What Jews Can Celebrate About America, and What America Can Celebrate About Jews

Most of us understand what America gave the Jews. Batya Ungar-Sargon knows what the Jews gave America.

After almost two thousand years of exile, America became the place where Jews achieved genuine freedom. America not only offered unparalleled economic opportunity, but separated church and state, and prohibited religious tests for office. And while it has struggled to live up to its ideals, America enshrined in its founding the understanding from the Hebrew Bible that all men are created equal.

By the beginning of WWII, the homegrown antisemitism that was festering in some corners of America resulted in the failure to take in European Jews at a time when it could have prevented the Holocaust. Nonetheless, by the mid 20th century, the American neighborhoods, universities, professions, and institutions that had once excluded Jews opened their doors. And America became the safest and most prosperous country diaspora Jews had ever known.

In America, Jews have much to be grateful for. In “The Jews and the Left,” Ungar-Sargon explains that it wasn’t a one-way street.

Ostensibly, the book is about a political relationship. American Jews have always been among the Democratic Party’s most loyal supporters and most committed participants in progressive causes. They were disproportionately represented in movements for labor reform, civil rights, civil liberties, and legal and social justice. As Jewish religious observance declined, many increasingly expressed their Jewish identity through liberal politics. According to the Pew data Ungar-Sargon cites, nearly 60 percent of American Jews say that “working for justice and equality in society” is among the most important components of their Jewishness.

In answering the question of why the relationship between the Jews and the Left has begun to fracture, Ungar-Sargon illuminates why American Jews were so deeply invested in the American experiment in the first place. The usual explanation is that America gave Jews opportunities they had never enjoyed before. But for most of Jewish history, Jews could become prosperous. They could even become influential. What they hadn’t become was truly free.

Throughout history, kings and emperors protected Jews—until they didn’t. Rights depended on the disposition of rulers rather than on enduring principles. Toleration could be granted or withdrawn. In his 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport Rhode Island, however, George Washington wrote:

“It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”

America is exceptional because it grounded citizenship in principles rather than ancestry, religion, or tribe. Unlike in pre-war Europe, Jews could belong fully, even as equal citizens, without surrendering the identity that had made them outsiders elsewhere.

As Ungar-Sargon explains, in 1654, when twenty-three Jewish Dutch subjects arrived in New Amsterdam from Brazil, Governor Peter Stuyvesant wanted to expel them. But given that the Portuguese had just conquered Brazil, the Dutch West India Company, which owned the colony, took into account the “considerable loss sustained by this [Jewish] nation” and overruled him.

Stuyvesant imposed restrictions on New Amsterdam’s Jews, attempting to prevent them from becoming citizens. But a Jewish man named Asser Levy repeatedly sued. By insisting that he not be deprived of the rights of a burgher just because of his Jewishness, and winning those rights through the courts, he became a symbol of equal citizenship under law, earning the respect and admiration of his fellow citizens. As Ungar-Sargon writes: “It was Levy, a litigious Jew, who taught his fellow burghers not only what it meant to be a citizen, what it meant to have rights, but what it meant to hold them dear, to fight for them, to accept nothing less than the fullest respect from the authorities—for it was not the authorities who granted freedom but God.”

The story of Asser Levy that Ungar-Sargon tells provides one of the earliest hints that this new society would become something different from Europe. And not just for Jews.

The story of Asser Levy that Ungar-Sargon tells provides one of the earliest hints that this new society would become something different from Europe. And not just for Jews.

The book is about how the political left turned on the Jews. Something we’ve all seen since Oct. 7, 2023. But it is also about how American Jews helped build many of America’s institutions, and how those institutions have now abandoned the liberal values that made Jewish—and American—freedom possible in the first place.

Jews were once understood as deserving equal protection under laws that were created by appealing to universal principles. Today, Jews are increasingly viewed through a lens of identity, power, and oppression. The result is not merely political disagreement over Israel. It is a fundamentally altered conception of morality.

On the Fourth of July, American Jews have every reason to celebrate what America made possible. No other nation gave the Jewish people such an extraordinary combination of liberty, equality, and belonging. But the Jewish contribution to America is worth celebrating too. From Asser Levy’s insistence that rights belonged to citizens rather than rulers, to the generations of Jews who fought to extend to all Americans the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Jewish contribution was not simply economic or even cultural; it was civic. Jews both found freedom here and helped Americans understand what freedom requires.

Jews both found freedom here and helped Americans understand what freedom requires.

In the conception of individual rights that Jews embraced on the political Left, liberty meant more than the absence of persecution. It meant that rights no longer depended on belonging to the “right” religion, the “right” race, or the “right” tribe. For the first time in almost two thousand years, Jews not only found a refuge; they found a country in which they could remain fully Jewish and still be equal participants in creating the story of a young nation. And that’s what makes the Left’s betrayal that much more painful.

In 1751, to mark the 50th anniversary of Pennsylvania’s original charter, a bell was inscribed with a line from the Hebrew Bible. From the book of Leviticus, the words that for 275 years have been seared into the Liberty Bell read, “Proclaim liberty throughout the land for all its inhabitants.”

The story of the Jews and the Left, as Ungar-Sargon tells it, is a story of love and loss. The ending depends on whether that essential, and uniquely American, conception of liberty is defended or defeated.

The Jews and the Left by Batya Ungar-Sargon is available on Amazon.

A social psychologist with a clinical background, Pamela Paresky, Ph.D. serves as an Associate at Harvard University in the Psychology Department, Senior Advisor to the Open Therapy Institute, Advisor to the Mindful Education Lab at NYU, and Senior Fellow at the Network Contagion Research Institute. She writes the “Habits of a Free Mind” Substack and is on Twitter @PamelaParesky.