As America celebrates its semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of its independence, the country finds itself confronting a painful and dangerous paradox.
At the very moment when Americans are marking the birth of the Republic and the ideals that made it possible, antisemitism is once again surging across campuses, city streets, social media platforms, and parts of the political arena.
In May, the New York Police Department reported that antisemitic hate crimes in the city were up 71% compared with May 2025. Jews were the targets of 60% of all hate crimes, despite constituting roughly 10% of New York’s population.
Synagogues require armed guards. Jewish students are forced to hide their identity. The rise of the world’s oldest hatred is a security problem and a moral problem. But it is also something else: a failure of memory.
Antisemitism flourishes where history is forgotten, distorted, or weaponized. It thrives when young people are taught to view society through the narrow lens of oppression and grievance rather than gratitude, citizenship, and shared destiny. It gains ground when the story of the Jews is reduced to caricature or conspiracy, and when America’s founding principles are dismissed rather than understood.
Combating antisemitism therefore requires more than denunciations, investigations, and security grants. It also requires restoring historical truth.
This year’s celebration of American independence offers a rare opportunity to do precisely that.
Schools, museums, civic institutions, media outlets, and public officials are turning their attention to the Revolution, the Founders, the Constitution, and the meaning of American citizenship. The country will be invited to consider what America is and what it demands of its citizens.
That conversation must include the story of American Jews.
Not as an afterthought, a narrow ethnic footnote, or another exercise in identity politics. Rather, it should be told as part of the larger American story: the story of a people that found in the United States an unprecedented promise of religious liberty, embraced that promise with gratitude, and helped strengthen the Republic from its earliest days.
American Jews were not outsiders to the American experiment. They were participants in it from the beginning.
During the Revolutionary era, Jewish patriots such as Haym Salomon helped raise funds for the Continental Army and finance the struggle for independence. Mordecai Sheftall, the commissary-general for Patriot troops in Georgia, served in uniform, supported the American cause, and cast his lot with the new Republic.
Schools and museums should incorporate figures such as Salomon and Sheftall into the teaching of the Revolution. Public officials should highlight Jewish patriots in celebratory events. And the media should tell the broader story of how America’s founding promise of religious liberty made Jewish flourishing possible.
Jews make contributions to American society
In the generations that followed, American Jews contributed to national life in a variety of fields. From Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine and Albert Einstein’s transformative physics to the more than 500,000 American Jews who served in World War II, Jews consistently answered the call of citizenship.
Theirs is not a story of group grievance, but of civic contribution: how religious liberty, constitutional government, and free enterprise enabled a small minority to flourish while giving back immeasurably.
This does not mean ignoring the discrimination Jews faced in America. There were quotas, exclusions, prejudices, and social barriers. But those injustices must be placed within the broader and more remarkable reality: America’s founding principles gave Jews the tools to overcome them.
For too long, the public response to antisemitism has been reactive. A synagogue is attacked, a Jewish student is assaulted, a hateful slogan appears, and officials issue statements of condemnation. There are hearings, task forces, and promises of vigilance.
All of that has its place. But a society cannot merely punish antisemitism after it erupts. It must dry up the soil in which it grows.
That means teaching young Americans that Jews are not alien to the American story. It means showing them that American Jews helped defend the country, build its economy, advance its science, shape its jurisprudence, and enrich its culture. It means restoring the civic knowledge that liberty in America was designed to protect people of faith, not erase them.
George Washington understood this when he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport in 1790 that the United States gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” He also hoped that “the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land” would continue to enjoy the goodwill of their fellow citizens.
Those words were not a public relations gesture. They expressed one of the defining achievements of the American founding.
For the first time in history, Jews were offered not mere toleration but genuine citizenship. They did not have to shed their Jewishness in order to belong. They could be faithful Jews and loyal Americans, members of an ancient people and citizens of a new Republic.
The succes of American Jews is one of the great vindications of the American constitutional order. It demonstrates that a nation rooted in ordered liberty, limited government, religious freedom, and civic responsibility can integrate minorities without dissolving national identity. It shows that pluralism need not mean fragmentation, and that patriotism need not require uniformity.
That lesson matters especially now, when so many forces seek to divide Americans into competing tribes and teach the young to see inherited institutions only as instruments of oppression.
Antisemitism feeds on that fragmentation. It presents Jews as a hostile collective, a manipulative force, an enemy hidden within society. America’s 250th anniversary should therefore be used not only to celebrate the past, but to educate for the future.
Civic literacy is a defense mechanism for a free society. A generation that does not know its history, does not understand religious liberty, and does not know what Jews contributed to America will be vulnerable to those who portray them as strangers or enemies.
The fight against antisemitism must become a fight for memory, rooted not in slogans but in facts, not in ideological fashion but in constitutional principles, not in grievance but in gratitude and truth.
As America marks 250 years of independence, it has a chance to remind itself and the world of something profound: the American experiment made room for the Jew, and the Jew helped make America.
At a time of rising hatred, that is not merely a historical observation. It is a necessary act of American civic renewal. ■
The writer, a former deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation.