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Vol. 70, No. 1 (Summer 2026) - Celebrating America’s Sestercentennial

Introduction: America’s Transformation of Jewry

Jonathan Rosenbaum

Anniversaries can simply mark time, or they can commemorate a transformational occasion. The 250th anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence represents more than one country’s milestone. It celebrates an experiment in freedom and self-governance.

In 1789, in his first inaugural address, George Washington averred that the “sacred fire1 of liberty” and the American model of government depend on “the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”2 The Founding Fathers readily acknowledged the tenuous nature of the nascent republic they had declared in 1776. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, when asked if the gathering had created a monarchy or a republic, Benjamin Franklin famously responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”3

If the ideal that “all men are created equal…endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” embodied a radical innovation for America’s patrician founders, it constituted an unprecedented turning point for America’s minute but active Jewish community and, ultimately, for all the generations of Jews that followed.

In 1776, Jews had not known citizenship since antiquity; the concept of unalienable rights outside of the Holy Land was unique. When the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE, Jews had not been free. The Jewish kings who had governed them were clients of Rome. Except for a brief period of independence under the Hasmonean dynasty (ca. 140-63 BCE), Roman, Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Macedonian, Persian, and Babylonian rulers had controlled them for six and a half centuries (586 BCE to 70 CE). During the Middle Ages, Jews in Europe lived at the sufferance of kings and nobles. After 1100, expulsion became the norm. Jews were banished from England (1290), France (1306, 1322, 1394), German towns and city-states (Black Plague Expulsions, 1348-1351), Spain (1492), Sicily, Sardinia, and the Kingdom of Naples (under Spanish rule, 1492-1493), and Portugal (1496), to name a few.

Not surprisingly then, when the first group of Jews came to New Amsterdam in 1654, they were fleeing an expulsion. The Portuguese had reconquered Recife, Brazil from the Dutch, thereby precipitating the expulsion of as many as 1,500 Jews4 who had established a community under Dutch protection. The Protestant Dutch had freed themselves from Spanish control beginning in 1581 and had adopted a policy of religious toleration. That toleration had made the Dutch Republic a refuge for religious minorities, including Jews fleeing the Inquisition.

Dutch toleration, however, was not synonymous with religious freedom. The 23 Jews who arrived in 1654 immediately faced the threat of a new expulsion under Peter Stuyvesant, the director-general of New Netherland. Stuyvesant was restrained by his superiors at the Dutch West India Company who, clearly influenced by Jewish shareholders in the company, allowed the Jews to remain on the condition that they not become a charge of the company.5 Despite such toleration, most of the original group eventually departed, but the first Jewish community in what would become the United States had taken root. The first Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel, traces its founding to receipt of a Torah scroll in 1655 and the purchase of a cemetery in 1656.

By 1776, the Jews in all 13 colonies numbered between 1,000 and 2,500, 0.04% to 0.10% of the general population.6 Their religious and civil rights varied from colony to colony, but in Philadelphia where the Founders would compose the Declaration of Independence and, later, the Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights, Jews enjoyed relative religious freedom in the colony founded by Quakers under William Penn. When the Revolution came, at least 15 Jews became officers, a number equivalent to their percentage in the general population.7 The total number of Jewish Revolutionary soldiers is thought to be of equivalent proportion. Jewish participation in the Revolutionary War was not limited to military action. Religious leaders like Gershom Mendes Seixas (1745–1816), the hazzan (religious leader) of Congregation Shearith Israel—still New York’s only Jewish congregation at the time—preached the Patriot cause from the pulpit.

American independence and the First Amendment to the Constitution did not immediately produce equality of citizenship, much less of religion. Like other minorities, Jews would have to wait to secure those goals. However, the foretaste those documents provided caused American Jews to confront what one pair of authors in this issue (Sussman and Barness)8 diagnose as the challenge of acculturation versus assimilation.

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The foregoing demonstrates the unique, revolutionary impact that the American experiment has had upon Jews. It also validates the need for an academic volume that honors America’s 250th anniversary through rigorous, groundbreaking contributions by eminent scholars. Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism has accepted this challenge.

A double-blind, peer-reviewed academic journal, Masorti is the direct continuation of the Conservative Movement’s academic journal, Conservative Judaism (published from 1945 to 2014). Masorti is jointly sponsored by the Rabbinical Assembly and all five seminaries ordaining Conservative rabbis and cantors: the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York City; the American Jewish University in Los Angeles; Schechter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem; Seminario Rabinico in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and the Frankel College in Potsdam, Germany.

Despite its name and sponsors, Masorti covers far more than topics related to one religious movement. It also serves as a scholarly forum for the serious, critical examination of Jewish texts and traditions, history and law, analyzing the changing Jewish community and its spiritual, social, and moral challenges. Masorti embraces a global perspective that transcends denominational boundaries.

This special issue honoring America’s sestercentennial emerged from a systematic plan. Almost all of the articles grew out of formal invitations to leading scholars of American Jewish history and religion. Invitations, however, did not guarantee publication. Each manuscript required evaluation through Masorti’s double-blind peer-review process.

The plan also called for contributors whose areas of research span the full spectrum of American history from the colonial period to issues of the present day. To avoid the facile route of inviting contributors who are part of Masorti’s sponsoring denomination, invitations were distributed without regard to religious affiliation. Efforts were also made to encourage papers that did not fit the traditional academic categories. Thus, several articles use autobiographical experiences to examine historical and religious phenomena in American Jewish society. Finally, leading specialists whose innovative research has shaped our understanding of the challenges and trends confronting American Jewry were asked to submit manuscripts.

The response to this plan produced unanticipated but positive results. A senior law professor (Baker) wrote about his gradual, profound religious metamorphosis that led to his conversion to Orthodox Judaism and eventually to the presidency of a leading Orthodox congregation. Scholars who had written complementary and definitive books on American Jewish religion (Sarna and Ferziger) and the history of social and political developments on American Jews (Lederhendler) turned their attention to the nineteenth-century emergence of communities with multiple, competing synagogues and the peculiarly American development of Jewish religious movements. Historians who had helped define the academic study of Orthodox Judaism (Gurock and Eleff) investigated the role of sports and changing values in the postwar era. A scholar (S. R. Schwartz) whose innovative work had chronicled the role and power of rabbis’ wives documented her own role at a pinnacle of Jewish academic and religious leadership. Long-time pressing issues like antisemitism, Zionism, mental health, and Jewish education receive fresh analysis (Sherman, Cooperman, Guzik, and E. Schwartz, respectively; see also Benporat for a pertinent review essay), and a distinguished historian applies the analytical tool of vernacular religion to American Jewish life (Moore). Penetrating studies of Jewish liturgical music, America in Jewish liturgy and thought, and a Hebrew text (Austerklein, Dorff, and Rank) round out the broad range of Jewish culture and history.

Two seemingly unrelated articles supply important data regarding the challenge of Jewish generational continuity. One examines a colonial religious leader who played a quasi-rabbinic role in the period of the American Revolution (Sussman and Barness) while the other documents his great-grandson, who became a trailblazing explorer in the American West (Hoberman).

For generations, peer-reviewed academic journals published articles in more than one language and doctoral students were required to master a reading knowledge of at least two languages beyond their own. With the increasing, postwar domination of English as the international lingua franca of commerce, research, and communication generally, the academic tradition of multilingual publication has all but disappeared. In establishing Masorti and thereby reviving the academic journal, Conservative Judaism, the editors set the goal of publishing at least one article in Hebrew and one in Spanish in each issue. Doing so recognizes the international range of Jewish communities in Israel and Latin America.

In this special issue, two such articles revive academic linguistic variety and simultaneously commemorate America’s 250th anniversary by symbolizing the country’s diversity. The Hebrew article incisively analyzes scholarly theories and reaches new conclusions concerning Conservative Judaism (Lederhendler), while the Spanish article (Mejia) sheds light on a twenty-first-century phenomenon of emerging Jewish communities, primarily in the Global South, in which most of the founding members are converts. In addition to amplifying awareness of a growing segment of the Jewish population, the Spanish contribution links to the other, aforementioned article on conversion (Baker) and thus accentuates the easily overlooked but crucial fact that Jews are an amalgam of 1) descendants of exiles from ancient Israel and Judea and 2) converts who have joined and often led Jewry over more than two millennia.

Masorti epitomizes a multiplicity of religious outlooks in both contributors and readers. Indeed, this special issue’s authors include Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform rabbis9 as well as the secular and non-observant. The journal serves as an open forum where different ideas from contrasting perspectives receive hearings. It is an arena where data, logic, scholarly rigor, and originality test hypotheses to advance knowledge. It thus harkens back to the values of the Enlightenment, the intellectual watershed that provided the foundation for the ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, and constitutional government, which America’s founders sought to actualize. Yet, Masorti’s commitment to open inquiry also finds commonality with two Jewish modes of discovery: the give and take of the classic Ḥavruta method and the scientific applications of Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Beyond its commitment to the customary standards of academic journals, Masorti incorporates a willing acceptance of autobiographical evidence and analysis—a less conventional but nevertheless productive investigative approach. The three articles that feature autobiography (Ferziger, S. R. Schwartz, and Baker) are not unprecedented in this journal,10 and autobiography increasingly appears in the social sciences and beyond.11

Shortly after this special issue had entered its final stage of preparation, the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) named its ninth chancellor, Rabbi Mike Uram. Since JTS, in partnership with the Rabbinical Assembly, had founded Masorti’s direct predecessor, the journal Conservative Judaism (1945-2014), the editors thought it fitting to invite the new chancellor to offer greetings. He responded with an eloquent, substantive endorsement of the methods and goals of meticulous, critical scholarship.

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As they struggled over the content of the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago, the Founders understood that their efforts were aspirational. Even if they achieved victory in the oncoming War of Independence and preserved their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, they knew that their defining document was incomplete. Jefferson, the slaveholder, had inserted a crucial paragraph against the slave trade12 only to have it expunged—at the behest of Southern enslavers and Northern merchants and shipowners—to gain the unanimous endorsement of the Continental Congress. The recognition that all human beings are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights existed in writing but not in reality.

For Jews whose perpetual statelessness over millennia had characterized their lot, the Founders’ unique declaration and later constitutional guarantees promised not only survival but the opportunity to help build the society that, as Washington would later write, “gives to bigotry no sanction” where “all possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship.”13 However, like the Founders, the infinitesimal colonial Jewish community and its successors also understood the difference between ambition and fruition. Despite the First Amendment, there were states where Jews could not vote or hold office or organize a congregation until well into the nineteenth century. Periodic waves of antisemitism continue to rise and fall in contemporary America. Thus, when the Preamble to the Constitution spoke of achieving a “more perfect union,” it frankly acknowledged America’s unfinished tasks.

The articles in this special issue attest to America’s achievements and to its continuing challenges. In their dedication to truth, they comprise an anniversary tribute to the country that set the standard for liberty and unalienable human rights and still strives to attain that ideal.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, PhD is President Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies, Gratz College; Associate, University of Pennsylvania, 2025-2026; and Associate Editor, Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism.

  1. 1 Though most of the Founders were Deists, they knew biblical texts. Washington’s reference to “sacred fire” demonstrates this fact by alluding to fire in the Pentateuch (e.g., Leviticus 9:24; Exodus 3:2; Exodus 13:21). For more illustrations of prayer among America’s leaders from George Washington onward, see “Prayers for the Sestercentennial” (Prouser) in this issue.

  2. 2 George Washington, “First Inaugural Address” (April 30, 1789), Record Group 46, Records of the U.S. Senate, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

  3. 3 James McHenry, Diary Entry, September 18, 1787, James McHenry Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Elizabeth Willing Powel (1743-1830) was the person who asked Franklin the question. Powel was a social and political power in Philadelphia society and clearly felt quite comfortable in questioning Franklin despite the fact that women would not have the vote throughout the United States for another 133 years.

  4. 4 Arnold Wiznitzer, Jews in Colonial Brazil (Columbia University Press, 1960), 130; Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Number of Jews in Dutch Brazil (1630–1654),” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (1954): 107-114.

  5. 5 Samuel Oppenheim, “The Early History of the Jews in New York, 1654-1664: Some New Matter on the Subject,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 18 (1909): 1-91, esp. 12; Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315-1791 (Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1938), 69-71.

  6. 6 Jacob R. Marcus, To Count a People: American Jewish Population Data, 1585–1984 (University Press of America, 1990), 12–25; Cecil Roth, “America,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, eds. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 2nd ed., (Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 2:42.

  7. 7 Adam Jortner, A Promised Land: Jewish Patriots, the American Revolution, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (Oxford University Press, 2024), 72-76.

  8. 8 Further information about contributors appears in the Contributors section of this issue.

  9. 9 Several rabbis who are also academicians have chosen not to include their rabbinic credentials in their brief biographies. This practice is not uncommon; faculty members in secular institutions routinely omit clerical credentials in standard academic bios.

  10. 10 See, e.g., Ismar Schorsch, “A Rabbi For All Seasons: In Two Registers,” Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism 68, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 8-38.

  11. 11 The method, also known under the term autoethnography, evaluates autobiography to understand broader cultural, political, or social occurrences. See, for example, Tony E. Adams, Robin M. Boylorn, and Lisa M. Tillmann, eds., Advances in Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry: Reflections on the Legacy of Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner (Routledge, 2021).

  12. 12 Thomas Jefferson, “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, June 11–July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  13. 13 George Washington, “Letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island” (August 18, 1790), in The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, ed. Dorothy Twohig (University Press of Virginia, 1996), 6:284–285.