As the United States nears its 250th birthday, a once-settled confidence has given way to uneasy questions. What does Jewish belonging mean when the promise of American tolerance feels fragile again?
It was the last night of Chanukah, back at Bondi Beach. Thousands of Sydneysiders, along with Jewish community representatives and politicians—some scorned, some cheered—had gathered. They’d come to remember those felled martyrs who had lain so still on that Bondi sand, just a few days before, just a few feet away. Onlookers standing behind metal security barriers wore transparent ponchos to shield them from the rain, sporadic and lightly falling. As the late summertime sun dipped and disappeared, cellphone screens and cheap electronic candles cast a faint light on earnest, shell-shocked faces.
David Campell, a popular television breakfast show presenter and the son of Aussie rock legend Jimmy Barnes, led the crowd in a heartbreaking rendition of “Waltzing Matilda.” The parents of Matilda Britvan, the youngest victim on that terrible day, stood near the stage, faces buried into each other, swaying. As the candles of the menorah were lit, the band struck up “Maoz Tzur.” Then Campbell, alongside several black-hatted Chabad rabbis, launched into another song I instantly recognized from my childhood.
Growing up in nineties Melbourne, “I Am Australian” enjoyed all of the prestige of, and more popularity than, the actual national anthem. A catchy folk ballad filled with references to the nation’s physical and cultural iconography—Aborigines, dusty-red soil, convicts, farmers, you get the picture—it presents a sweeping, sunny view of Australian history. Its chorus is easy to sing along:
We are one
But we are many
And from all the lands on earth we come
We’ll share a dream
And sing with one voice
I am, you are, we are Australian
I don’t recall ever hearing it at a menorah lighting, but the same could be said of “Waltzing Matilda.” This was not a normal menorah lighting. And “I Am Australian” worked its magic. Voices from the crowd joined in, buoyed by the song’s infectious optimism, maybe feeling hopeful for the first time that dark week.
But as I took in the scene over Facebook video clips, expatriated thousands of miles away in the United States, I couldn’t shake off the pathos coming through the screen. “I Am Australian” is a wonderfully inclusive song, but its valence shifts with the identity of the singer. From some, it comes across as a generous gesture of solidarity. For others in that crowd, I suspect it served therapeutic ends, as a reassuring affirmation of their country’s essential goodness. But from the targets of the deadliest hate crime in Australian history, it struck me as a plea for inclusion—or perhaps for acceptance. “I Am Australian” works as a claim to identity, and when made explicit, such claims always ring with insecurity. You only need your identity affirmed when it is in question.
“We are also a part of this country,” the song insists. “We should not have to cower behind armed guards, to retreat indoors, to deny our heritage, or to conceal outward expressions of religious observance in order to participate in public life. The country and its leaders cannot ignore or tolerate the threats to our survival. We belong here too.”
This claim is undeniably true and eminently justified, but the tragedy is that it has to be made at all. We have become accustomed to hearing such anxieties about the place of Jews in France or Belgium or Russia. The Jewish Question, after all, has deep roots in the old country. But their sudden emergence in Australia and the United States has thrown once-comfortable Jewish communities off balance.
American Jews, certainly, enjoy a more secure footing in their national terrain, having long occupied an integral part of American culture, society, and politics. Jews in the US don’t just sing along to “G-d Bless America”—they (or, to be more specific, Irving Berlin) wrote the music and the words. And yet, even here, the notion of a seamless American-Jewish fusion has come under assault. From left and right we are accused of being too Jewish, or not American enough, and sometimes both.
To their surprise, on the eve of their country’s 250th anniversary, Jews in the United States find themselves wondering again: What is our place in this country? Wasn’t America supposed to be different?
New World, New Home
“America is no different!” So went the rallying cry of the Chabad movement back in the 1940s. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, declared those words after arriving in the United States in the middle of the Holocaust. It was his response to the prevailing mood in the goldene medinah, or as some called it, the treyfene medinah—the non-kosher country.
