This is an excerpt from the e-book “250 Reasons to Thank America.”
We are two Jews in love with America. We’re also friends. We’re also writers. We bond over many things, one of them being an aversion to whining.
We can always find reasons to whine about anything. There are a million reasons, for example, to whine about America, just as there are a million reasons to whine about France, Spain, Israel or Greece.
Given that America is celebrating its 250th birthday this year, we thought we’d offer you a whine-free zone zone by launching the e-book, “250 Reasons to Thank America.” We picked reasons that move us. You’ll have your own. The point is not to have an exhaustive list but to take a time-out to thank our country.
As a little taste of the book, and because the word Jewish is in our name, here are the 50 reasons why Jews are particularly grateful for America.
That is our birthday present, 250 years in the making:
1. 1787: No Religious Test: In Article VI, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution, the Framers insisted “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” This repudiates the European and Middle Eastern laws barring Jews from government service.
2. 1790: Washington’s Welcome Mat: President George Washington shows that America’s welcoming spirit is not just formal and legal. Replying to Moses Seixas, warden of the Sephardic Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, Washington proclaims that America’s government gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” He wants America’s Jews to “continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
3. 1791: Separating Church and State: With the Bill of Rights ratified, the First Amendment vows: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
4. 1840: Refuting the Damascus Blood Libel: Secretary of State John Forsyth makes history when he instructs America’s minister in Turkey to protect persecuted Jews. America shows its passionate commitment to defending Jews abroad, purely on a human rights basis.
5. 1847: Mr. Blue Jeans: A young Jewish peddler arrives safely from Germany fleeing discrimination, alongside tens of thousands of others, thanks to the 1847 Passenger Act mandating more sanitary conditions on boats arriving in America. The American Jewish population will soar from 15,000 in 1840 to 300,000 by 1880. This young man, like many others, will go West, but few will experience the extraordinary success of Levi Strauss after U.S Patent No. 139,121 for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” makes him and his blue jeans household names.
6. 1852: Jewish Hospitals: The Jews’ Hospital in New York — today Mount Sinai Hospital — symbolized many American Jews’ determination to fight employment discrimination simply by founding their own organizations, and outdoing the original. From 1850 to 1955, Jewish communities will establish 113 acute-care hospitals in 24 American cities, that cumulatively have healed millions of Americans from coast to coast.
7. 1862: Jews Can Be Chaplains Too: When Abraham Lincoln signs the Chaplaincy Equalization Act, saying military chaplains no longer have to be of a “Christian denomination,” Rabbi Jacob Frankel becomes America’s first Jewish military chaplain – and another barrier collapses.
8. 1863: “Father Abraham Undoes Jew-Hatred”: When “Father Abraham” hears of General U.S. Grant’s General Order No. 11, banning Jews from “The Department of the Tennessee,” Lincoln cancels it immediately, later explaining: “to proscribe a class is, to say the least, to rob the sustainable of the rights which belong to all.” Grant genuinely regrets his sin, even becoming the first sitting president to attend the opening ceremony of a synagogue – Adas Israel – and actually sitting through the entire three-hour service.
9. 1883: Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor: Seeking donations to finance the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, Jewish poet Emma Lazarus writes “The New Colossus,” urging, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free …” Those words will be etched on the pedestal in 1903. Meanwhile, from 1880 through 1924, approximately 24 million immigrants will be welcomed by her words – more than 10% of them Jews from parts of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, as well as Eastern Europe.
10. 1887: The Welcoming Front Porch: In Brownsville Brooklyn and dozens of other lower middle-class neighborhoods, immigrants from different countries and of different religions buy or rent houses with front porches. The street-oriented life – sharing stories, trading recipes, looking out for all the neighborhood kids – creates all-American bonds. The contact minimizes many frictions that often grow from segregated communities and ghettoes, making Jews feel welcome neighbor to neighbor.
