'Jewish Roots of American Liberty': Explaining the Jewish connection to the American story - review

If there is a single consistent, unvarying element in US policy, firmly rooted in conviction and practice, and transcending the Republican or Democratic nature of the administration, it is the strong and abiding America-IsraeI relationship.

“The bonds of friendship and affection between the American and Israeli people have endured for generations, and they are absolutely unbreakable,” said US President Donald Trump in 2025.

Former president George W. Bush, in 2008, described the US-Israel alliance as grounded in “the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, [and] the ties of the soul.”

Such sentiments can be found in the words of virtually every American president back to the very first, George Washington. Indeed, Chapter 15 of the book Jewish Roots of American Liberty consists of a series of letters between George Washington and various Hebrew congregations.

To much of the world, the ties between the United States and Israel appear inexplicably strong and are a great puzzle. Anti-American political views, endemic in many countries, are often exacerbated by this solid US support for Israel, which people consider perplexing, if not inexplicable.

Others, more prosaically, nominate the “enormously powerful Jewish lobby at the heart of the Washington machine,” without explaining why American policy-makers would succumb to such lobbying.

The volume is largely, though not entirely, a collection of essays by 12 contributors who plumb the depths of what the editors term “the nature of the Hebraic impact on the United States.” Their work demonstrates its two-way nature. Jews owe an immense debt to America, in which they have been enabled to flourish as in few other places on Earth.

Five contributions at the heart of the volume demonstrate in various ways how profoundly the Hebrew Bible directly and indirectly influenced the formulation of America’s political institutions. The fact is that the history of the US is quite unlike that of any other Western country. Jews were part and parcel of the foundation of the nation. The US is a nation of immigrants, and the Jews were there from the start.

Chapter 17 recounts how, in 1905, president Theodore Roosevelt helped celebrate the 250th anniversary of the arrival of Jewish people to North America.

Most of the early immigrants to the US left their native shores to escape religious persecution. The essayists in this book demonstrate that the great country’s national identity is embedded in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Belief in God is at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, and the Bible is a cornerstone of the American national character.

Early fundamentalists, no less than those of today, would base their support of the Zionist dream on the Old Testament, its account of the release of the Jews from slavery and their journey, under God’s guidance, to the “promised land, flowing with milk and honey.”

Exactly 100 years ago, the US was celebrating the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution in 1775. On May 3, 1925, then-president Calvin Coolidge laid the cornerstone of the Jewish Community Center Building in Washington. Chapter 18 covers the speech he gave on that occasion.

He spoke of the depth of “the debt the young American people owed to the sacred writing that the Hebrew people gave to the world,” describing the “strikingly impressive” biblical influence in the foundation documents of the New England states. It was so strong, said Coolidge, that John Davenport, one of the founders of the New Haven colony, “arranged that the Hebrew language should be taught in the first public school in New Haven.”

Coolidge paid tribute to the contribution made by Jews to the American Revolution, both by way of political support and by service in the armed forces.

“The Jewish faith,” he said, “is predominantly the faith of liberty…From earliest colonial times, America has been a new land of promise to this long-persecuted race.”

Quoting the assertion “Hebraic mortar cemented the foundations of American democracy,” Coolidge’s closing words were: “If American democracy is to remain the greatest hope of humanity, it must continue abundantly in the faith of the Bible.”

Visitors to the Jewish museum in Philadelphia (the National Museum of American Jewish History) will find in an early display cabinet a letter of greetings to the leader of the Hebrew Congregation of Philadelphia signed by George Washington.

A little farther down sits a letter from Abraham Lincoln to the head of his Jewish community, thanking him for his loyal address.

In the United Kingdom, there are something less than 300,000 Jews out of a total population of some 61 million – that is less than 0.5 %. But while Jews in European countries are counted in their thousands, in the US they number millions. Estimates vary, but currently it seems that the Jewish populations of the US and of Israel are about the same, at some 7.5 million. The Jewish presence and the influence of the Hebrew Bible are woven into the very fabric of America and are an inextricable part of its very existence.