In midcentury America, the forces of assimilation were in full swing. Shabbat observance was an afterthought, institutions like the mikvah were an embarrassment, and intermarriage was quickly becoming normalized. Apocryphal stories abound of the Jew who casts his tallit and tefillin overboard at first sight of Lady Liberty. It must have taken a special kind of nudnik to shlep his siddur across the Atlantic only to toss it as soon as he arrived, but our people do like to make a point.
It was these Jews, who assumed there was no need for tefillin in the United States, who thought that there would never be an American-made pair of tefillin, whom Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, also known as the Frierdiker Rebbe, was addressing. This place is not as far away as it seems, he insisted. This too can become home to a flourishing Judaism, to proud Jews, and to prolific Torah scholars.
But those same words of the Frierdiker Rebbe—America is no different—when read with a different intonation, can take on a darker meaning. If there truly is no discontinuity between America and the old world—if it really is no different—does that also mean it was impossible to make a fresh start here? Had the legacy of intolerance and exclusion that Jews had always known in Europe traveled with them on the ship? Was it just a matter of time before antisemitism surfaced in the new world?
Strangers Again
It is one of the grim absurdities of antisemitism that it so often contradicts itself: In the early twentieth century, Jews were demonized as both Bolsheviks and bourgeois capitalists; the Soviets managed to simultaneously smear us as rootless cosmopolitans and ethno-state fascists; in Poland they told us to go back to Palestine, and today they tell us to leave Palestine for Poland. More recently, the far right decries Jewish schemes to replace white westerners by means of mass migration, while fantasists on the hard left share ghost stories about Israelis training border security agents to deport the very same migrants.
In a similar vein, we can distill the classic challenges to American Jewish identity into two opposing elements. For those on the far right who celebrate the white nationalist ideology of “blood and soil,” American identity is a narrowly defined thing. Rather than a creed or a set of propositions, this nation is historically rooted—like most other nation-states in history—in an ethnic core. These are the people who stepped off the Mayflower, settled the continent, founded the original thirteen colonies, and then comprised the overwhelming majority of the population at the founding of the republic: white Protestants of Anglo-Saxon descent. In a generous mood, these right-wingers might also allow for a broader group of Northern Europeans, as well as Catholics, and the descendants of colonial-era slaves. But anyone arriving after the Civil War is just a johnny-come-lately, a migrant mooching off the hard work of the first settlers, someone benefiting from the American project but not truly a part of it. Jews—not to mention non-Europeans—get squeezed out of the frame.
On the other side of the political spectrum, although not quite as far from the center, we find the opposite line of attack. American identity is conceived in far broader terms. To be American is to profess the highest ideals of freedom, tolerance, inclusivity, and progress. It follows as a matter of course that the immigrant can become more American than the natural-born citizen: Whereas native-born Americans, with their lazy jingoism and narrow-minded bigotries, are there only by accident of birth, immigrants earn their place by an act of choice. To be properly American, then, Jews would have to forgo the backwards cultural mores and religious eccentricities that set them apart from their neighbors. Precisely which aspects of Jewish particularism are placed under pressure varies, but the bottom line doesn’t move much: These people have to transcend their parochial way and give up the obsession with preserving a distinct sense of Jewish peoplehood—in America, and certainly in the Land of Israel.
In this latter view, Jews are guilty of clinging to a particularistic identity and lifestyle at the expense of a more enlightened universalism. By contrast, in the former view, the sin isn’t particularism per se, but possessing the wrong kind of particularism. Either way, American identity is drawn along clear ethnic or ideological lines, and we’re on the wrong side.
Patriots and Pioneers
Refuting the far-right view is a more straightforward matter. As historian Adam Jortner explains in A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom, the notion that the United States had a “Christian founding” is something of an anachronism, propagated decades after the revolution in order to reinterpret the events of 1776. Of course the Founding Fathers and patriot soldiers who fought the British were predominately religious Protestants. However, this view, as Jortner writes, “makes it seems as if what mattered in the revolution was religious conviction; what made a patriot was Protestant faith. It was not so.”
At the time of the Revolution, there were some two thousand Jews living in America, with synagogues in the port cities of Philadelphia, Savannah, Charleston, Newport, and New York. These Jews were eager participants in American civic society and, although exact numbers are hard to come by, Jortner believes that the majority supported the patriotic American cause. More than helping to finance General Washington’s campaign, as in the true-to-stereotype example of Haym Solomon, they “served in the patriot army in direct proportion [emphasis added] to their numbers in the general population.”
