Mr. Washington's Promise...

Usually Mrs. Stroock takes the girls to Hebrew school, but as her Eagles are playing in London the Dad-Taxi is activated this morning.

We fully expect to see a cop car parked out front of the synagogue.

That's not usually necessary here in America, except on the High Holydays. This is Jewish paranoia more than anything else. That paranoia is well founded, of course. We have yet to be in a sanctuary that did not have multiple exits. Jews know their history, the entire religion is history.

John Podhoretz quotes the Passover Hagadah:

In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us. In a classic act of anti-Semitic violence, which is what this is, Jews hear the echoes of every violent anti-Semitic act that has preceded it in history. And we hear those echoes because they are there. That which motivates Jew-hatred today is what has motivated it from time immemorial—the poisonously attractive idea that Jews need to be extirpated because our existence is an offense or a threat to an existing larger order. The blessing of Jewish life in America is that this notion has largely been consigned to the dregs from which today’s human malignancy rose. Despite the fact that most hate crimes in America are aimed at Jews, the actual number is vanishingly small—especially compared to France, from which Jews are now fleeing, and England, whose Labour Party is in the hands of an actual Jew-hater.

Read the whole thing.

It is true that most Jewish holidays (Passover, Hanukah, Purim...) can be summarized thusly, 'They tried to kill us. They failed. Let's eat.' 

Our Russian-Jewish neighbor sometimes tells us about being discriminated against in her native Lithuania, which seems just incredible. We once attended her birthday party-a room full of Jews from all over the former Soviet Union. One man tried very hard to make us understand that while he was from Azerbaijan, he was not Azerbaijani according to the government and people. He was a Jew. 

Our entire life we've never thought of ourselves as anything other than an American who happened to be Jewish. In that time we've never, ever experienced raw Jew-hatred, occasionally an offhand comment uttered by someone who didn't realize we're of the tribe. We walk around with Israeli hats and T-shirts. No one messes with us. Of course we don't really look Jewish and we're a large man, soooo.

For Jews America is paradise.

In 1790 President Washington visited Newport, Rhode Island, home of the oldest synagogue in the United States. The synagogue expressed the warmest welcome to President Washington, who wrote back:

The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy—a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship...it is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support...May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants—while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.