Published by JNS on 3/19/2025 This column has been adapted from a March 3 speech by Alyza D. Lewin at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Four years after Dr. Benjamin Rush founded Dickinson College, he attended a Jewish wedding. It was the wedding of Rachel Phillips to Michael Levy, held in Philadelphia in June 1787. We know about this wedding because Rush, one of America’s founding fathers, and a signatory to the Declaration of Independence, was so enamored with the Jewish event, he described it in great detail in a letter to his wife. His letter is the earliest description we have of a Jewish wedding in America. Rush told his wife that he “accepted the invitation [to the wedding] with great pleasure, for you know I love to be in the way of adding to my stock of ideas upon all subjects.” Rush’s curiosity and positive enthusiasm are evident throughout his letter. As he wrote, “At 1 o’clock the company consisting of 30 or 40 men, assembled in Mr. Philips’ common parlor, which was accommodated with benches for the purpose. The ceremony began with prayers in the Hebrew language, which were chaunted by an old rabbi and in which he was followed by the whole company.” Rush said that he “did not understand a word, except now and then an Amen or Hallelujah” and that the prayer service lasted about 20 minutes. The wedding took place following that brief prayer service, which was likely the daily afternoon Minchah prayer service that has been recited by Jews for centuries and is still recited by Jews today. In his letter, Rush described many details of the event including the chuppah, “a beautiful canopy composed of white and red silk in the middle of the floor, supported by four young men [by means of four poles], who put on white gloves for the purpose,” the bride’s veil (which covered her face and “reached halfways down her body,” and the entire ceremony, which included the reading of the ketubah, the marriage contract, the blessings that were said over the wine, and how, at the end, the groom broke a glass, which was followed by “a general shout of joy.” What Rush witnessed that day were Jews in America celebrating a lifecycle event with customs, prayers and traditions that for centuries connected Jews around the globe to one another and their ancestral heritage. These customs, prayers and traditions, which are still followed, highlight that Jews share more than a common faith. As a people, Jews also share a history and heritage linked to the land of Israel. Let’s start where Rush began, the afternoon Minchah prayer that the wedding guests recited that day. Included in the liturgy for that service is a prayer recognizing that Jews were historically exiled from their ancestral homeland and dispersed around the globe. The prayer is for the ingathering of the exiles and includes the words: Baruch ata Hashem, m’kabetz nidchai amo Yisrael, “Blessed are You, Lord, who gathers the dispersed of His people Israel.” The service also includes a prayer for the rebuilding of Jerusalem, Baruch ata Hashem, bonei Yerushalayim, “Blessed are You, Lord, who builds Jerusalem,” as well as a prayer for the return of God’s presence to Zion, which is another name for Jerusalem, V’techezena einainu b’shuvcha L’Tziyon brachamim, Baruch ata Hashem, ha-machazir shechinato l’tziyon, “And may our eyes witness Your return to Zion in compassion. Blessed are You, Lord, who restores His Presence to Zion.” In addition to the prayers that were said that day, the Jewish wedding customs connected the bride and groom to their Jewish ancestral roots. For example, the marriage canopy, the chuppah, represents the home a couple will build and is open on all four sides, to recall the tent of the patriarch Abraham, known for his hospitality. Similarly, the veil the bride wore, is to recall the veil worn by the Biblical matriarch Leah. And the breaking of the glass at the end of the wedding? That is a custom that is still followed at Jewish weddings today to commemorate the destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (in 70 C.E.). Even at the Jewish people’s moments of greatest joy, they remember the destruction of the holiest site for the Jewish people. Rush concludes his letter with the following: “During the whole of this new and curious scene my mind was not idle. I was carried back to the ancient world, and was led to contemplate the Passovers, the sacrifices and the jubilees” of the Jewish people. Nearly 238 years ago, this founder of Dickinson College was moved to reflect on the history of the Jewish people after witnessing a Jewish wedding. The Jews at that wedding in America in 1787 demonstrated their connection to the Jewish people around