Solomon Bush of Philadelphia managed to rise to the rank of colonel, which was all the more remarkable because Jews were completely shut out of the officer class in every European army at that time. In 1774, Mordecai Sheftal became the chairman of Georgia’s Parochial Committee, a patriot organization that eventually turned into the de facto local government. The equivalent appointment would have been impossible under British rule—when the British took back Savannah in 1778, Governor James Wright banned any Jews who had fled the city from returning. Importantly, Jewish soldiers who fought in the revolutionary war did so as Jews: In 1776, the New York militia let one Hart Jacobs go off duty on Friday nights so that he could observe Shabbat.
None of this is to say that the Jews of the Revolutionary period were modern-day Maccabees or dyed-in-the-wool patriots, that they displayed some special martial virtue, or even that they played a substantial role in the founding of the United States. They were a mixed bag, like Jews, like all people, always are. Archeologists have yet to dig up any dreidels at Washington’s winter camp at Valley Forge, and—a few half-baked rumors about Alexander Hamilton aside—there were no Jewish Founding Fathers.
The point, however, is this: Jewish people were public and active participants in the founding of the country. Their inclusion was a considered and deliberate choice. This entire argument cuts off the very branch it is sitting on: It makes no sense to use the history of the American founding as grounds for excluding a group of people if they were included in the American founding.
Assimilate or Synthesize?
The liberal challenge to American Jewish identity is where we run into trouble—because it is one that many American Jews agree with.
Here, we find a gentler view of things. National identity is allowed to expand and adapt to new realities—and to accept newcomers into the fold. Unsurprisingly, for the same reason, this view has been exceedingly attractive to Jews over the past century. But it is also dangerous to American Jewishness for a simple reason: It’s true that the universalist attitude admits Jews into the American story—but just not qua Jews, or at least not as Jewy Jews.
Well before Eastern Europeans started throwing their tefillin overboard, the sense that Judaism had to be changed in order to survive in the United States first found institutional expression in 1825. That year marked the first schism in American Judaism, when a group of young, mostly American-born members of the Charleston Jewish community decided to break off from the local congregation and found the Reformed Society of Israelites for Promoting the True Principles of Judaism According to its Purity and Spirit. By their lights, sanding down its rougher edges was meant to make Judaism “purer” and more authentic, but also sleeker and more modern. In the account of Jonathan Sarna, American Jewish history’s preeminent scholar, this new society arose as a result of declining interest in “our holy religion,” increased Christian missionary activity, and the recent success of Unitarianism. If American Jews were going to survive, they had to adapt, by switching to English prayers, shortening synagogue services, and discontinuing practices that “partake strongly of bigotry.”
The Charleston reformers, of course, were only acting on an intuition that long predated them and remains with us today. Nor is this intuition confined to the Unitarian-adjacent wing of American Judaism. It can also be found, in a different form, in the fight to resist Americanization in order to preserve the old ways.
The tendency was embodied in such individuals as Rabbi Abraham Rice of 1840s Baltimore who, as Sarna tells us in his American Judaism, “took pride in his lack of accommodation to America” or, on the institutional level, by the Agudath HaRabbanim at the turn of the twentieth century, in their efforts to ban the use of the English language in the weekly Shabbat sermon. Later on, especially in the postwar period, the desire to retreat from mainstream American life would be solidified in the creation of enclave communities in upstate New York and Lakewood, New Jersey.
What these opposing poles of the American Jewish spectrum share—to varying degrees, it must be emphasized—is the sense of tension between Jewishness and Americanness. They both assume that the two dispositions and identities cannot easily coexist; one of them has to give, and the only question is how much—and which.
At the same time, a popular stream of American Jewish thought and culture has been devoted to the notion that there is no tension at all: There was a time, writes Sarna in his American Judaism, when “all major movements and ideologies within American Judaism insisted that Americanism and Judaism reinforced each other.” Efforts at synthesizing the two sometimes straddled the line between the earnest and the absurd. Take, for instance, one nineteenth-century rabbi’s assertion that Native Americans were descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes, or the baby-naming trend that produced a George Washington Cohen and an Abraham Lincoln Danziger, among others.
