Jewish Values Are American Values

As America marks its 250th birthday, the country is asking some necessary questions: Who built this nation? What ideals are worth celebrating? And what does it mean to be truly American?

Part of the answer is with the Jewish people, who have been there since the very beginning. Jews have been part of the American story since the nation’s infancy: helping to finance the Revolution, defending religious liberty, building its economy, advancing its science, and strengthening its democracy. The story of the American Jew is not separate from the story of America. It is woven into it.

That’s why I closed my speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention with a line I believe more strongly today than ever: Jewish values are American values, and American values are Jewish values. I did not say it to flatter the audience. I said it because history proves it.

I am a proud Orthodox Jew, a first-generation American, and the lead plaintiff in a civil-rights lawsuit against Harvard. The university settled with me, but not before I saw firsthand what institutional silence on antisemitism looks like. So when I hear that standing with Israel is a foreign entanglement, or even a betrayal of American interests, I know the claim is not merely wrong. It is backward, and the whole of American history says so.

When the Continental Army was broke, and the cause was nearly lost, a Polish-born Jewish immigrant named Haym Salomon brokered the funds that kept George Washington’s war effort alive. He was not a bystander to the American founding; he helped pay for it.

A year after the Constitution was ratified, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new American government gives to bigotry, “no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” That was not a throwaway courtesy. It was a promise, from the father of the country to a small Jewish congregation, that in America they would be citizens and not guests. Jews took that promise seriously.

Look at what came of it: Jewish Americans are roughly 2% of the U.S. population, yet they have earned a wildly disproportionate share of this nation’s Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, chemistry, and economics. They helped build industries, split the atom, cure diseases, launch companies, and make the American dream a reality. A people Washington welcomed as equals repaid the country a thousandfold. That is the American promise working exactly as designed.

Israel is that same promise projected outward. It is the Middle East’s only enduring democracy and a major non-NATO ally of the United States, a partner that shares our commitment to the rule of law, free markets, and innovation. We do not stand with Israel out of charity or because there’s a nefarious conspiracy afoot. We stand with them because it is the one country in a hostile region that holds the values we hold, and because a strong Israel keeps Americans safer and American principles respected abroad. Reinforcing that alliance is not a gift to a foreign government; it is an investment in the kind of world America wants to live in.

That is not an abstraction. Israel stands on the front line of a war the free world would otherwise be forced to fight closer to home, absorbing the aggression of Iran and the terror network it arms and funds, from Hamas to Hezbollah to the Houthis. For more than four decades, the same regime that chants “Death to America” has counted on Americans to look the other way. Israel does not have that option, and neither, in truth, do we. Every rocket Israel intercepts and every plot it dismantles is a danger that never reaches an American city. A partner that meets our enemies before they meet us does not drain American strength; it multiplies it.

The Anti-Defamation League counted 9,354 antisemitic incidents in 2024, the most in its history, and for the first time, a majority were tied to Israel or Zionism. The movement that brands support for Israel as un-American is the same one tearing at the actual foundations of America: free inquiry, equal citizenship, the simple idea that a Jewish student can walk to class without being told his loyalties are suspect. They have it backward: it’s patriots who are the ones defending the alliance, not the ones torching it.

I know what that costs, because I have paid it. I wrote to Harvard’s antisemitism task force more than 40 times and never received a reply. I testified before Congress about what I had witnessed. I have lost most of my friends. I did none of it because it was easy or popular, but because the country that gave my family refuge is worth defending, and the alliance that carries its values into the world is worth defending too.

We will not apologize for loving this country, and we will not pretend that standing with the world’s only Jewish state is anything other than deeply, proudly American. The synagogue in Newport still stands, and the synagogue of the American Revolution in the heart of Philadelphia attracts thousands of visitors a year. Washington’s letter still means what it said. American Jews helped build this nation into the freest and most prosperous on earth because of our undivided commitment to the values that made America worth loving in the first place.

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