June 9, 2026|כ"ד סיון ה' אלפים תשפ"ו The Future of Jews in America
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Looking around the country today, the America we Jews have come to know, appreciate, and love is becoming increasingly unrecognizable. While this may have been true the last several years on a cultural level with the move towards more progressive values and blurring of definitions, lines, and institutions in ways that are totally incompatible with our sacred tradition, now it is true in a more personal and specific way, a way that makes us feel increasingly uncomfortable and unsafe.
In his Halachic responsa, Rav Moshe Feinstein, himself an immigrant from Europe in 1937 fleeing from increased anti-Jewish sentiment and Soviet religious persecution, described America as a malchus shel chesed, a kingdom of kindness for the Jewish people. Similarly, Rabbi Menashe Klein (the Ungvarer Rav) and Rav Moshe Stern (the Debreciner Rav), who moved to America after surviving the Holocaust, describe this country in their teshuvos as a medinah shel chesed, a benevolent nation.
What might they write today about the same country that features, as a major party candidate for U.S. Senate, a man who for years unabashedly sported a tattoo of the Nazi SS “Totenkopf?” At a rally this week for this candidate in Portland, when asked, “Would an Israeli flag tattoo be a deal breaker?” one attendee said, “Honestly yeah, because I don’t support genocide.” While that only represents one voter’s view, this candidate continues to be endorsed by mainstream leaders of the Democratic Party despite the reporting about his vile Jew hate, among other disturbing problems.
Dan Bilzerian, who has 30 million Instagram followers, is on the ballot as a Republican in Florida’s 6th Congressional District. While he has little chance of winning, as an extremist, vulgar antisemite, his mere presence on the ballot combined with whatever percentage of the votes he will get, is jarring.
Literally as I was sitting down to write this, members of the neo-Nazi group Blood Tribe marched through Athens, Georgia carrying a swastika banner, and a sitting member of Congress delivered a rant against Israel filled with long-debunked falsehoods. It truly seems not a day goes by in this country without one or more terrible stories involving antisemitic rhetoric or, worse, actual violence, and it is coming from all parties and all sides.
So what is the future for Jews in America? Is it the Malchus and Medinah shel chesed, a country of unprecedented religious freedom, a democracy that awards rights and protection to our people? Or is it, as other ancestors warned, a “treifene medinah,” a place that Jews don’t belong, a country that will compromise and corrupt us morally and physically?
As we approach the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary, for Jews living here, this is an essential question. Certainly, American Jews—like those throughout the Diaspora—should be asking ourselves not if, but when we will move to Israel. That is the destiny and must be the destination for us all.
But in the meantime, is our time in America just a holding pattern, a passive, meaningless stopover? Rav Aharon Kotler certainly didn’t think so. In a time when it was tremendously unpopular to move here, Rav Aharon saw his immigration to America in religious terms, as a mission connected with the fulfillment of a prophecy of Rav Chaim Volozhener. In a tradition relayed by not only Rav Aharon Kotler, but Rav Chaim Ozer, Rav Yaakov Ruderman, Rav Dovid Lifschitz, Rav Aharon Soloveitchik and others, in 1803, at the laying of the cornerstone of his yeshiva in Volozhin, Rav Chaim Volozhener tearfully told his talmidim, “This will not be the final station of Torah before Moshiach. Torah has yet to flourish in the American before he can come. America will be the final stop of galus.”
Rav Aharon Kotler took this as a charge to build Torah in the New World. He planted the seeds for what would become the largest yeshiva in the world and a network of kollelim in communities around America.
Speaking about the purpose of being spread throughout the galus more generally, Rav Gedalya Schorr (Ohr Gedalyahu, Shemini Atzeres) writes that Hashem sends us to different countries and cities to collect the righteous converts and to redeem the sparks in each location. We aren’t there passively or accidentally; we are there with a mission and a purpose.
By that standard, have the Jewish people succeeded in impacting America? Have we brought Torah values and ideals to this country? The answer is a resounding yes. In midst of the September 2000 presidential campaign, amid the national conversation about the religious observance of Joe Lieberman a”h, Michael Novak, a non-Jewish writer and philosopher who often wrote on theology, wrote in the New York Times:
I am pulling for Bush and Cheney, not Gore and Lieberman, and I am not Jewish but Roman Catholic. Still, I love what Senator Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, is doing to wake this nation up to its deepest identity, rooted in Jewishness.
John Adams wrote, “I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation.” He wrote as a Christian, but added that even if he were an atheist and believed in chance, “I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently of all civilization.”…
The best kept secret of American history is that the favorite language of that founding generation came from the Torah. The founders referred to their own experiment as the Second Israel. They commissioned a design for the Great Seal with a symbol recalling the first Israel, for they thought of themselves as crossing the deserts of Egypt en route to building a “city on the hill.”
Ben Franklin proposed as a motto of the Republic “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.” It fit the American circumstance. The signers of the Declaration, after all, were committing treason. They needed some sort of moral warrant. They also needed hope that they could avoid the hangman’s noose; they faced the most powerful army and navy in the world. It helped that they believed that Providence would assist them and that Providence had created the world so that liberty would in the end prevail. For without liberty, how could the Creator, who desired the friendship of free women and men rather than the worship of slaves, fulfill his eternal purposes?
Most historians lazily say that the founders were Deists, because they did not use Christian names for God, like Trinity and Savior and Redeemer. They miss the crucial point. Three names for God in the Declaration — Creator, Judge and Providence, are unmistakably Jewish names for God. This language did not come from the Greeks or Romans…
If for whatever reason our time in America is not yet over, we must be here with a sense of purpose and mission. Certainly, it is to defend and advocate for our values, morals and principles.
But in this moment, I think it is something even more.
As America celebrates 250 years, particularly for those who subscribe to “America First,” we must speak of how America first came to be. This country was born from an extraordinary faith, deeply informed by the language and ideas of the Jewish Bible. When our Founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” they were echoing the first chapter of Genesis, that every human being is created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God. When they appealed to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” they were affirming that there is a moral law higher than any king, any parliament, or polling data. When they concluded, “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence,” they spoke in the language of our prophets, a people placing its destiny in the hands of Heaven.
America must stand true to the principles, values, and ideals that made her exceptional in the first place.
The right for even someone with a Nazi tattoo to run for office is an American value. For anyone to endorse or vote for him is a grossly un-American value. The right to protest Israel, or even speak of Israel and Jews in vile terms, is American. The failure to stand with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East, the land from which America’s own values drew, is un-American.
The right to platform purveyors of hate is American. To amplify their message, spread evil lies against Israel or the Jewish people on college campuses, outside of Synagogues and even in the halls of Congress, is un-American.
As we approach this significant milestone, it is a critical time for us to stand tall and proud and tell our fellow citizens that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not about hatred of the Jew alone. These beliefs are not only un-American, they are rooted in hatred of America.
We must align with allies, religious leaders, elected leaders and influencers to return and restore this great country to its roots. If America is to remain a medinah shel chesed, we cannot outsource that work to others. Each of us must ask: What am I doing to make my home more Jewish, my community more courageous, my elected officials more accountable, my non-Jewish neighbors more informed, and my children more proud? We must live with gratitude for this country, loyalty to our people, longing for Eretz Yisrael, and a renewed sense of responsibility for the sacred mission of Torah in America. We must work to ensure it remains a medina and malchus of chesed and not a treifene medinah.