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America at 250: Why the Jewish Story Is Central to the American Experiment
The US Capitol Building. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
In 2026, the United States will mark its 250th anniversary. The semiquincentennial — “America 250,” as it is now branded — will bring speeches, exhibitions, curricula, and civic rituals meant to tell the nation’s story anew. Anniversaries of this scale are never only about the past. They are moments when a country decides what it remembers, what it forgets, and what it chooses to pass on.
This anniversary arrives at a moment of strain. Trust in institutions is low. National confidence is brittle. And American Jews are confronting a surge in antisemitism unmatched in a generation; on college campuses, in cultural institutions, in public discourse, and increasingly in everyday life. The ADL’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents recorded 9,354 incidents across the United States, a record high and an 84% increase in campus incidents alone. Jews are harassed, excluded, and told, sometimes explicitly, that their place in American society is conditional.
All of this makes America 250 more than a commemorative exercise. It is a test of civic memory.
For American Jews, it is also a moment of responsibility. We must insist — clearly and without apology — that the Jewish story is not adjacent to the American story. It is central to it.
Jews did not come to America to escape its ideals. We came because of them. From the colonial era forward, the United States offered something rare in Jewish history: a political order that separated citizenship from theology, protected religious conscience, and allowed minorities to flourish without surrendering their identity. That promise was imperfectly realized, but it was real and Jews recognized it immediately. They responded not by retreating inward, but by investing outward, with loyalty, gratitude, and a deep sense of obligation.
Jews fought in the Revolutionary War. Haym Salomon, a Polish-born Jewish broker, helped finance George Washington’s army at a critical moment before the siege of Yorktown. Jewish congregations organized in the earliest years of the republic. Jewish leaders defended religious liberty not only for Jews, but for Catholics, Quakers, and others who stood outside Protestant majorities. Long before pluralism became a slogan, Jews lived it as a civic practice.
America did not make Jews invisible. It made Jewish life possible.
One small but telling example captures the larger story. Congregation Shearith Israel, founded in 1654 by Jews fleeing persecution in Brazil, predates the United States itself. Its members prayed under British rule, supported the American Revolution, and rebuilt after fires, wars, and waves of immigration. When George Washington wrote his 1790 letter affirming that the government of the United States “gives to bigotry no sanction,” he addressed it to a Jewish community already woven into the nation’s civic life. That congregation still exists today in Newport, Rhode Island, not as a relic, but as a living institution. Its continuity tells the story plainly: Jews did not pass through America. We helped build it, and we stayed.
Across every major sector of American life, Jewish contributions have been foundational rather than peripheral. In commerce and finance, Jewish entrepreneurs helped build the modern American economy. In science and medicine, Jewish researchers expanded knowledge, extended life, and strengthened public health. In law and jurisprudence, Jewish thinkers shaped constitutional interpretation and civil rights. In labor movements, philanthropy, journalism, arts, education, and higher learning, Jews helped construct the institutions that defined modern American life.
Jews helped build Hollywood and Broadway, the modern university and the modern hospital, the neighborhood synagogue and the national civil rights coalition. These were not side projects or accidents of success. They were expressions of a tradition that values learning, debate, moral responsibility, and communal obligation — and of a country that allowed those values to be lived openly.
This pattern matters. It reflects something deeper than achievement. American Jews are not simply a religious denomination or a demographic category. We are a people with history, memory, law, ritual, and continuity across generations. The United States is strong not because it erased such identities, but because it welcomed and integrated them into the civic fabric. The American experiment did not ask Jews to stop being a people. It asked only that we live as citizens. We did and we built.
Judaism itself helps explain why this worked. Jewish life and our traditions have never been merely a private matters of faith and practice. Being Jewish is a way of life rooted in law, learning, community, and moral obligation. America, uniquely, made space for that kind of religious seriousness without demanding conformity or erasure. This is why Jews have historically been among the strongest defenders of the First Amendment; not only its protections for speech, but its guarantees of free exercise and non-establishment. Religious liberty was not a concession to Jews. It was a shared civic principle that allowed Jews, Catholics, Protestants, and others to thrive together.
The American experiment worked because it assumed that difference, properly governed, strengthens rather than weakens a free society. Jews understood that intuitively and lived it daily.
Yet today, that shared understanding is fraying. In some quarters, Jews are once again treated as conditional citizens – valued for past contributions but suspect in the present. On campuses, Jewish identity is recast as political liability. In cultural spaces, Jewish history is selectively erased. In activist circles, Jews are told they belong only if they disavow their peoplehood, their history, or their connection to Israel.
This is not progress. It is dangerous regression.
Antisemitism thrives where civic memory collapses — where Jews are no longer seen as neighbors, builders, and fellow citizens, but as abstractions or intruders. It flourishes when America’s story is retold as a morality play of power rather than a hard-won experiment in pluralism, restraint, and mutual obligation.
