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The gift Jews gave to America on its 100th birthday in 1876
On the eve of July 4, 1876, a New York broadside marked America’s centennial with something extraordinary: the first Hebrew poem to probe the essence of America. The poem, which appeared with an English translation, creates a fascinating encounter between a new nation brought forth upon a new land and an ancient nation without a land of its own.
It also reflects some of the most fundamental dilemmas troubling American Jewry “in those days, at this time.”
This now largely forgotten poem, “Minchat Yehudah” (Judah’s Offering), was written in Hebrew by Moses Aaron Schreiber and translated by Rabbi Dr. Frederick de Sola Mendes. Both served as clergy in a leading New York synagogue: Sha’arey Tefila, located at the time on West 44th St.
The poem is notable in Hebrew literature not only for its pioneering subject matter — the United States — but at least as remarkably for its tone. It radiates exuberance; its mood is festive and upbeat, and its joy and optimism are virtually unique in Diasporic Hebrew poetry. Nor is it common to find in that poetry the harmony and confidence of verses like:
Here they came
Christians and Jews
as friends and brothers
In her shadow they find peace,
In her bounty, joys increase.
And indeed, from the centennial and until quite recently, America and the Jews were a kind of match made in heaven, an encounter that generated an explosively successful historical rendezvous.
The poem’s title, “Judah’s Offering” is a quotation from Malachi 3:4, which refers to a new offering that is reminiscent of “the days of old.” Accordingly, in the poem it is made to refer to the singular gift that American Jews could give their adopted homeland on its anniversary: a new song in the language of the ancient Hebrew Bible. As the author writes in the eighth and final stanza:
Alas! but we,
Posterity
Of Judah’s host,
No land can boast!
Our tongue alone
Is all we own!
Accept from Hebrews
This ode in Hebrew,
Our heartfelt prayer,
“God bless thee, e’er!”
The Hebrew language, presented here as a “portable homeland,” was something that Jews could offer to the American national heritage. The Puritans had appropriated the Bible as an American asset, using it as a parable (an “ideal typology” in their terminology). They understood their migration to the new world as an exodus from the bondage of England — their Egypt — to America, their Promised Land. But if the founders had already made the biblical heritage their own, the language of the Bible was something else. It belonged exclusively to the Jews and could serve as the special “Offering” of biblical Judah’s offsprings.
Though only a minuscule number of American Jews at the time — before the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe — knew any Hebrew, the language, as scholar Alan Mintz has suggested, was understood as the root-source of Jewish national culture, one might say the cultural DNA of the Jewish people. Since the U.S. was a “composite nationality” (that’s Frederick Douglass) or “nation of nations” (that’s Walt Whitman), Hebrew as a symbol of the Jewish nation was a building block of America.
This symbolism is brought out strikingly in the graphic arrangement of the broadside. Its shape is reminiscent of the popular schematic display of the biblical tablets, with the Hebrew and English version placed on either of the joined tablets. From early on, the tablets served as a prominent symbol of American Judaism. Since the poem was about uniting the Jews with America and Hebrew with English, this merging was displayed visually, echoing the biblical heritage common to Christians and Jews.
But the harmony of the Hebrew and English as melded tablets is solely graphic and visual. A striking feature of the broadside is the gulf between the themes and messages of the Hebrew poem and its English rendering. The English translation, in many places, simply subverts the Hebrew original.
To understand why this was, it is first necessary to become better acquainted with the author and the translator. The author, Moses Aaron Schreiber (1841–1912), was a Kovno, Lithuania-born maskil (Hebrew Enlightener) who had studied to become a Hebrew teacher. Shaaray Tefila, the synagogue in which he served as “chazan” upon his arrival in the U.S, was founded in 1839 as a hub for the city’s Anglo-Jewish elite.
The English translation was crafted by Sha’aray Tefila’s acting minister, Rabbi Dr. Frederick de Sola Mendes (1850–1927), a scion of illustrious Sephardic rabbinic dynasties. Mendes was born in the new world’s Jamaica but was raised and educated in elite higher-learning institutions in England and Germany. As Sha’aray Tefila’s religious leader he would gradually transform it from a traditionalist stronghold into a Reform congregation. These progressive shifts were likely what prompted Schreiber to leave Sha’aray Tefila for more traditionalist pulpits in New York and Baltimore.
