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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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New York City Officials Condemn Formation of Anti-Israel ‘Global Oppression’ Group in Mamdani Admin
Candidate Zohran Mamdani speaks during a Democratic New York City mayoral primary debate, June 4, 2025, in New York, US. Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Pool via REUTERS
A growing number of New York City officials are speaking out against the new “Global Oppression and Public Health Working Group” formed in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, arguing that the coterie foments antisemitism and increases hatred against the city’s Jewish community.
A cohort of staffers within the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene reportedly formed the group and declared its purpose is to explore how supposed “global oppression” operates and affects health equity and the wellbeing of certain communities in the city. In its initial meeting, which lasted one hour, a presenter explicitly cited the conflict in Gaza as “ongoing genocide” and framed it along with other forms of alleged oppression as relevant to health outcomes, the New York Post reported.
“We really developed in response to the ongoing genocide in Palestine,” one presented said, according to video acquired by the Post. “And the working group aims to address the growing interests among the health department staff to learn about current and ongoing global oppression in its many forms and how it influences the advancement of health equity.”
Critics, including City Council leaders, say the working group crossed a line by focusing on international politics and critiques of a foreign government instead of core public health responsibilities like managing diseases. They argue this represents a misuse of taxpayer-funded time and resources.
Joann Ariola, a member of City Council, lambasted the group’s presentation as a distraction from the city’s actual health issues. She also accused the staffers of injecting “antisemitic activism” into city agencies.
“New York City already has an overwhelming plethora of health-care issues on its own. There is no need to begin a discussion on the problems facing other countries when there are so many issues to be tackled here at home,” she said in a statement.
“What this is, to be clear, is thinly veiled antisemitic activism that is attempting to normalize itself within a city agency,” she continued. “If Mayor Mamdani truly wants to create a New York for all New Yorkers, then he will join the growing chorus of lawmakers in condemning this group, because health care is not the arena for cultural or political bias to be tolerated.”
Lynn Schulman, a council member representing Queens, said she was “deeply troubled” by the group and urged the staffers to refocus their efforts on the critical health issues impacting the city’s residents rather than foreign affairs.
“I’m deeply troubled that New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) employees launched a so-called ‘working group’ focused on foreign political issues — during work hours and using city resources — while New Yorkers face serious and urgent public health challenges at home,” she said in a statement.
“This incident is especially troubling given the alarming rise in antisemitism we are seeing in New York City, including multiple antisemitic incidents reported in recent weeks,” she continued. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens division and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
Figures from the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released last week showed anti-Jewish hate crimes in the city skyrocketed by 182 percent in January during Mamdani’s first month in office compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani assumed office amid an alarming surge in antisemitic hate crimes across New York City over the last two years, following the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to data issued by the NYPD. A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin called for an investigation into the health workers’ group.
“Our health-care officials should be fighting infectious diseases and addressing skyrocketing health-care costs instead of spending public time debating geopolitics on city time,” said Menin, who represents Manhattan.
“A thorough investigation into the use of taxpayer resources is necessary to protect the public trust and address the unacceptable rise in antisemitism across New York City,” she added. “Hosting a meeting that promotes inflammatory accusations while ignoring antisemitism entirely only deepens and alienates Jewish employees and residents.”
The outrage over the group has gone beyond city council to former officials and prominent associations.
Mark Botnick, an aide for former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, suggested that the group’s political bias could endanger the city’s residents.
“This is shocking. If these NYC Health Department staffers truly believe Israel is committing genocide, will they now boycott the Israeli pharmaceutical companies that make lifesaving drugs New Yorkers depend on?” he said. “Or is this just performative politics that has no place in a taxpayer-funded public health agency?”
Yael Halaas, president of the American Jewish Medical Association, also condemned the group’s presentation.
“This is a meeting using New York City Department of Health resources that promote libel against the Jewish people,” she said.
Moshe Spern, president of United Jewish Teachers, claimed that the presentation is part of a broader pattern of city officials abusing their powers to spread anti-Israel propaganda throughout critical agencies.