This is why America 250 matters so much. How the nation tells its story will shape who is permitted to belong within it.
At a moment when American culture struggles to hold past and present together — when history is either sanctified or erased — Jewish peoplehood offers a different model. Jews are a people shaped by memory without paralysis, by argument without rupture, by continuity without uniformity. That sensibility is not incidental to Jewish success in America. It is precisely the kind of civic maturity the American experiment now requires. A nation that cannot tolerate Jewish peoplehood cannot long sustain pluralism at all.
The 250th anniversary of the United States must not become another exercise in national self-denunciation. Honest reckoning is necessary, but so is gratitude, pride, and recommitment. The American experiment succeeded not because it eliminated difference, but because it governed it. Jews did not succeed here by abandoning who they were. They succeeded by bringing Jewish law, learning, family life, debate, and moral obligation into public life without asking America to become Jewish, and without becoming less Jewish themselves.
The American experiment did not succeed despite Jewish peoplehood. It succeeded in part because the nation welcomed it.
At America’s 250th birthday, Jews should not shrink or whisper. We should teach, write, build, celebrate, and insist — calmly but firmly — on our place in the national story. We are not guests in America. We are not beneficiaries of temporary tolerance. We are not outsiders who happened to succeed.
We are Americans by conviction, by contribution, and by covenant.
The Jewish story is woven into America’s freedoms, institutions, culture, and moral vocabulary. To deny that is not only to misunderstand Jewish history. It is to misunderstand America itself.
And one thing must be said just as clearly: the hatred must stop. Not because Jews are fragile. Not because we are afraid. But because antisemitism is incompatible with the American experiment itself.
America works when citizens see one another as partners in a shared project. Jews have been partners since the beginning. We have helped this nation grow and we will continue to do so.
This is not a demand for recognition; it is a recognition already written into the American story.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Syria Gives Kurds Four Days to Accept Integration as US Signals End of Support
Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fighters walk near an armored vehicle, following clashes between SDF and Syrian government forces, in Hasakah, Syria, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Orhan Qereman
Syria on Tuesday announced a ceasefire with Kurdish forces it has seized swathes of territory from in the northeast and gave them four days to agree on integrating into the central state, which their main ally, the United States, urged them to accept.
The lightning government advances in recent days and the apparent withdrawal of US support for the continued holding of territory by the Syrian Democratic Forces represent the biggest change of control in the country since rebels ousted Bashar al-Assad 13 months ago.
US envoy Tom Barrack in a social media post described the offer of integration into the central Syrian state with citizenship rights, cultural protections, and political participation as the “greatest opportunity” the Kurds have.
He added that the original purpose of the SDF, which Washington had supported as its main local ally battling Islamic State, had largely expired, and that the US had no long-term interest in retaining its presence in Syria.
The United States is monitoring with “grave concern” developments in Syria, a White House official said, and urged all relevant parties to continue negotiating in “good faith.”
“We urge all parties to exercise maximum restraint, avoid actions that could further escalate tensions, and prioritize the protection of civilians across all minority groups,” the White House official said.
FOUR-DAY CEASEFIRE
The SDF said it accepted a ceasefire agreement with the Damascus government and that it would not engage in any military action unless attacked.
A Syrian government statement said it had reached an understanding with the SDF for it to devise an integration plan for Hasakah province or risk state forces entering two SDF-controlled cities.
The government announced a four-day ceasefire starting on Tuesday evening and said it had asked the SDF to submit the name of a candidate to take the role of assistant to the defense minister in Damascus as part of the integration.
Northeast Syria, wedged between Turkey and Iraq, is home to both Kurds and Arabs and was largely overrun by Islamic State fighters a decade ago before the SDF drove them back with air support from a US-led coalition.
However, advances by the SDF’s main component, the Kurdish YPG force, were concerning to US ally Turkey, which regarded it as an offshoot of the PKK group that had waged a years-long insurgency inside Turkey.
Since Assad was overthrown in December 2024, Syria has been led by former rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa, who at one stage controlled the al Qaeda offshoot in the country, and who has emerged as a close ally of Turkey.
Northeast Syria remains sensitive to Ankara, and is of wider international concern because of the presence of SDF-guarded facilities holding thousands of detained Islamic State militants and civilians associated with them.
ISLAMIC STATE DETAINEES
About 200 low-level Islamic State fighters escaped Shaddadi prison in northeast Syria on Monday when the SDF departed, but Syrian government forces recaptured many of them, a US official said on Tuesday.
The Syrian Interior Ministry said on Tuesday that about 120 Islamic State detainees escaped, 81 of whom had been recaptured.
The SDF said it had also withdrawn from al-Hol camp housing thousands of civilians linked to the jihadist group near the Iraqi border.
A senior Syrian government defense official said Damascus had notified the US of the SDF intention to withdraw from the vicinity of al-Hol camp and that government forces were ready to deploy there.