11. 1889: “Saluting the Flag at the Mott Street Industrial School”: This photo of mostly young Jewish immigrant students, taken by the Progressive reformer Jacob Riis, captures the magic of the American public schools. There, all were welcome, regardless of religion, all received the same desk, regardless of status, and all received an impressive education.
12. 1893: Redemption on Henry Street: Appalled by the poverty and sanitary conditions on the Lower East Side, Jewish nurse Lillian Wald launches a public nursing initiative, the Henry Street Settlement. It grows into a laboratory for social innovation and human dignity, empowering young Jewish immigrants through sports, theater, quality medical care, and civil rights activism. And in 1903, 20,000 children swarm Seward Park on the Lower East Side where, thanks to Wald and others, New York City opens this first permanent, municipally built playground.
13. 1908: The Brandeis Brief: In Mueller v. Oregon, the Supreme Court accepts the pathbreaking approach of Louis Brandeis. This Progressive lawyer submits two pages of legal citations and a hundred pages of scientific, medical and sociological data. This brief helps convince President Woodrow Wilson to nominate Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916. The Brandeis Brief opens the courts to accepting evidence beyond legal reasoning to help make America more just – especially in the 1954 landmark blow against school segregation, Brown v. Board of Education.
14. 1909: Look for the Union Label: In the Uprising of the 20,000, also known as the New York Shirtwaist Strike, a 23-year-old Ukrainian-Jewish immigrant named Clara Lemlich inspires the members of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union with a speech in Yiddish to strike for a 52-hour workweek and a 20% wage increase. As many as 80% of the strikes are Jewish women, mostly teens and young adults. The strike, while emphasizing Jewish and labor self-empowerment, is supported by the “Mink Brigade,” wealthy socialites like Alva Vanderbilt and Anne Morgan. Ultimately, it’s a milestone in advancing workers’ rights and women’s rights.
15. 1911: The American Passport Protects Every American: The United States nullifies its 1832 commercial treaty with Tsarist Russia when the Russian Empire dishonors the American passports of American citizens because they happen to be Jewish too. In America – unlike Russia and so many other countries – there is no forced national identity card and religion does not appear on passports or drivers’ licenses.
16. 1917: It’s Tax Deductible!: The War Revenue Act of 1917 makes individual charitable donations tax deductible, essential to the spread of Jewish philanthropy. Today, Americans donate nearly $600 billion to charity annually, with U.S. households averaging $1,394 in donations. Modern American Jews donate up to $9 billion annually – between 75 to 90% of the funds to non-Jewish causes – with 75% of Jewish households donating, averaging over $2,526 annually.
17. 1924: The Jews Invent Hollywood and Hollywood Reinvents America: Bypassing Wall Street insiders, the merger of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer productions into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM, helps Jewish outsiders led by Mayer – born Lazar Meir in Ukraine – create the great American dream machine. These self-made men improvise the star system, with Clark Gable, Joan Crawford and others reinventing themselves to help feed Americans entertaining and initially patriotic fairy tales on the big screen.
18. 1933: The Jew Deal: Although it was antisemites who mocked Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as “The Jew Deal,” as many as 20% of FDR’s top advisors were Jews – at a time when Jews barely constituted 3.5% of the American population. Leading Jewish New Dealers included Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Special Counsel to the President Samuel Rosenman and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. But FDR’s open-minded hiring spree emphasized the importance of expertise and idealism over breeding and contacts, transforming the federal bureaucracy and the broader landscape at a critical moment.
19. 1933: America’s Genius for Welcoming Welcomes Geniuses: Albert Einstein arrives in America, ultimately representing thousands of scientists and academics, who shift the world’s center of gravity from the Old World to the New World. Einstein’s refugee colleagues will win at least half-a-dozen Nobel Prizes, split the atom, create game theory, help develop computers, modernize radar, invent the MRI, explain how stars generate energy through fusion, teach how cells convert food into energy and cure polio. Along the way, they transform America’s universities from country clubs for aristocrats to centers of excellence, training tomorrow’s superstars.
