Home is Never Finished

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday, my recent conversations with Black clergy have deepened my understanding of the contradictions woven into our celebration of Independence Day. For many Americans, July Fourth is uncomplicated—a celebration of liberty, family, fireworks, and country. For many Black Americans, however, it has always carried a deeper tension.

In his famous 1852 address, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Frederick Douglass exposed the hypocrisy of celebrating liberty while millions remained enslaved. Yet Douglass refused despair. He came to insist that “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a glorious liberty document.” America’s founding ideals, he believed, contained within them the moral resources to condemn slavery and ultimately overcome it.

American Jews know something about oppression as well. Signs reading “No N*****s, No Jews, No Dogs” once hung across the American South. Most American Jewish families came to this country fleeing pogroms that culminated in the Holocaust, even as restrictive immigration quotas and antisemitism kept countless European Jews from finding refuge here. My grandparents’ generation could easily have concluded that democracy had failed forever. Instead, they made a remarkable wager.

They bet on American democracy. They believed the United States could become something almost unprecedented in Jewish history: a Diaspora where Jews could live openly as Jews while helping build a society rooted in liberty, justice, and pluralism.

Today, that confidence feels more fragile. Since October 7, 2023, antisemitic incidents have reached record levels in the United States. The Anti-Defamation League documented more than 9,300 incidents in 2024—the highest number since it began keeping records nearly fifty years ago. Too often, Jewish students and families find themselves unfairly held responsible for the actions of a government half a world away.

Many Black Americans, meanwhile, watch with alarm as protections once guaranteed by the Voting Rights Act have been weakened, making it far harder to challenge electoral maps that dilute Black voting strength and practices that restrict equal access to the ballot. Battles over political representation continue across the country, reinforcing the sense that the struggle for an equal voice remains unfinished.

Our fears are not equivalent. Neither are our histories.

Black Americans did not come here seeking refuge. They were kidnapped, separated from their families, and forced across the Atlantic in chains. America is the home their ancestors built under unimaginable oppression. Jews arrived in successive waves hoping this country might become the first Diaspora where our children would not have to choose between being fully Jewish and fully accepted.

Different journeys. A shared question: 

Can America become a home where all of us belong?

The Torah commands: “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the heart of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.”

God does not command solidarity because it is politically useful. Jewish memory of oppression was never meant to make us merely better survivors. It was meant to make us better neighbors.

That is why I believe the future of American Judaism is inseparable from the future of American democracy.

In a recent conversation with Israeli journalist Haviv Rettig Gur, Van Jones reflected on the historic partnership between Black Americans and Jews. “The most persistent feature of democratic progress,” he said, “has been this alliance between the best people in both communities”—the Jewish commitment to tikkun olam, repairing the world, and the Black commitment to justice for all. Together, he said, they created “this double helix of hope for everybody.”

He is right.

Rebuilding the Black-Jewish relationship is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is one of the great civic tasks of our generation. The partnership between our communities did not simply strengthen Jews or Black Americans. It helped move America closer to its own ideals.

Despair is a luxury covenantal people cannot afford. Home is never finished. America remains unfinished. Every generation inherits both a gift and a construction site. As we celebrate 250 years of this remarkable, imperfect country, may we recommit ourselves to the wager our grandparents made—not merely defending our own place within American democracy, but helping widen its promise for others as well.

Because home is not something we inherit.

Home is something we build—and keep rebuilding—together.