This week in Philadelphia, I stood before a 1776 letter about American independence. It wasn’t written in English – and it changed how I understand my place in this country.
I was born in Brooklyn and raised in a Yiddish-speaking community. My sense of being American always felt real, but was always questioned.
I was curious about American history, yet I rarely found myself in its fabric, in its story– a feeling that only deepened as I grew up hearing voices cast doubt on Jewish belonging and loyalty.
So I made my way to the Museum of the American Revolution, where the letter is on display: written in the summer of 1776 by Jonas Phillips, a merchant, a civic figure, and a member of a small but significant Jewish community.
In the letter, Phillips writes to Gumpel Samson in Amsterdam about personal matters and shares a new development – that America has declared independence.
He tucks in an original Dunlap broadside, one of the rarest and most meaningful documents in American history. But the most striking part of the story is not the contents. It is the language he wrote in: Yiddish.
Neither the letter nor the Declaration ever reached Amsterdam. It survives today only because it ended up in a stack of correspondence the British had captured and kept.
I bought my $27 ticket and asked where the letter was. Down the hallway, the cashier said, to the left of the spiral staircase.
I walked into the exhibit and saw it from across the room, mounted on the wall beside the Dunlap broadside and a portrait of Phillips. I moved closer and read the broadside first, the words etched into every American heart: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”
Just seeing a copy of that first printing of American independence is moving.
But moving closer still, I found a small, humble letter – in a language I do not only understand but feel deeply, the language my mother first spoke to me in, the one my grandmother praised: Yiddish.
Phillips’s handwriting, the Hebrew-calendar dating, the abbreviations – all of it looked like my own. And then I saw the words that struck me most, where he writes how this will end, only the blessed God knows – set down in the same Hebrew abbreviation Yiddish speakers still use today.
For the first time in my life, the story of independence was not some far-fetched, inspiring tale. It was real life.
It was the story of a man who shared my mother tongue, living in the city where independence was declared, holding a copy of it, sharing the news with loved ones across the Atlantic, worried about his future, and hoping for the best.
Standing there, as a Yiddish speaker, a Jew, and an American born to this nation, I thought about the American promise. It was never fully kept.
The Declaration spoke of equality while slavery endured. Women were shut out of the dream; Native nations faced ruin; Jews met prejudice, too. But its words set a standard, and a standard is something later generations can hold the country to.
Once spoken aloud, the promise outgrew those who first spoke it. Already in 1776, a Jewish immigrant could take the founding text and send it onward in Yiddish to the people he loved – and make it, quietly, part of his own story.
A Yiddish voice at the birth of America
Before I left, I sat down at a desk in the museum and wrote a Yiddish letter of my own.
Not about business, not a thank-you note, not a request – a simple prayer: that the Creator have compassion on the remnant of the Jewish people, keep His hand on this nation and this land, and guard it through the 250 years to come.
God bless America.
I wondered: Could Phillips have imagined what this experiment called America would look like 250 years on?
Could he have imagined that millions would share his faith and that hundreds of thousands of them could still read and understand his letter?
And I wondered about myself. In 250 years, will anyone understand my Yiddish letter? Will there still be millions of Jews, or thousands of Yiddish speakers, to read my words? As Phillips wrote: only the blessed God knows.
As a writer for the Yiddish-language Moment magazine, I will share Phillips’s story and his letter with tens of thousands of its readers.
His letter may never have reached the man it was meant for. But now it will reach thousands of Yiddish-speaking Jews on the 250th anniversary of the country he was straining to describe.
The British intercepted his letter; they never intercepted the promise it carried.