The problem with “synthesis” is that it can play fast and loose with the two categories it seeks to reconcile. Moreover, Jack Wertheimer, a noted student of contemporary Judaism, has noted that this approach raises questions of its own: “Have American Jews, as a group, paid a price for blurring the lines between the cultural assumptions of their own religious and civilizational heritage and the values of their American environment?” And of course, should the synthesis prove too successful, another question arises: “If Judaism’s norms are so perfectly convergent with America’s, why bother to remain Jewish?” More than that, and citing historian Beth Wenger’s treatment of the subject, Wertheimer writes, “the very fervency with which Jews proclaim their belongingness may hint at an underlying uncertainty or insecurity.”
It would seem that we’re back where we started, singing along to “We Are Australia.” The lyrics have changed, but the melody has stayed the same. Is there another way out? What might it look like to simultaneously be both a proud American and an uncompromising, confident Jew?
Covenant and Constitution
Let’s return, for a moment, back to the beginning—to the arrival of the Frierdiker Rebbe on American shores and his announcement about the US being “no different.”
There is an obvious irony in that statement: If this country was really no different, why not just stay back in Europe? The fact that the United States has emerged as such a welcoming home for Jewish people is not something to be taken for granted: Only in America, you could almost say, could you ignore the fact that you are in America. Although, it must be said, there are many countries that have made a genuine about-face in their attitudes toward Jews. Real changes have taken place.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the successor to the Frierdiker Rebbe, was himself alive to this apparent contradiction. “He came to America . . . because America was different, and the danger which threatened him in Europe did not exist there,” he noted in a 1983 talk on the anniversary of the Frierdiker Rebbe’s passing. “If so, how could he describe the purpose of his coming in this way?”
In response the Rebbe proposed a two-layered view of the emigration story. From an external point of view, the United States was inarguably different—safer, more prosperous, and more tolerant. On an essential, internal level, however, nothing had changed. The Frierdiker Rebbe had devoted his life to “spreading Judaism in every place, through every means, and thereby heightening the awareness of the oneness of the Jewish people,” the Rebbe said. “Wherever he lived, he worked for these goals.”
The same inward-outward split could be used as a model for maintaining traditional Jewish life in the United States writ large. It is possible to fully adopt and adapt to a new home externally without ever losing one’s inner essence. Identity, after all, always operates on multiple levels: To suggest that being Jewish and being American is a tension in need of resolution—to suggest that they pose competing or “dual” loyalties—is like saying you can’t be a Knicks fan and a member of your local chess club at the same time. Or like saying a married man cannot be a good citizen, because he needs to be loyal to both his wife and to his country.
In much the same way, in a country that enshrines the free exercise of religion in its founding documents, a Jew can maintain her commitments to G-d, family, and community without compromising her loyalty to country. How could it be otherwise? What value is there in an attachment to a nation that isn’t grounded by any prior sense of virtue? It was that kind of amoral patriotism, hollowed of any deeper substance, that Samuel Johnson famously derided as the “last refuge of the scoundrel.” And it was precisely that kind of tyranny—in which the state lays claim to the inner, spiritual, religious lives of its subjects—that the American founders were trying to avoid.
After 250 years, the question of whether this country will fully accept its Jewish members feels newly unsettled. Yet the ground we stand on is more solid than it seems. Even before 1776, Jews devoted themselves to the broader American cause while remaining rooted in their own particularistic identity. In the process, the nation itself was enlarged: intellectually, culturally, and morally.
It is a Chasidic axiom that Jews have a moral responsibility to elevate their spiritual environment and participate in the work of making the world “a dwelling place” for the Divine. And it is precisely the texture of Jewish life—its traditions, moral commitments, intellectual rigor, and historical consciousness—that enriches the societies in which Jews live and contributes to their resilience and vitality. That is, when a Jew can feel at home in a country, it’s good for the country—and good for the world.
This article appears in the Spring-Summer 2026 issue of Lubavitch International, to subscribe to the magazine, click here.
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