It feels like an awkward time for Jews to celebrate anything, including a national birthday, when antisemitism is at record levels and with the recent signing of an MOU with the theocratic tyrants of Tehran.
But we don’t choose birthdays. They choose us. And on July Fourth, Jews will be taking a time-out from our challenging reality to celebrate America’s 250th birthday.
The truth is, whether it’s about the Jews or America, an ugly lens is what animates much of our society these days. We’re accused of being 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, runaway debt – the list goes on.
This ugly lens has sucked up the national oxygen. Indeed, if you were hiding in a hole for the past 10 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 and politicized 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 timeless Jewish value, and there’s still place in America for a healthy patriotism. So, for our country’s 250th birthday, The Journal is offering a special birthday present: an e-book titled “250 Reasons to Thank America,” which will be available online.
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 an additional section on why Jews should be especially grateful, which we feature in this week’s cover story.
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 Declaration of Independence — ideals such as “all men are created equal” and 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 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 we go through the milestones in our e-book, we 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 1831 with 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, of course, 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 these days to trash America as an imperialist, colonialist, oppressive, irredeemable ogre.
Count me out of that trend.
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.
But, whether we’re Jewish or not, let’s remember that we’re also free to celebrate our gratitude.
Happy birthday to a nation of stubborn dreamers.