20. 1934: Hank Greenberg Americanizes Baseball: Leading the Detroit Tigers down the stretch in the pennant race, on his way to hitting 139 RBIs, Hank Greenberg publicly consults a rabbi, deciding to play on Rosh Hashanah yet sit out Yom Kippur. Americans cheer him for being principled, and American Jews relish his respect for his tradition and the sheer physical power the 6′ 4” slugger projects. Greenberg helps transform the American Jews’ image while convincing many skeptical older American Jews that their sons’ obsession with this childish game was legitimate.
21. 1941: GI Jews and Joes: Within days of Pearl Harbor, Jews start enlisting – ultimately 550,000 men and women will serve, constituting about 4% of the American military, which ultimately mobilizes over 16 million Americans. An estimated 11,000 Jews never return home. Joining the war effort helps mainstream American Jews, as they become increasingly aware that they are fighting side-by-side with fellow Americans against totalitarianism and for their oppressed brethren in Europe and North Africa too.
22. 1942: “Send a Salami … to Your Boy in the Army”: The new slogan of Katz’s deli, initially founded in 1888, reflects co-owner Rose Tarowsky’s worry that her son Izzy, a bomber pilot in the South Pacific wasn’t eating well. Such patriotism helps the Jewish deli become an American institution, especially after it inspires a song-and-dance routine in the 1952 Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin movie, “At War with the Army.”
23. 1942: God Blesses America with a “White Christmas”: Irving Berlin, the songwriter who in 1918 wrote “God Bless America,” sees his Christmas song – sung by Bing Crosby – become the best-selling physical single ever. Americans’ openness to Jews’ writing their most sacred patriotic and spiritual hymns reflects an extraordinary acceptance and appreciation of the quality of product rather than the identity of its creators.
24. 1944: Roddie Edmonds Says “We’re All Americans”: Nazis running his prison camp order Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds to separate American Jewish POWs from their fellow Americans. Edmonds orders all 1,275 American prisoners to step up, telling the Nazis, at gunpoint, “We’re all Americans.” Edmonds went to his grave with this story. It only emerged when his granddaughter started researching his story for a college assignment.
25. 1944: The Nonsectarian GI Bill: The GI Bill’s generous benefits – with no religious tests – gave lower-class American Jewish veterans a remarkable boost, helping many enter the middle class by financing their educations and helping them buy homes in suburbia.
26. 1945: The 761st (All Black) Regiment Frees a Concentration Camp: At a time when blacks were still forced to serve in segregated units, the 761st regiment fought in the Battle of the Bulge, terrified racist Nazis whenever they took any captives, and helped liberate the Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria.
27. 1947: The Gentleman’s Agreement that No Bystanders Are Innocent: When “Gentleman’s Agreement,” starring Gregory Peck, wins three Academy Awards, Americans start to notice that being polite in the face of discrimination against Jews or anyone else, is not gentlemanly or ladylike – the terms at the time – but un-American.
28. 1948: The Displaced Persons Act: After Harry Truman signs the Displaced Person Act, America will welcome 140,000 Holocaust survivors over the next decade or so. Most are between the ages of 20 and 40, because few children or elderly Jews survived the Nazi horrors.
29. 1949: “The Goldbergs”: Continuing its 17-year radio run, from 1929 to 1946, “The Goldbergs” spends another seven years – until 1956 – entertaining Americans on their living room TVs. Molly Goldberg’s “Yoo-hoo Mrs. Kramer” helps accustom Americans to television during its Golden Age, and while humanizing and universalizing the American Jewish immigrant experience. Meanwhile, programs like “Your Show of Shows” – with its all-Jewish writers’ room starring Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon and Woody Allen – so mainstreamed a manic, sardonic Jewish sensibility, most Americans associated it with “television” or “comedy,” not realizing how deeply urban, immigrant, Eastern European, and Jewish it was.
30. 1954: Jennie Grossinger and the Borscht Belt Grace the Cover of Time Magazine: As the first hotelier and immigrant Jewish entrepreneur featured on Time’s cover, Jennie Grossinger represents the many comedians who performed in the Borscht Belt, including Mel Brooks, Eddie Cantor and Joan Rivers, and the millions of vacationers who visited more than 500 hotels or more than 50,000 bungalows over half a century of hospitality, American Jewish style.
