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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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Synagogue attacks were part of massive ISIS-inspired plot last week, FBI says
(JTA) — A 21-year-old man from Valencia, Pennsylvania, suggested poisoning food in synagogues as part of a mass attack in support of the Islamic State group last week, according to the FBI.
The suspect, Jonathan Kramer, said in an online forum using the pseudonym “Hamza Al Rashid” that “i wish to inject ricin or cyanide into places such as grocery stores inside water/food with a syringe, or going to food events, preferably synagogues and putting the chemicals in their food and drink…,” according to a sworn FBI affidavit.
The prospective poisoning was part of a broader plot of mass violence that included “repeated attempts to encourage and coordinate violence through encrypted platforms, such as advising others on attack methods, discussing chemical poisons, arson, vehicle attacks, drone delivery explosives and firearm based assaults,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Richard Evanchec said at a press conference last week.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh said in a security update on Friday that no synagogue had been specified by the FBI. , “We are in close contact with our law enforcement partners and federal prosecutors, and if we learn of anything concerning, we will share that immediately,” the organization noted.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg announced last Tuesday that Kramer was “preparing for a mass shooting that could have taken many lives, having already secured a rifle and approximately 190 rounds of ammunition for what he called his ‘mission.”
Efforts to reach Kramer’s public defender Jake Morrison were unsuccessful.
FBI agents arrested Kramer in a hotel parking lot in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, the Justice Department said. They seized a semiautomatic rifle, five rifle magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a total of 190 rounds of rifle ammunition and about 30 knives following a search of him, his house and his hotel room.
Kramer was charged with receiving a firearm and ammunition believing they would be used to commit terrorism. He appeared in court last Wednesday to waive a preliminary hearing, according to CBS News. A court date has not been set for Kramer’s next proceedings, the network reported.
Kramer had been on the FBI’s radar since 2023, when he was charged by Pennsylvania state authorities “for his role in a plot to commit a mass casualty incident” and sent to a juvenile detention facility, FBI special agent Gregory Battaglia said in a sworn affidavit.
Nearly eight years ago, 11 worshippers were killed at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances
(JTA) — The State Department has approved a possible $24.3 billion sale of 48 F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia — a move that would make the kingdom the second Middle Eastern country after Israel to have the world’s most powerful combat aircraft.
“This proposed sale will support the foreign policy and national security objectives of the United States by improving the security of a major non-NATO ally,” the department said in a statement.
Israel wants the sale attached to a normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, but that doesn’t appear to be on the horizon. However, there is a small chance that Congress could keep the sale from happening.
When President Donald Trump first confirmed that he was considering the sale last November, Israeli officials told Axios that while they don’t oppose the sale itself, they wanted it “to be subject to Saudi normalization with Israel.”
Although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly brushed off the deal’s significance last fall, a security source at the time warned on CNN that the possibility of Saudi Arabia acquiring “the same capabilities” as Israel was “very concerning.”
The prime minister was more vocal in his opposition to a July announcement from Trump that he was weighing selling the advanced jets to Turkey as well, telling CNN that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is “not exactly a model ally of the United States.”
Israel has already purchased 50 F-35 jets, in two procurement rounds that occurred in 2016 and in 2017, according to the Israeli Defense Ministry. However, local media reports indicate that two of the 50 have yet to arrive, meaning that just 48 are on the ground – the same number of planes that the State Department has approved for Saudi Arabia’s potential purchase.
Israel would have many more F-35s than Saudi Arabia for the time being, because its Defense Ministry announced in 2024 that it would be procuring 25 more of the planes, slated to begin arriving in 2028. Earlier this year, the Defense Ministry revealed that it would be procuring yet another squadron of the jets, although the quantity remained unclear.
Congressional approval is not assured; wariness of the Saudi regime, stemming in part from the state-sanctioned 2018 murder of a U.S.-based journalist in Turkey, crosses party lines.
The U.S. Arms Export Control Act requires the executive branch of the government to notify Congress regarding major defense equipment sales to most countries. Congress can then deem a country ineligible to participate in a sale through a joint resolution. The president can then veto the resolution, which Congress would need a two-thirds supermajority to override.
Additionally, U.S. law requires the president to ensure that Israel maintains “a qualitative military edge over military threats” when considering arms sales to other Middle Eastern countries. Israel, per the law, must be able “to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat” from both other nations and “non-state actors.”
“The proposed sale of this equipment and support will not alter the military balance in the region,” the State Department said on Thursday. It called Saudi Arabia “a force for political stability and economic progress in the Gulf region,” adding that the sale would help “deter current and future threats by strengthening its homeland defense.”
