America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing![1]
So kvetched the great American-born Jewish-Buddhist poet Allen Ginsburg. And so began one of the great litanies to and about America by one who wrestled with its conundrums and its contradictions, of a nation that takes itself so seriously and has no idea who it really is. In Ginsberg’s poem, he has a dialogue with America—he jests and jokes, he scolds and he cries, before he realizes: he’s talking to a mirror. The best lines in the poem are its author’s ultimate self-awareness:
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
“Unfulfilled promises are still promises—as long as they are aspirations for what we can be, and not lies about who we already are.”
That’s my favorite line, because it reminds us, with a comic sense of self-absurdity, that America is big and complex and fractured into a million hues. No one owns the right to a single American narrative. Who’s to say that the voice of a gay Beat Generation New York poet is any less representative of “authentic America”—as if there were such a thing—than, say, Huckleberry Finn? You are America, I am America, and our neighbor is America: no matter our place of birth, or Whom we worship, or whether we talk with an accent, or whom we love.
I know a lot of people are feeling apprehensive about the semiquincentennial. I was 6 years old at the bicentennial celebration, and my memories of that time are idyllic. I’m sure there were controversies at that time, when the shadow of Vietnam had barely receded. But it seems that the energy this time is much less, and I’m trying to figure out why. There is much to be skeptical about, of course. Just a few weeks back the President led a Christian mass prayer gathering on the National Mall, and the official 4th of July event will effectively be a MAGA political rally, and in general it's a time when American democracy feels so endangered and wobbly.
And there are many reasons, too, for Jews to be apprehensive. The surging antisemitism and Israel-hatred that we’re experiencing is making many of us wonder about our liberties and our future and what happened to the neighbors who used to have our backs. These are sure to put a damper on some people’s festivities.
We may stay away from the official celebrations—I certainly will. But we should also be considering the wondrous Jewish place in America. After all, there is much to celebrate. It’s arguable that no other single minority group has benefited from America’s civil liberties and freedoms as much as Jews have.
Personally, I love the American saga. Not just that mythological “American Dream”—but the story of America, with all its glaring paradoxes and contradictions and conundrums. I like the secret folk history of America, found in its songs and literature and entrepreneurial spirit. I love the America of Rebecca Gratz, Walt Whitman, Moby-Dick, Emma Lazarus, The Wizard of Oz, Woody Guthrie, Louis Brandeis, Robert Johnson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Henrietta Szold, Superman, Philip Roth, Rabbi Heschel, Jimi Hendrix, Harvey Milk, Sandy Koufax, George Lucas, and Bob Dylan—each of whom celebrated America in their own way. I’m drawn to the paradox of a place where you can leave a past behind and start anew—but also a place where you need not shed your identity or your unique heritage, because only out of many can we truly be one.
So here’s a question to consider in the week leading up to the 4th of July. Consider the grand sweep of the Jewish experience in America. What, for you, are the most pivotal moments in Jewish-American history?
There are so many, especially in the 20th and 21st centuries. Here are some I’m thinking of, just as prompts to get us thinking:
· The enormous wave of Eastern European Jews—nearly 2 million of them—who came to the country in a 25-year period at the end of the 1800s and beginning of the 1900s. (All 8 of my great-grandparents arrived in America in this wave.)
· The 1902 Kosher Meat Boycott, led by the Jewish women of New York: perhaps the first awakening that by banding together, Jews could effectively assert ourselves against entrenched and powerful established forces.
· The appointment in 1916 of Louis Brandeis as the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court.
· The legacy of the Jewish GIs fighting alongside their fellow citizens in World War II to liberate the world from Nazi fascism.
· President Truman, on May 14, 1948, recognizing the independence of the State of Israel, making America the first country to do so.
· Abraham Joshua Heschel, marching across the Pettus bridge in Selma arm-in-arm with Dr. King in 1965. I think of the Jewish role in the Black civil rights movement, as well as every other key social justice movement of the past century: women’s rights, labor, LGBTQ rights, the environmental movement, and so on. Jews have played an outsized leadership role in every one of them.
· “Freedom Sunday,” the December 6, 1987 march for Soviet Jewry, the climax of what has been called the most successful human rights campaign in history, on the very same spot where King’s “I Have a Dream” speech was delivered 24 years earlier.
That’s the tip of a large iceberg, and I’d be curious about your additions to that list. (Feel free to add them to the comments.) These were proud moments in American history, in Jewish history, and in American Jewish history. They are certainly a long way from the humble arrival of the first boat of 23 Sefardi refugees in New Amsterdam from Recife, Brazil, the first Jewish immigrants to arrive on these shores, fleeing the clutches of the Inquisition when the Portuguese showed up in South America.
From its inception, Jewish immigrants came to America with a push and pull. The push was fleeing the pogroms, ghettos, and undiluted centuries-old antisemitism of their neighbors. The pull was America’s freedoms to identify as a Jew openly, fully, and in each person’s own way—promises that had never been offered by any government in history except our own. There is much to celebrate.
But I’m worried, too. Because I’ve just given you a litany of personal highlights of American Jewish history, as a way of inviting you to consider your own list. But I wonder, for our children and grandchildren, what the key events of Jewish life in America will be. I fear that they won’t be moments of innovation, moral inspiration, and pride. I fear that for the next generation, the key events will be the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh. Or October 7. Or the campus protests of the past two years and the constant assault on Jewish identity. Or the libels and slanders perpetrated against Zionism.
Personally, I know that both of my children carry their Jewish-American identities well. But I often wonder if America will be the home for the generations after them. Jewish history is marked by loyalty and pride for the countries in which we have made our homes. But it is also characterized by metaphorically always having one bag packed and one eye on the door.
My deepest fear is that without diligence, America’s embrace of its Jews is in the process of imploding.
The founding principle of America is that word “freedom”—which is also a watchword in Jewish life. The foundational story of the Jewish people is forged in slavery in Egypt—and then becomes fulfilled with the movement to freedom. It’s an unfinished freedom, marked by a maturation process in the wilderness, with the goal of the Promised Land around every corner and always on the horizon.
But in Judaism, of course, freedom never meant “I’ll just do whatever I want.” We left slavery to Pharaoh in order to become partners with the living G-d in bringing the potential of Creation to fulfillment. With Torah as the guidebook and Mitzvot as the terms of the arrangement, freedom has always meant responsibility. Pirkei Avot purposefully misreads the Torah: When the Torah reads, חָר֖וּת עַל־הַלֻּחֹֽת , “The writing of G-d was charut, inscribed upon the Tablets” (Ex. 32:16), Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi says: אַל תִּקְרָא חָרוּת אֶלָּא חֵרוּת – “Don’t read charut/inscribed on the tablets, but cherut/freedom was on those tablets” (Pirkei Avot 6:2).
The commanding voice of Jewish history is never to take freedom for granted. It’s a delicate sapling that needs to be tended in order to continue to blossom. With freedom comes responsibility: responsibility to fulfill our own potential as Jews and simultaneously to protect the well-being of anyone who is vulnerable or hurting or marginalized. With freedom comes responsibility: What could be more Jewish than that?
Happy semiquincentennial America. You remain a land of unfulfilled promises—but so is Jewish history. I’m okay with that. Unfulfilled promises are still promises—as long as they are aspirations for what we can be, and not lies about who we already are. Here’s hoping that 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will prompt us to renew our Declaration of Interdependence, making this a home of dignity, safety, liberty, and justice for all.
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A version of this essay was delivered at Am HaYam—Cape Cod Havurah in Orleans, MA, in June 2026.
[1] “America,” Allen Ginsberg, in Howl and Other Poems, City Lights, 1956