“Jewish city workers are struggling and honestly all agencies are turning a blind eye,” he said. “That is why we are all collaborating together. They cannot and will not divide the Jewish community anymore. We cannot allow this bias in NYC to continue.”
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, is an avid supporter of boycotting all Israeli-tied entities who has been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric. He has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; refused to recognize the country’s right to exist as a Jewish state; and refused to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been associated with calls for violence against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
Leading members of the Jewish community in New York have expressed alarm about Mamdani’s election, fearing what may come in a city already experiencing a surge in antisemitic hate crimes.
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University of Nebraska Says BDS Measure Passed by Student Government Isn’t School Policy
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) participating in a “Liberated Zone” encampment at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in November 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has implored the public not to regard a student government resolution endorsing the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as an official statement of policy, citing its irrelevance to the institution’s decision-making process.
“While the University of Nebraska respects student governance and our students’ right to voice their perspectives, the members of the NU Board of Regents do not have plans to act on the divestiture resolution passed during Wednesday’s [Associated Students of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln] meeting,” board chairman Paul Kenney said in a statement. “Our Board of Regents retains final authority of university policy … UNL remains committed to fostering a safe and respectful environment for students, faculty, staff, and community members.”
As reported by The Algemeiner last week, UNL’s student government agreed to a vote on the measure, an initiative pushed by the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) organization. The resolution passed on Wednesday by a wide margin after being doggedly argued against by Jewish students who were subjected to unfounded allegations about links to Israel.
Launched in 2005, the BDS campaign opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
The student government, facing public scrutiny, ultimately amended the resolution to remove any mention of Israel and rename it the “Divest for Humanity Act.” The measure demanded divestment from armaments manufacturers to block “weapons complicit in the genocide and atrocities worldwide.”
SJP exalted its passing as a victory for its mission to foster a climate in which pro-Israel support in the US is untenable.
UNL’s SJP chapter has praised Hamas terrorists as “our martyrs,” promoted atrocity propaganda which misrepresented Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas, accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian Christians,” and distributed falsehoods denying Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel. Since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the group has denounced UNL’s alleged ties to Israel, which includes a partnership in agricultural research, as investments in “death” even as it accuses the institution of Islamophobia.
The national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
At the time, the tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
Antisemitism on college campuses is pervasive, Jewish students reported in a recent survey conducted by the StopAntisemitism advocacy group.
Fifty-eight percent of respondents reported having “been a victim of antisemitism on campus” while 88 percent who brought the matter to campus officials said they were dissatisfied with the handling of the investigation. Sixty-five percent said they felt “unwelcome as a Jew in certain spaces” at some point and 61 percent said diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives do little in the way of reducing hatred.
“The 2025 findings prove that antisemitism on campus is systemic, not episodic. It is embedded in the culture, policies, and power structures of higher education,” the group said. “Jewish students who report harassment are routinely dismissed, ignored, or retraumatized. Administrators hide behind ‘process,’ either because they too are afraid or, worse, because they are complicit. Faculty validate and amplify extremist rhetoric, some even teaching it in class. And DEI offices, the very departments tasked with protecting minority students, often serve as engines of anti-Jewish hostility.”
Elite colleges are often the most hostile environments, the group said in a report which assigned mediocre and failing grades to over a dozen elite American colleges, citing the institutions’ failing to mount a meaningful response to the campus antisemitism crisis.
Of all the Ivy League universities assessed by StopAntisemitism, only three — Cornell University (C), Dartmouth College (B), and Princeton University (D) — merited higher than an “F.” StopAntisemitism, which is led by executive director Liora Rez, said other schools in the conference, such as Harvard University and Yale University, continue to offer Jewish students a hostile environment, citing as evidence feedback it has received from Jewish students who attend them.
“At Harvard, Jewish students report high levels of self-censorship and antisemitism, with federal authorities finding the university showed ‘deliberate indifference.’ Despite new initiatives, the campus climate remains tense and accountability uncertain,” the report said. “At Yale, Jewish students faced harassment, exclusion, and blocked access, prompting a federal investigation. Despite policy changes, the campus remains hostile and unsafe for Jewish students.”