The department maintained that not only would the sale improve Saudi Arabia’s defense capabilities, but it would also boost “interoperability” with both U.S. forces and other players from NATO and the region.
As for the potential deal’s logistics, Saudi Arabia has requested 48 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter Jets, as well as 49 Pratt & Whitney engines, according to the State Department.
The kingdom is also seeking to acquire other non-major defense equipment, such as cryptographic devices, precision navigation, secure communications, simple key loaders and support for electronic warfare databases, maintenance and personnel training.
Producing and delivering these planes can take many years.
Meanwhile, just a day before Trump’s announcement, The New York Times surfaced intelligence concerns that China could acquire F-35 technology by spying on Saudi Arabia or through its partnerships with the kingdom.
U.S. House Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democrat from Illinois, warned in a statement on X that “Beijing has spent decades stealing American intellectual property” and that this deal could “help them do it.”
“Our own intelligence community is warning that it could put the crown jewels of American military technology within reach of the Chinese Communist Party,” Krishnamoorthi added.
The Biden administration reportedly ended a past F-35 deal with the United Arab Emirates — secured by the first Trump administration — due to similar concerns about the country’s connections to China, as well as to Russia.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Proposed U.S. $24.3 billion sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia advances appeared first on The Forward.
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After outcry, Texas lieutenant governor says schools should teach Holocaust books ‘Night,’ ‘Anne Frank’
(JTA) — The lieutenant governor of Texas says his recent call for the state’s public schools to remove “over 2,000 titles” of “dirty, filthy and vulgar books” was not meant to include books about the Holocaust.
Dan Patrick’s statement, provided exclusively to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday, comes after a month of confusion following a press conference in which he and a conservative Christian activist threatened schools with potential loss of state funding if they did not comply with his directive to purge their libraries.
“I believe Texas students must learn about the Holocaust, and that includes reading books such as ‘Night’ by Elie Wiesel, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ and other books about the Holocaust,” Patrick told JTA, singling out two books on the removal list he had promoted – one of which, “Night,” that he previously explicitly called for removal from middle schools.
Patrick added that his initiative was “focused on age-inappropriate, sexually explicit books in public school libraries across Texas.” At his earlier press conference, he had directed viewers to an online list compiled by an activist group that features several books about the Holocaust and Jewish identity.
Patrick’s threats have teeth. In Texas, lieutenant governors are more powerful than in many other states, playing central roles in shaping the budget and determining the legislative agenda.
Patrick also appeared to walk back some of the harsher proclamations from his Aug. 19 press conference, at which the Republican had stated, “We’re coming for the books.”
“As the law states, local communities have the right to make their own decisions about their public school libraries,” he told JTA Friday.
The lieutenant governor, who is up for reelection this fall, appeared at the conference with Bonnie Wallace, the head of the activist group Recover America, and told viewers to “go to RecoverAmerica.com.” That group has circulated a list of more than 2,100 “Harmful Books in Libraries.” Its list, which it describes as “books with harmful, sexually explicit, and vulgar content,” includes more than a dozen titles of particular import to Jewish readers.
Recover America’s flagged books include both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” a comic-book adaptation of Frank’s diary and Bernard Malamud’s novel of a blood libel “The Fixer” — all books that have been removed from school districts in Texas and other states in the past amid broader conservative-led library culture wars. In some cases those books were restored to the districts following public outcry, but spurred deeper dialogue about the state of Holocaust education and antisemitism awareness in public schools.
Patrick’s latest push would go much further than a handful of districts, affecting the more than 5.5 million students in public schools across the state.
One book of particular contention on Recover America’s list was “Night,” Elie Wiesel’s bestselling memoir of surviving Auschwitz and Buchenwald, which has been taught in schools for decades. After a Houston Chronicle story noted the book’s inclusion on the Recover America “harmful” list, Patrick initially doubled down on “Night,” saying that it was not appropriate for middle schools owing to its “violence.”
“If ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, were made into a movie, it would likely be rated R,” Patrick wrote on the social network X on Aug. 26. “‘Night,’ which includes depictions of graphic violence and the machine-gunning of babies, should not be available to sixth graders in middle-school libraries. High school is more age-appropriate.”
His tweet appeared to contradict the state’s own K-12 required reading list, passed this summer, which mandates that “Night” be taught in the eighth grade beginning in 2030.
Now, in response to questions from JTA, the lieutenant governor said he would defer to the Texas State Board of Education on the appropriate grade to teach “Night.”
