By Jack Simony

This July 4, American Jews did something I have never seen on such a scale. Nearly every Jewish organization and countless individual Jews posted the same document at the same moment: George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island.

The CEO of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations based his Independence Day op-ed on it. Jewish leaders from the Orthodox Union to the Jewish Federations and Hebrew Union College invoked it in an open letter for America’s 250th anniversary. My own organization, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation, posted it. Scroll through any Jewish feed this month, and there it is again: Washington’s pledge that the United States would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”

I have quoted that letter myself. But when an entire community converges on a single 230-year-old text, it is doing work beyond celebration. It is being read as reassurance.

We should be honest about what that something is. The American Jewish Committee’s latest survey found that 91% of American Jews feel less safe after major acts of antisemitic violence in 2025. More than half report changing their behavior out of fear, hiding a Star of David, avoiding events or saying less. The Anti-Defamation League recorded 2025 as the first year since 2019 in which Jews were murdered on American soil for being Jews.

So, the Washington posts are not really about 1790. They are about 2026. They represent a community quietly checking whether the deed to the house is still in its name.

Look closely at what we have been posting about: Washington’s letter. Haym Salomon, the Jewish broker who financed the Revolution. The Liberty Bell, cast with a verse from Leviticus: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land.”

Every one is a receipt. We have it in writing from the first president himself.

I understand the impulse. But Jewish history has seen this before. The instinct to prove belonging through service, sacrifice and documentation is very old, and it has never been the thing that actually protected us. The Jews of Germany had their war heroes and patriots. The receipts saved no one.

But the belief that a thick enough file of contributions purchases safety is precisely what history refutes. Safety is secured, or lost, by the strength of the constitutional order.

Which brings us back to Washington, because the anxious reading of his letter has it exactly backwards.

Washington did not tell the Jews of Newport that they had earned their place. He said the opposite: “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights.”

Natural. Not granted, purchased or conditional. Washington was not issuing Jews a certificate of worthiness. He was declaring that worthiness was never in question.

The language came from Moses Seixas, whose words Washington answered with the authority of the presidency. A Jewish community did not ask for permission to belong. It reminded America of the principles America claimed to uphold.

That is the letter’s radicalism. The cure for our fear is not a better case file. Assembling proof concedes the premise that belonging is on trial. It is not.

None of this diminishes what Jews and America have built together.

The Liberty Bell speaks Leviticus. The Statue of Liberty bears Emma Lazarus’ invitation to the world’s “tired” and “poor.” Irving Berlin, who arrived as a 5-year-old fleeing pogroms, gave America “God Bless America.” A people does not write inscriptions on a house it merely rents.

Beyond the words came the work. Jews served in every American war from the Revolution onward. They helped build American medicine, law, science and industry. Jonas Salk helped end polio. Rabbis marched in Selma as America struggled to fulfill its own promise.

America, in turn, gave the Jewish people something no diaspora had ever offered: not toleration but ownership, the ability to be fully Jewish and fully American without surrendering either.

This was never a landlord indulging a tenant. It was two partners building a house together, and the house is better because both were on the job.

Partners do not reread the lease every time the wind rattles the windows. They maintain the building. That means strengthening the institutions that keep rights inherent rather than indulged. When we defend that structure, we are not asking America for shelter. We are holding up our end.

And notice what American Jews did when fear arrived. They did not become less Jewish. They became more so. Synagogues filled. Young Jews claimed a community they had never fully owned.

For many, Oct. 7 was not the end of an identity. It was the beginning of one. Frightened tenants pack their bags. Builders renovate.

Washington closed his letter with the prophet Micah: “May everyone sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

That was never a promise made to Jews alone. It is a description of America when America works. Fear tells us what to repair, not who we are.

We are not guests here, checking whether the invitation still stands. We are among the builders of the house.

At 250, that is the message worth posting.

Jack Simony is the director general of the Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation.