As America celebrated its Bicentennial on July 4, 1976, my father called me over to the television. I was outside enjoying the local fireworks, so I was surprised that he would interrupt the fun on such a special night.
Putting his arm around me, he pointed at the screen. “Look.”
I expected to see fireworks over Boston Harbor. Instead, the news was focused on a word I could not pronounce, let alone understand: Entebbe.
My father explained that an airplane carrying many Israelis and Jews had been hijacked, that the hostages were being held in Uganda, and that Israel had undertaken a courageous mission to rescue them. We watched prime minister Yitzhak Rabin welcome the hostages home as blue and white flags waved in the background.
With tears pooling in his eyes, my father said, “This is why we have a homeland.”
As an eight-year-old, I did not fully understand what had happened, but my father’s impassioned message etched itself into my soul and helped shape my Jewish identity.
Over the past 50 years, I have returned to that moment many times. Only recently did I recognize the question I never thought to ask him that night:
Which homeland?
I know that my father meant Israel. But 50 years later, I hear his words differently.
Israel and America occupy distinct but deeply connected places in the modern Jewish story. Israel is the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people, representing Jewish sovereignty, peoplehood, and return. Its strength made the improbable rescue at Entebbe possible.
America, meanwhile, became a civic home for generations of Jews, offering something historically extraordinary: a haven from persecution and the possibility of becoming full participants in society while remaining distinctly Jewish.
These are not equivalent forms of belonging in the public square, but neither must they be competing ones. A strong Israel and a confident American Jewish community are not rival projects. Like Babylon and Jerusalem centuries ago, each is essential to the future of the Jewish people, and each places responsibilities upon those who call it home.
That unresolved question, what it means to belong deeply to the Jewish people while participating fully in American life, inspired Rabbi Menachem Creditor, scholar-in-residence at UJA-Federation of New York, and me to co-edit American Torah at 250. This collection of original sermons and Torah reflections for the weekly portions of 5787 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States.
The volume invites Jewish communities to encounter the American story through Torah, and Torah through the experience of American democracy. The overarching theme examines what America has made possible for Jews and other minorities while asking what its unfinished experiment in self-government requires of us.
That question has become more urgent since October 7. The massacre, the suffering of the hostages, the ensuing war, and the alarming normalization of antisemitism have shaken the sense of security long enjoyed by many American Jews.
The blurring of anti-Zionism and antisemitism has demonstrated how readily attacks on Israel’s legitimacy become attacks on Jewish history, American Jewish identity, and our belonging in the public square and the halls of government.
American Jewry has created an extraordinary network of synagogues, schools, scholarship, philanthropy, advocacy, and public leadership with global significance. It is a vital center of Jewish religious, intellectual, educational, and communal life. Its strength matters to Israel, just as Israel’s strength matters to Jews throughout the world.
The contributors to American Torah at 250 represent different movements, communities, and political perspectives. They do not speak with one voice, nor should they. Jewish tradition has never demanded uniformity of thought. Our sacred literature preserves disagreement because the search for wisdom is strengthened by multiple voices wrestling seriously with enduring questions.
Throughout the collection, rabbis, educators, and thought leaders examine freedom and responsibility, covenant and the Constitution, justice and religious liberty, pluralism and public trust, memory and hope. They ask how Jews can participate fully in American civic life without surrendering our particular commitments, including our bond with Israel and the Jewish people.
These are not questions separate from Torah. They are Torah questions.
Torah asks what it means to build a society worthy of our highest values. Jewish tradition teaches that disagreement need not destroy community, that power carries obligations, that the rule of law is the bedrock of a just society, and that human beings are responsible for one another.
American Jewish experience
For Israeli readers, America’s 250th anniversary may seem like a distant national commemoration. Yet America’s democratic ideals, global influence, and relationship with Israel have profoundly shaped modern Jewish history.
Understanding America’s promises, tensions, and unfinished work is essential to understanding the largest Jewish community outside Israel and the relationship between the two great centers of contemporary Jewish life.
Fifty years after that July 4 night, I can still see my father pointing toward the television and hear his voice: “This is why we have a homeland.”
Today, I understand that I inherited more than one story of home from my parents. Each has shaped me and carries obligations. And each has sustained the Jewish people in different ways.
As we prepare to read the Torah again, American Torah at 250 invites us to examine the rights, responsibilities, and reasons for hope embedded in the American Jewish experience.
Perhaps the question before us as Jews is not simply where we belong. It is what our belonging asks of us. As Pirkei Avot reminds us, “Turn it over and turn it over; it’s all in there.”
The writer is a civic educator and the executive director of Civic Spirit, a nonpartisan organization that provides training in civic education to Jewish, Catholic, and Christian day schools to prepare students to be informed and engaged members of American democracy. He is the 2026 recipient of The Covenant Foundation Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.