“The State Board of Education decides the appropriate grade level for books and will determine whether ‘Night,’ by Elie Wiesel, is at the appropriate grade level,” Patrick told JTA in his statement.
He continued to insist that books in schools should be held to “FCC standards,” referring to the Federal Communications Commission, an agency that governs broadcasting content and does not regulate publishing.
The head of the Texas Holocaust, Genocide and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a governor-appointed panel which advised the state on the inclusion of “Night” and other Holocaust texts on its required reading list, did not return a JTA request for comment.
In a statement, the Texas Educational Authority, which drafted the required-reading list, told JTA, “When Texas students learn about the Holocaust, they will be exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust. That is why the SBOE placed the book in 8th Grade to ensure age appropriateness for students.”
At the Emmys this week, when “The Librarians,” a documentary about librarians facing book removal threats, won an award, retired Texas librarian Carolyn Foote joined the producers on the stage and held up a copy of “Night” in protest.
“I felt like it was very symbolic to bring ‘Night,’” Foote, a subject of the film and a co-founder of the librarian activist group FReadom Fighters, told JTA. “Having read it, I just know the importance of not forgetting our past. And that’s part of Elie Wiesel’s whole legacy, is remembrance, and so it just felt very important for me to carry that book, coming from Texas.” Another librarian onstage for the win held up “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation.”
Elisha Wiesel, Elie’s son and chair of the Elie Wiesel Foundation, told JTA that “Texas deserves credit for recognizing that Holocaust education belongs in the eighth-grade curriculum.” Yet, the younger Wiesel suggested, Patrick’s concerns about the book’s violence were misplaced.
“‘Night’ contains violence because the Holocaust was violent; its purpose is not to shock young people, but to help them understand where hatred and indifference can lead,” he wrote in an email. “With context and guidance, students should not be shielded from this history. They should be equipped to confront it.”
Despite having directed viewers to Recover America’s book list during his press conference, Patrick’s new statement to JTA said, “I do not have a book list.” He pointed instead to a law passed in the state legislature in 2025 regulating school books that he said districts were required to follow.
Yet some districts in the state have removed every book on Recover America’s list from their own libraries out of fear of losing funding, Foote told JTA. While the list nominally contains a ratings system, many of the books do not have a rating.
Besides “Night,” “Maus,” “Anne Frank’s Diary” and “The Fixer,” other books about Judaism and the Holocaust on Recover America’s list of “Harmful Books” include:
- “Annexed,” a young-adult novel about Peter van Pels, who hid in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank
- “The Berlin Boxing Club,” a young-adult historical novel based on German boxer Max Schmeling, who helped young Jews during Hitler’s rise to power
- “Black, White and Jewish,” a memoir by Rebecca Walker, the mixed-race Jewish daughter of author Alice Walker
- “Caste: The Origins of our Discontents,” a nonfiction book analyzing the “caste systems” of Nazi Germany. “Caste” had been included on an earlier, Wallace-spearheaded list of books for removal from a Texas public library in a case that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear in 2025, allowing the removals to proceed.
- “Kasher in the Rye,” a memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher
- “Pride: the story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag,” a children’s picture-book biography of the pioneering Jewish LGBTQ legislator
- “Sophie’s Choice,” the bestselling Holocaust novel for adults
- “The Violin Maker’s Daughter,” a historical novel about a Jewish family of musicians during the Holocaust
- “White Bird,” a young-reader graphic novel about a Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied France
In response to JTA sharing a list of the above books, Patrick’s statement mentioned only “Night” and Anne Frank by name. The Recover America list is largely made up of romance and fantasy novels, many with an LGBTQ element, while also including classics such as “The Glass Menagerie” and “Cat’s Cradle” and some picture books for children.
Recover America did not immediately return a JTA request for comment Friday on Patrick’s new statement. Wallace, the group’s leader who has also appeared on Patrick’s podcast, previously told the Houston Chronicle that she had “thought long and hard” about including “Night” on her list.
She ultimately did so, she said, because “an eighth-grade student is 13 years old. Do they need to read about soldiers massacring, throwing up babies, and killing them with machine guns?”
She added, “It’s not to say this doesn’t happen in life. And the Holocaust was maybe the worst tragedy in the history of the world.”
For Cameron Samuels, a Jewish alum of Texas public schools and founder of the activist group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, such efforts do not help Jewish students.
“Non-Jewish people are deciding for us what’s best, and making this public policy,” Samuels said. “We can’t readily access these books and stories. And that makes students feel alone. It also means that our classroom peers are not learning authentic Jewish narratives.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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