At 250, America Is Still a Jewish Miracle

To the people trying to push Jews out of the American story: you are centuries late.

American Jews are not new arrivals. We are not guests in this country. Nor are we a tolerated population whose belonging rises and falls with the latest campus chant, city council resolution, primary result, or passing fashion in moral outrage.

We. Are. Jewish. Americans.

And on America’s 250th birthday, it is worth saying plainly: we love it here!

Not naively. Not blindly. Not because the last few hundred years have been easy, or because Jew hatred is imaginary, or because Jewish life in America is suddenly simple. We love it here with the clear eyes of a people that has learned, at great cost, the difference between tolerance and freedom. 

For most of our history, Jews lived at the mercy of others. We were useful until we were resented, welcome until we were blamed, protected until protection grew inconvenient. The empires that hosted us in golden ages, expelled us in bloody ones, and a Jew could do little but read an ending someone else had already prepared.

America was always different for us.

Not perfect. Never perfect. But unique in the way that mattered most. America gave Jews room to rise. It found a people trained to keep a packed bag by the door, and it told them, at last, to unpack. To build. To set roots. To belong.

And we did.

We came as strangers carrying memory and hunger, prayer and grief, ambition and nerve. We came wanting dignity. We wanted possibility. We wanted the right to build a life without asking the permission of kings, priests, mobs, ministers, or regimes. And then we took the narrow opening America gave us and made something extraordinary of it.

We built families and businesses, synagogues, schools and camps, hospitals and newspapers, laboratories and law firms, charities and universities and whole industries. We shaped this country from medicine to music, from the courts to comedy, from the public conscience to the very vocabulary of its civic life. We fought in her wars, buried our dead in American soil and raised our children to speak this country’s language as their own.

We helped make America.

That is the fact today’s antisemites cannot bear. Jewish flourishing here is a standing rebuke to everything they believe. It is the living proof that this country, for all its shortcomings, has done something almost without precedent in the long chronicle of our Jewish history. It took outsiders and made them citizens. 

Of course they resent that.

Jewish flourishing here exposes the antisemites’ contempt for America’s promise. Jewish confidence here refutes their politics of permanent grievance. Jewish belonging here wrecks the only story they know how to tell, that America is nothing but oppression, nothing but cruelty, nothing but hierarchy and theft.

The American Jewish story proves the antisemites wrong.

That is why the hatred feels so ferocious. It is not only an assault on Jews. It is an assault on the very America that made Jewish life here possible.

So let’s stop responding as though our belonging in America is still up for debate.

The mayor who called some of us monsters does not get to decide whether Jews can participate in American civic life. Nor do the congresspeople who dress their bigotry in the language of justice. Nor the professors who sneer at the civilization that guarantees their right to sneer. Nor the activists who mistake contempt for courage.

They did not give us America, and they sure as hell cannot take America from us.

None of this is a counsel of carelessness. We still need to confront these cowards. Expose the rot. Fight the bigots. A serious people does not entrust its survival to just sentiment. We must also refuse to let others’ hatred make American Jews feel like temporary occupants of this country.

On this Fourth of July, as America turns 250, the Jewish answer to this moment should be deep gratitude and love for a country that gave us possibility. Not a finished promise, but a share in the labor of making that promise true.

That is what makes America always worth celebrating. Not that it has never disappointed us. It has. Not that Jews are kept safe here by some magic. We are not. America is worth celebrating because it remains the most spectacular kind of country we Jews have ever known.

So raise the American flag. Watch the fireworks split the sky. Chant the melodious anthems. And remember this country is magnificent, and it is ours too.