America at 250: A Promise Worth Celebrating and Renewing

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we will mark this event in many ways: Some will celebrate our democratic legacy, some our veterans and service members, and some will revel in the aspects of our nation that make it so unique.   
 

But one of the greatest parts of this country deserves our special respect: America has strived to protect its religious minorities like few places in the world.   
 

For Jewish Americans, that promise has been especially meaningful. When the United States was born, Jews in much of the world lived under legal restrictions, faced social exclusion and endured targeted violence. But in the U.S., respect for religious diversity was encoded in the DNA of our foundational charter, the US Constitution: no religious tests for office, freedom of worship, and prevention of the establishment of a religion by the government. These principles helped create a civic home where Jews, Catholics, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and people of every faith, as well as people of no faith, could claim equal standing under the law. 
 

That commitment has never been perfect. It has been and continues to be tested, betrayed and too often unevenly applied. And it has been most-deeply tested when those betrayals are injected into American politics.  
 

We’ve seen this recently with the increasing entry of antisemitic rhetoric into the political mainstream. Antisemitic candidates long have been part of American politics, from Charles Lindbergh to Pat Buchanan to Cynthia McKinney. You see them in all corners and at all levels of political life. ADL long has reported on such extremism, whether it shows up from the left or the right. And despite their prevalence, the country always has overcome such intolerance and, in the long run, held elected officials to a higher standard.  
 

Despite this history, Jews find themselves more at risk than ever as our nation celebrates its 250th year. We see an increased presence of anti-Jewish candidates on both sides of the aisle. We find more party officials peddling antisemitic stereotypes. We hear an increasing number of political influencers demonizing “Zionists” or “AIPAC” or “Jewish money.” Antisemitism (especially in its antizionist form) has been injected into the political pipeline, the endorsement ecosystem, the platform process, and governance itself. 
 

Most recently, some candidates affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have been winning elections not withstanding their anti-Jewish hostility.  And it is not a sideshow, but arguably the main attraction—the common thread binding together disparate politicians. In some races, DSA candidates with essentially identical policy platforms are getting elected in part by appealing to the base instincts of a segment of the electorate and obsessively denigrating the Jewish state and demonizing its supporters.  
 

The good news is that liberalism always has been central to our democracy. We always have believed that true freedom is best achieved when individuals can live openly without fear, proud of their identities. This is obvious on many levels, but perhaps nowhere more vividly than the American quarter-millennium commitment to religious pluralism.  
 

That promise was enshrined beautifully in President George Washington’s historic 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island. President Washington did not describe religious liberty as a gift handed down by a generous majority – he described it as a right. The United States, he wrote, gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” More than two centuries later, those words, and the civil rights and religious freedom protections now enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, remain among the clearest expressions of the American ideal and a critical benchmark against which we must judge ourselves. 
 

America’s record on religious freedom is far from perfect. Antisemitism, like other forms of discrimination, has found expression in discrimination, exclusion, quotas, vandalism, and violence. Jews and other religious minorities have faced suspicion, stereotyping, and worse.  
 

Even today, antisemitism is at record levels. Indeed, 2025 was the third-highest year on record for antisemitic incidents since the ADL began tracking them in 1979.  
 

Yet the continued struggle for unqualified religious freedom and respect for religious diversity—through advocacy in courts, in legislatures, and in communities with ordinary citizens—is part of what makes the American experiment so important. As we celebrate this anniversary, let us honor the country America has been at its best: a haven for conscience, a home for religious minorities and a nation where Jews and so many others have helped turn liberty into lived reality.  But let’s not be complacent.   
 

We should measure ourselves, not by the ideology of provocateurs but instead against the directive that President Washington set for us in his landmark letter as to “give bigotry no sanction.”  
 

This is the legacy we will measure ourselves against, and this is the legacy that we will always work to ensure.