It feels like an awkward time for Jews to celebrate America’s birthday, when antisemitism is at record levels and we’re witnessing a bipartisan betrayal of Israel with the signing of an MOU with the genocidal tyrants of Tehran.
But we don’t choose birthdays. They choose us. And on July Fourth, we will be taking a time-out from our ugly reality to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
What shall we do?
The truth is, whether it’s about the Jews or America, an ugly lens is what seems to animate many Americans these days. We’re systemically racist, our democracy is dying, we’re cursed by income inequality, climate change, rampant crime, homelessness, social injustice, incompetent leadership, institutions we can’t trust, politics as war– the list goes on.
This ugly lens has sucked up all the oxygen. Indeed, if you were hiding in a hole for the past ten years and just came out, you’d think our country never did anything right and was about to implode. Even that great unifier—the American Dream—has been polluted beyond recognition. It’s gotten to the point where it’s embarrassing to look too patriotic or even display the American Flag on July Fourth.
But gratitude is a great Jewish value, so even though things have been especially lousy for Jews, we’ve created a very special birthday present: an e-book titled “250 Reasons to Say Thank You to America.” This special issue of the Journal will give you a taste of the book.
In partnership with Journal contributor and historian extraordinaire Gil Troy, we express our gratitude through five historical periods: 1776-1826: Laying the Foundations; 1827-1876: Making this New Republic Truly Democratic – and Free; 1877 to 1926: Giving Birth to modernity; 1927 to 1976: Inventing the First Mass Middle Class Society; and finally, the Information Age.
We even include a special section on why Jews should be especially grateful.
You’ll note that, unlike The New York Times, we haven’t revised our origin story to 1619, the year the first boat of slaves landed on our shores.
We’re sticking with 1776, the year the greatest experiment in nation-building began with the ideals enshrined in our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—ideals such as “all men are created equal” and are endowed with “inalienable rights,” including the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Few Americans understood these ideals better than Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who called on us to live up to the promise of our founding documents. As our first Black president, Barack Obama, once said: “What a glorious task we are given to continually try to improve this great nation of ours.” And as President Bill Clinton famously reminded us, “There’s nothing wrong with America that something right with America can’t fix.”
That, for me, is the defining trait of the American experiment—a built-in corrective mechanism that drives a restlessness for progress.
As you go through the milestones, you’ll see such progress unfold: “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery” in the Pennsylvania legislature in 1790; the First Amendment in 1791 that guaranteed freedom of speech and religion; the 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision that established the principle of judicial review; the 1826 Lyceum Movement, a nationwide network of public lecture halls to educate the electorate; William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator that galvanized abolitionists in 1831with its anti-slavery fury; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Harvard lecture in 1837 that is remembered as “the declaration of independence of American intellectual life”; and on and on.
Progress is never perfect or linear; it’s halting, it’s jagged, it’s frustrating. Even after 600,000 Americans died during the Civil War to keep the country from breaking apart and to end slavery, it took another 100 years to end segregation and formalize the rights of Blacks, women and gays. No matter how far we go, the road never ends.
Too many Americans, however, choose not to see that road. They’d rather see a volcano that is always erupting. It’s become almost trendy to trash America as an imperialist, colonialist, oppressive, irredeemable ogre.
Count me out of that trend.
Despite the hell Jews are going through, I’m still in the camp that sees America as a place where great things happen; where immigrants the world over dream of entering; where individual liberty and equality under the law give us a chance to build our own future; and where we’re free to, yes, spend our days railing against America’s faults.
The thing is, before we go back to our battles, we’re also free to take a time-out to say thank you.
Happy birthday, nation of stubborn dreams.