The author and the translator were thus separated by a vast gulf in background, upbringing and ideology — making it hardly surprising that the Hebrew centennial hymn for American independence and its English translation diverged quite sharply.
A striking example appears in the elaborate ode’s 8th and final stanza. In it, Schreiber lauds President Ulysses S. Grant. In Mendes’ translation, Grant is nowhere to be found.
Here, it seems, we are seeing the influence of ideology, sociology and politics. The New York Jewish elite to which Mendes belonged tended to favor the Democrats, who were more conservative than Lincoln’s anti-slavery and more “progressive” Republican Party.
Many leaders of the Jewish community maintained extensive commercial ties with the South. Their Southern coreligionists were almost universally Democrats. In New York City wards where most Jews resided, Lincoln received only about a third of the vote in the fateful election of 1860. Similarly in Philadelphia, the focus of the centennial celebrations, most of the leaders of its veteran synagogue Mikveh Israel were, according to its prominent hazan Sabato Morais, “Copperheads.”
This is a chapter of history that American Jews tend to gloss over, for reasons that have become acutely understandable in recent times. They prefer to dwell instead on the prominent role Jews played in the mid-20th-century Civil Rights movement, after the Holocaust.
But there was a Jewish minority in the Civil War era North — likely made up of ordinary working-class Jews and the few Eastern European immigrants who had arrived by then — that gravitated toward Lincoln and the Republicans, fighting for the abolition of slavery. After all, Eastern European Jews had experienced prejudice and brutal persecution firsthand. Schreiber, a native of Lithuania, was seemingly among them; at the very least, his glowing view of President Grant aligns with this faction.
Grant was the commander Lincoln chose to decisively end the Civil War, deploying a strategy that historians describe as “hard war” — if not quite total war — directed at the economic and civilian heart of the South. During his presidency, the South was subjected to military rule. To those with economic ties or lingering sympathies for the South, Grant was hardly a figure to be celebrated. Moreover, Grant’s administration was mired in corruption and faced severe public criticism, even if Grant himself was not considered personally corrupt.
Even through a specifically Jewish lens, Grant evoked ambivalent feelings. As a general on the Western front, he had issued General Order No. 11, expelling Jews from the territories under his military command. It was perhaps the most flagrant state-sanctioned antisemitic measure in American history, though it was swiftly revoked by the scrupulous Lincoln. In later stages of the war, and especially during his presidency, Grant’s conduct toward Jews was not only irreproachable but arguably more supportive than that of any of his predecessors.
It is easy, therefore, to see how Grant and his administration could become a point of contention between literary collaborators like Schreiber and Mendes, even though the English translation strongly condemns slavery and praises Lincoln.
The focus of Schreiber’s Hebrew version was on Philadelphia, its Independence Hall, and the Liberty Bell hanging over it, on Leviticus with its call to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land,” inscribed on the bell, and on the Jubilee, when Liberty was to be proclaimed.
Mendes’ focus was different — not on Philadelphia, but on the neighboring Fairmount Park, home of the centennial exhibition representing 37 countries. Liberty’s arm and torch were on display there, and Moses Ezekiel’s statue representing freedom of religion was supposed to be displayed. When it comes to terminology, Mendes’ translation celebrated the more individual “freedom,” rather than the more public “liberty.”
Perhaps, however, this Centennial hymn was precisely the place for such profound discrepancies between Hebrew text and English translation. As noted, Minchat Yehuda — the offering brought by the Jews to America’s centennial — was the Hebrew language. In an English rendering, this offering inevitably dissipates and vanishes, as do liberty and Leviticus, Ulysses Grant and Patrick Henry, Liberty Hall and Liberty Bell, Philadelphia and the Jubilee.
The English language demanded a new and different offering — a forward-looking one, oriented to the new America of 1876 and to a new world’s fair. The Hebrew language pointed to 1776. It was an offering that reflected, in the words of Malachi, “the days of old, and former years,” before the Jews discovered modern America.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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He organized World Cup viewings in Gaza. Then an Israeli airstrike killed him
Soccer is a universal language. Billions of people around the world watch the game, which means that soccer fans everywhere can appreciate someone like Mohammed al-Wahidi, who enabled others to participate in that shared global experience.
Al-Wahidi was a Palestinian aid worker who organized public screenings of the FIFA World Cup in Gaza. He’s emerged from anonymity for the worst reason: An Israeli airstrike killed him last week, while he was on his way to watch a screening of the knockout stage match between Argentina and Egypt.
With the world’s attention focused on the World Cup in North America, al-Wahidi’s killing briefly brought Gaza back into the global frame.
For the people of Gaza who attended the screenings organized by al-Wahidi, World Cup matches offer a brief respite from the daily struggle to survive, the loss of loved ones, and the absence of any political horizon of hope. Cheering for Egypt against Argentina could not end Gazans’ suffering, but it provided a much-needed moment of escape. Until it didn’t.
It’s common to hear that “politics has no place in sports” — although frequently the governments and sporting institutions that make this claim, while recognizing soccer’s symbolic power, are really arguing that sports should not be used to advance political goals they oppose.
Al-Wahidi’s death made headlines because that refrain simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s both legitimate and necessary to politicize al-Wahidi’s death even further.
In reporting on al-Wahidi’s death, mainstream media outlets — including the BBC, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times — situated it within its broader context. They reminded readers that he was only one of more than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since a ceasefire was announced 10 months ago. His death became an opportunity to highlight that, for Palestinians in Gaza, the so-called ceasefire has amounted to little more than a reduction in the scale of daily killing and ongoing dispossession.
At the same time, some Israeli officials have openly declared their intention to promote what they call the “voluntary migration” of Palestinians from Gaza. Violence against Palestinians — including the killing of al-Wahidi — is a central mechanism for creating the conditions under which such migration becomes possible.
The politics of soccer
The chronology of state violence and the chronology of soccer usually unfold independently, but at times they intersect. When they do, that intersection reveals soccer’s symbolic power, which manifests itself in diverse — and sometimes contradictory — ways.
In 2024, an Israeli airstrike killed Hani al-Masdar, an assistant coach of the Palestinian men’s Olympic national football team, earning an outpouring of international mourning. Both al-Wahidi and al-Masdar were humanized because of their publicly visible connection to soccer. Unlike most Palestinian victims, they had their names and faces shared broadly in Western media, and their deaths briefly resonated far beyond Gaza.
But they’re among more than 900 Palestinian athletes and coaches killed by Israel since October, 2023. The fact that most of us have only heard two of their names, at most, is a tragedy.
Israel has long turned to soccer as a public relations instrument, a way to divert international attention from the long-term process of Palestinian dispossession.
As one senior Israeli minister said after inviting the Argentine team, with star Lionel Messi, to play in Israel in 2018: “When we fight over moving embassies to Jerusalem, there is no question. One of the most popular players in the world, who has billions of followers—surely, it is the right thing to see him playing in Jerusalem. What better public relations tool do we have?” (The match was eventually cancelled, after pushback from pro-Palestinian parties.)
FIFA has occasionally lent credibility to these efforts. Despite the fact that official United Nations bodies have described Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide, and that Israeli and international human rights organizations have documented systematic abuses against Palestinians, FIFA has declined to apply the same standard to Israel as it has to other countries, like Russia, which it suspended in 2022 following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In doing so, it has contributed to the normalization of violence against Palestinians.
In an awkward attempt to appease critics, FIFA even proposed that an under-15 match between Israel and Palestine serve as the opening fixture of a new global youth tournament in the United States this September — a proposal that many Palestinians regarded as adding insult to injury.
Palestinian activists, by contrast, have made calls for soccer-related sanctions against Israel an important component of efforts to raise international awareness of the Palestinian struggle for justice. One of their most notable successes came in 2018, when they persuaded Argentina to cancel that planned friendly match against Israel in Jerusalem. Although repeated attempts to suspend Israel from international soccer have so far failed, such efforts are likely to continue.
The possibility of sporting sanctions
Israel has faced few meaningful consequences for these policies, and without sustained international pressure, like in South Africa decades ago. they are unlikely to change. One possible form of such pressure is the imposition of sporting sanctions — a prospect that, for understandable reasons, Israeli officials have worked hard to prevent.
But as long as it doesn’t seriously consider those sanctions, the international sporting community sends the message that there is no meaningful price for the continuous and systematic violation of Palestinian human rights.
Al-Wahidi dedicated himself to bringing the world’s game to Gaza. The symbolic significance of his death should now help bring the world’s attention to Gaza — and to the question of whether Israel should continue to enjoy the privileges of international sport while denying Palestinians their most basic rights.
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