31. 1957: “I Like to Be in America”: With the words of Stephen Sondheim, the music of Leonard Bernstein, the choreography of Jerome Robbins, the script of Arthur Laurents and the producing skills of Harold Prince, “West Side Story” reflects how Jews were transforming Broadway, while telling a broader story of forbidden love and immigrant angst, focused on the clashing Puerto Rican and white gangs.
32. 1960: “No More Pencils …” on the Jewish High Holy Days: Respecting the fact that Jews, mostly women, comprise nearly half its teaching staff, New York City’s Board of Education closes all its schools on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
33. 1961: “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s Real Jewish Rye”: One of the most memorable advertising campaigns in history mostly uses subway posters to have an Irish policeman, a Native American man and a young black boy mainstream the eating of rye bread.
34. 1965: Needs-Blind Admission Breaks the Ivy League Quotas: Appointed as dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, 29-year-old Russell Inslee “Inky” Clark, Jr. implements a merit-based, needs-blind admission system, recruiting Jews, blacks, public school graduates and, in 1969, women. Clark’s legacy proves that fighting against discrimination of one, helps defeat discrimination against all.
35. 1966: Frank Sinatra in “Cast a Giant Shadow”: Frank Sinatra leads an all-star cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Yul Brenner and Angie Dickinson, all of whom wanted to show their support for the new Jewish state by starring in this movie about the American Jewish war veteran who volunteered in the 1948 war, Mickey Marcus. While representing a generation of American celebrities who supported Israel, Sinatra stood out. He smuggled $1 million in cash to an Irish ship captain in March, 1948 to buy bootlegged arms for the Jews, raised funds for the State after its establishment, defied the Arab boycott with a 1962 Israel concert tour, and proudly visited Hebrew University in 1978 for the dedication of The Frank Sinatra International Student Center on its Mount Scopus Campus.
36. 1967: The Most Important Missing “The” in The History of The Middle East: After helping Israel win the Six Day War – and becoming increasingly supportive of Israel – the United States insists that U.N. Security Council 242 seeking a “just and lasting peace” endorse “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Dropping the word “the” means that Israel must not leave all the territories and can remain in the Old City of Jerusalem and elsewhere.
37. 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel sing “We Shall Overcome” in Hebrew: Celebrating Heschel’s 60th birthday, King comes to the Concord Resort, the heart of the Borscht Belt. King is moved when the members of the 1968 Rabbinical Assembly link arms and sing Anu Nitgaber, “We Shall Overcome.” King calls antisemitism “a betrayal of all that is highest and best in the Christian tradition.” Less than two weeks later, the 39-year-old King is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
38. 1973: Operation Nickel Grass Resupplies Israel During the Yom Kippur War: With Israel reeling from a combined Arab surprise attack, America’s Operation Nickel Grass delivers 22,325 tons of military tanks, artillery and ammunition, over 567 missions in 32 days by air. A seaborne resupply delivers another 33,210 tons. In return, Israel wins, then sends back to America captured Soviet hardware and invaluable intelligence. The militaries of the two countries become increasingly interdependent after that.
39. 1975: Moynihan’s Moment: America’s Fight Against Zionism as Racism. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal Democrat working for the Republican President Gerald Ford, leads a bipartisan, all-American fight against the U.N.’s declaration that Zionism Is Racism. Most Americans recognize the resolution as antisemitic, not “just” antizionist. And most applaud, when, as New York’s Senator, Moynihan works with two other Republican Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush over 16 years, to get the resolution repealed, which finally happens in 1991.
40. 1979: Tehrangeles: As many as 80,000 Persian Jews flee the totalitarian Iran regime following the Khomeini Revolution. Over half settled in Beverly Hills, Westwood, Santa Monica and other parts of Los Angeles.
