America at 250: Why the Jewish Story Is Central to the American Experiment

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.