The SDF has previously said it was guarding some 10,000 IS fighters.
Syrian military sources said government troops had advanced on Tuesday in eastern areas of Hasakah province and south of the town of Kobani on the border with Turkey.
The SDF remains in control of Hasakah City, the provincial capital, which is ethnically mixed between Kurds and Arabs, and the Kurdish-majority city of Qamishli.
The government statement said it would not try to enter Hasakah or Qamishli cities during the four days it had given the SDF to outline a plan for integrating into the Syrian state.
MONTHS OF DEADLOCK
Tensions between the SDF and Damascus spilled into conflict this month after deadlock over the fate of the group’s fighters and territory as it resisted government demands to dissolve into the defense ministry.
On Sunday the SDF agreed to withdraw from the Arab-majority provinces of Raqqa and Deir al-Zor, and on Monday government forces pushed into Hasakah province.
Reports indicated that SDF commander Mazloum Abdi and Sharaa held a rocky meeting on Monday, after Abdi’s signature appeared on a 14-point agreement with the government.
The United States, which has established close ties with Sharaa under President Donald Trump, has been closely involved in mediation between the sides.
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Iranian Lawmakers Threaten ‘Jihad’ if Supreme Leader Attacked
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks during a meeting in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 17, 2026. Photo: Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iranian lawmakers on Tuesday warned that any attack on Iran’s so-called “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would lead to a declaration of “jihad,” or holy war, and a violent global response from the Islamic world.
The threat came as tensions between Washington and Tehran continued to escalate amid Iran’s deadly crackdown on nationwide anti-government protests. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to “hit” the Iranian regime and “help” the demonstrators if the violent repression continues.
“Any attack on the supreme leader means declaring war on the entire Islamic world,” Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency quoted the parliamentary National Security Committee as saying. The commission reportedly added that those responsible for the attack should expect “the issuance of a jihad decree by Islamic scholars and the response of Islam’s soldiers in all parts of the world.”
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian issued a similar warning on Sunday, saying an attack on Khamenei would be viewed as a declaration of war.
“Any aggression against the supreme leader of our country is tantamount to all-out war against the Iranian nation,” he posted on social media.
Such threats from Iranian leaders have come amid speculation that the US may take coercive measures against Iran, including potential military strikes, following Trump’s own warnings to the regime.
Last week, for example, Trump called on Iranian protesters to “take over your institutions” and suggested the US was prepared to take strong action against the regime.
“Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted on social media. “Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price. I have canceled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA [Make Iran Great Again]!!!”
Protests erupted in Iran on Dec. 28 over economic hardships but quickly swelled into nationwide demonstrations calling for the downfall of the country’s Islamist, authoritarian system.
The Iranian government has responded with force in an effort to crush the unrest.
The US-based group Human Rights Activists in Iran has confirmed 4,029 deaths during the protests, while the number of fatalities under review stands at 9,049. Additionally, at least 5,811 people have been injured, and the total number of arrests stands at 26,015.
Iranian officials have put the death toll at 5,000 while some reports indicate the figure could be much higher. The Sunday Times, for example, obtained a new report from doctors on the ground, which states that at least 16,500 protesters have died and 330,000 have been injured.
The exact numbers are difficult to verify, as the regime has imposed an internet blackout across the country while imposing its crackdown.
Trump recently called for an end to Khamenei’s 37-year reign.
“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran,” Trump told Politico in an interview published on Saturday.
“The man is a sick man who should run his country properly and stop killing people,” Trump said. “His country is the worst place to live anywhere in the world because of poor leadership.”
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Greece, Israel to Cooperate on Anti-Drone Systems, Cybersecurity, Greek Minister Says
Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz shakes hands with his Greek counterpart Nikos Dendias at the Ministry of Defense in Athens Greece, Jan. 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki
Greece will cooperate with Israel on anti-drone systems and cybersecurity, Greek Defense Minister Nikos Dendias said on Tuesday after meeting his Israeli counterpart in Athens.
“We agreed to exchange views and know-how to be able to deal with drones and in particular swarms of unmanned vehicles and groups of unmanned subsea vehicles,” Dendias said in joint statements with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz.
“We will also work together in order to be ready to intercept cyber threats.”
With strong economic and diplomatic ties, Greece and Israel operate an air training center on Greek territory and have held joint military drills in recent years.
Greece last year approved the purchase of 36 Israeli-made PULS rocket artillery systems for about 650 million euros ($762.52 million). It has also been in talks with Israel to develop an anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic multi-layer air and drone defense system, estimated to cost about 3 billion euros.
“We are equally determined regarding another critical issue: not to allow actors who seek to undermine regional stability to gain a foothold through terror, aggression or military proxies in Syria, in Gaza, in the Aegean Sea,” Katz said.
Dendias and Katz did not say who would pose drone, cyber or other threats to their countries. But Greece and Israel both see Turkey as a significant regional security concern.