41. 1984: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: The groundbreaking ceremony for this memorial and museum, on prime federal land just off the National Mall, epitomizes decades of American support in liberating the concentration camps, absorbing survivors, and making sure that Americans from coast-to-coast learned the essential lesson of “Never Again.”
42. 1986: Natan Sharansky Freed: Although Natan Sharansky is a Soviet prisoner who is freed from the Gulag and flies to his new home in Israel, the American government and the American people helped save his life and free him. Sharansky’s long-delayed but ultimately short walk across Berlin’s Glienicke Bridge to freedom represented America’s deep commitment to saving Soviet Jews and America’s constant pressure on the Evil Empire, which imploded in 1991.
43. 1991: A leading Republican, William F. Buckley, Jr., Denounces Republican Antisemites: The intellectual leader of the Conservative movement overcomes his own antisemitic upbringing to write a passionate denunciation of Pat Buchanan and others who use their foreign policy isolationism to mask their antisemitism. Buckley starts writing an essay but it grows into a book “In Search of Anti-Semitism.” It’s a sorely-needed model today that you fight antisemitism and all bigotry among your natural allies not your rivals.
44. 1993: The Oslo Peace Process: America has done much to defend Israel – and much to seek peace in the region – including Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords brokering an Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty in 1979. Still, Bill Clinton and the American government showed tremendous love for Israel, the Jewish people, and the region by devoting so many resources to the Oslo Peace Process, notwithstanding Yasser Arafat’s ultimate refusal to compromise.
45. 1993: “Not in Our Town”: When white supremacists throw a rock through the window of five-year-old Isaac Schnitzer, targeting his Hanukkah Menorah, 10,000 Americans in Billings, Montana, mobilize. They paste paper menorahs published in The Billings Gazette on their windows. This mass civic hug – reflecting the “happy ending” to most acts of antisemitism in American history – inspired the PBS documentary and mass movement against hate: “Not in Our Town.”
46. 1994: Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song.” You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy this charming, entrancing ditty. But Jews have a special appreciation for how this song, and so many other popular culture touches, made many American Jews feel not just tolerated, not just accepted, but fully American – and normal.
47. 1998: The Koshering of the Oreo Cookie: Nabisco frees Jews from the Hydrox ghetto, letting them enjoy the world’s most popular cookie world, replacing lard with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and spending millions to get an OU – Orthodox Union – kosher certification. While appealing to the $3 billion kosher food market, the move leaned into the great American health craze. Cornell University studies estimated that 80% of kosher food consumers in America are not Jewish, with 55% of buyers trusting the health and safety of kosher products and 38% living a vegan or vegetarian lifestyle.
48. 2018: America’s Embassy in Jerusalem: As President, Donald Trump fulfills a pledge made by Democrats and Republicans for decades to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move America’s embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The collapse of the “Palestine Veto,” because the threatened wave of Palestinian terror protesting the embassy move never occurred, strikes a blow against terrorism. It also paves the way to the 2020 Abraham Accords expanding Israel’s zone of peace to the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
49. 2023: President Joe Biden Leads America in Embracing Israel: Biden’s Oct. 18, 2023 visit, the first American presidential visit during wartime, along with the deployment of the USS Gerald R Ford and the massive resupply of Israel – culminating in a $14.3 billion aid package – reassures Israelis – and American Jews – after the horrors of the Hamas massacre. On Nov. 14, 2023, waving American and Israeli flags – unlike antizionists who burn both – over 290,000 Israel supporters fill Washington’s mall. Republicans and Democrats, Evangelicals and liberal Jews, pray, mourn and demand the release of the hostages together.
50. 2025: Bunker Busters: On June 22, 2025, seven U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bombers dropped 14 Bunker Busters – GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bombs, weighing 30,000 pounds each – over Iran’s fortified nuclear facilities. This necessary assault after decades of threats represents the seamless cooperation between the U.S. military and Israel, and decades of bipartisan support, even as Israel remains the DIY ally, usually preferring to Defend themselves and do it themselves.