Other elite schools such as the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wesleyan University didn’t perform well either. Ds and Fs were given to the lot. Meanwhile, in the Washington, DC metropolitan region, a destination for students aspiring to future roles in government, American University and Georgetown University earned Ds.
“Even since the recent Gaza ceasefire agreement, antisemitism remains loud, bold, and unchecked, revealing that none of this is about Israel but instead is about Jew-hared, plain and simple,” the report said. “Coordinated protests, ideological harassment, and institutional apathy continue to endanger Jewish students. Families must confront the facts: Are you prepared to send tuition dollars to a school that allows your children to be threatened, targeted, and blamed simply for being Jewish?”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism
The National Council of Jewish Women has named Jody Rabhan, its longtime policy director, to lead the organization as it grapples with how to balance progressive advocacy with support for Israel.
The 133-year-old group has helped rally Jews in favor of reproductive rights, especially after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade four years ago, but drifted closer to more conservative Jewish establishment organizations amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Some of the drive behind that shift appeared to come from Sheila Katz, before she announced she was stepping down as CEO in the fall. “We need those who claim to be our friends to passionately and unequivocally condemn antisemitism,” Katz posted shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack. “Silence is not neutrality; it’s complicity.”
The organization joined with a coalition of Jewish groups that took an especially hard line on criticism of Israel, including the Conference of Presidents and the Brandeis Center, during a spat with former President Joe Biden’s Education Department.
“Oct. 7 really changed everything, and that trajectory for NCJW was very real,” Rabhan said in an interview with the Forward. “And in some ways that made a lot of sense for us.”
Rabhan referenced instances of sexual assault against women on Oct. 7, and against Israeli hostages in Gaza, and said that NCJW was well-positioned to address antisemitism on the left because it participated in many progressive coalitions. “It’s work that we are committed to continuing,” she added, noting that countering antisemitism and hate was a new addition to its current strategic plan.
Israel has “certainly always been part of our portfolio and that’s only going to grow,” said Laura Monn Ginsburg, the president of NCJW’s board of directors.
But Rabhan, who first joined NCJW over 25 years ago, also emphasized the importance of staying “in community” with non-Jewish organizations on the left. “Particularly in this moment, where we’re in an administration that is really testing the levers of our democracy, we need one another more than ever,” she said, referencing President Donald Trump.
Katz, who now works for the Jewish Federations of North America, praised Rabhan in a text message as a “powerful and deeply trusted choice” to lead the organization, and said she would continue “strengthening both our communal voice and our broader civil rights impact.”
NCJW has undergone several significant changes in recent years. Nancy Kaufman helped shift its focus from community service to advocacy during her time as CEO in the 2010s, including relocating its headquarters from New York to Washington, D.C.
Katz was hired shortly thereafter as a rising star in the Jewish world. She came from Hillel International, where she served as vice president for student engagement and participated in a New York Times investigation into sexual harassment allegations against financier and philanthropist Michael Steinhardt.
During her tenure, Katz helped mobilize Jews following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, including raising hundreds of thousands of dollars to help fund abortions and providing educational materials and other resources for synagogues and Jewish organizations that wanted to get involved in promoting reproductive rights.
More than 2,000 clergy signed onto its “Rabbis for Repro” campaign, while synagogues across the country hosted their own “Repro Shabbat.” Yet NCJW has since had to navigate deep divisions in the reproductive rights world over Israel following Oct. 7 that have included allegations of antisemitism at major abortion advocacy nonprofits.
NCJW has not historically lobbied on behalf of Israel, even as it has long worked on gender equality issues there. Nevertheless, it has occasionally found itself targeted by progressive activists including the local D.C. chapter of the Sunrise Movement, which briefly sought to boycott the organization over its stance on Israel.
“Sometimes you have to change partners in certain moments — and we’re not afraid to do that when necessary,” said Ginsburg, the board president. “But overall we want to be in partnership and we want to find a way to make that work.”
The post NCJW names new leader as group steps up work on Israel, antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.