to Jewish summer camps and day schools when they could barely afford the tuition. Who wrote checks to the United Jewish Appeal and to Israel before they had finished paying off their own mortgages. They did not do these things because it was easy. They did them because they understood that Jewish life does not perpetuate itself. Someone must build it. Someone must fund it. Someone must raise the next generation inside it. We are that someone, right now.

And the choices we make in this decade, with this particular transfer of wealth, in this particular political and cultural moment, will shape what American Jewish life looks like for the next 50 years. Not the decade after us. This one.

So, what does building look like in practice?

It looks like funding Jewish day schools and early childhood education not as a niche cause for the parts of the Jewish community, but as the single most proven investment in Jewish continuity we have. Study after study confirms that children who receive a serious Jewish education are more engaged, more connected, more likely to marry Jewish, more likely to give to Jewish causes, and more likely to raise Jewish children. This is not a side project. It is the infrastructure.

It looks like investing in Jewish communal security as a philanthropic priority, not an institutional afterthought. The threat environment has changed. Our funding levels have not kept pace. It looks like supporting the organizations doing the hard, unglamorous work of building Jewish narrative infrastructure, training journalists, developing young Jewish leaders, creating the content that tells our story honestly and well before the next crisis forces us to play catch-up.

And it looks like something simpler, and harder, and more personal: having the conversation. With your children. With your financial advisor. At the Shabbat table. About whom we are, what we have been given, and what we owe the generations that come after us.

America’s founders wrote about the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right. Jewish tradition has always understood something slightly different: that happiness, belonging, and continuity are not rights to be pursued but obligations to be fulfilled. You do not inherit a Jewish future. You build one.

For 250 years, this country has given the Jewish people the freedom to build. Freedom of worship. Freedom of speech. Freedom of assembly. Freedom to build schools and synagogues and philanthropic institutions without fear of state persecution. That freedom is rare in Jewish history. It is precious. And it is not guaranteed to persist on its own.

It persists because people like us decide it will.

In the year America turns 250, the most Jewish thing we can do is not simply celebrate what we have inherited. It is to build something that the next generation will inherit from us. A school. A fund. A conversation. A promise.

America has been extraordinarily good to the Jewish people. The best way to honor this remarkable nation is to make sure the Jewish community it helped make possible remains strong, vibrant, generous, and unmistakably Jewish, for generations to come.