the world, prayed for the ingathering of the exiles and the rebuilding of Jerusalem, and broke a glass in commemoration of the destruction of the Jewish Temple. Compare and contrast Rush’s deeply positive reaction to the expression of Jewish pride at the wedding, with the alarming reaction we frequently see today when Jews take pride in their ancestral heritage. Today, Jews who define their identity as part of a people with a shared history and heritage rooted in the land of Israel, are often demonized as “Zionists,” treated as pariahs, and told that they are not welcome. It’s no secret that antisemitism in the United States is spiking. According to the FBI’s hate crime report, between 2022 and 2023, single bias anti-Jewish hate crimes increased 63%. In 2023, 68% of all reported religion-based hate crimes in the United States were targeting Jews. Think about that for a minute. Jews constitute only 2% of the U.S. population, yet in 2023, 68% of all religion-based hate crimes targeted Jews. In January 2024, the Anti-Defamation League reported that in the first three months after the Oct. 7, 2023 terror attacks in southern Israel, the amount of antisemitism in those three months—from October 2023 to January 2024—eclipsed the total number of antisemitic incidents from the prior 12 months combined. According to the ADL, in just those three months, antisemitic incidents increased 361%. Campuses are not immune from this antisemitism. Hillel International reported that between 2022 and 2023 antisemitic incidents on campus targeting Jewish students increased by 700%. An ADL report issued last month found that a whopping 83% of Jewish college students had either experienced or witnessed antisemitism since Oct. 7, 2023. The American Jewish Committee also released its “State of Antisemitism in America” report last month. According to that report, 56% of American Jews say that they have changed their behavior to avoid antisemitism, that includes not wearing or displaying Jewish symbols (40%), not posting Judaism-related content online (37%), and staying away from specific places, events and situations (31%). The number of American Jews changing their behavior to avoid antisemitism has been rising steadily in recent years. In 2022, the number was 38%, in 2023 it was 46% and now it is 56%. The AJC report also said that: 34% of Jewish students in the AJC survey said they had changed their behavior to hide their Jewish identity (avoided wearing or carrying or displaying things that would identify them as Jewish). Last year that number was 25%. 43% of students said they would not express their opinions on Israel in the classroom or on campus. Last year it was 26%. 22% of students reported feeling or being excluded from a group event because they were Jewish, that figure is up from 20% the year before. Two years ago, it was 12%. Additionally, more than half of the students who said they felt excluded, said they were excluded more than once.) Finally, according to the AJC report, 81% of Jews say that caring about Israel is an important part of what being Jewish means to them. So what can we do to address this antisemitism? How can we reverse the tide? First, we need to have a better understanding of how antisemitism works. Second, we need to have a better understanding of Jewish identity. Let’s start with how antisemitism works. Antisemitism may be called society’s oldest hatred, but it is one of the most difficult to recognize. That is because antisemitism morphs. It looks different in every generation. The one constant about antisemitism is that no matter the century, Jews are always the scapegoat. Whatever society views as its misfortune, the Jews are to blame. Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory, so the allegations against Jews can appear diametrically opposed. That is how the Jew can be accused of being both the communist and the capitalist; the globalist and the isolationist; condemned for being stateless and now for having a state. The Nazis who sought a pure Aryan race accused the Jews of being the ultimate race polluters. To the Nazis, the Jews were not “white.” Today, however, there are those who view the world through the binary lens of “oppressed and oppressor.” Antisemitism dictates Jews will always be lumped into the “evil” category. So, now, there are people who say that all Jews, no matter their background or skin color, are “white” colonizing oppressors. Antisemites believe that the Jews are the cause of their misfortune. They believe the world would be a better place without the Jews. Antisemitism often seeks to “other” the Jew, to treat Jews as unacceptable company. Think about the yellow Star of David that the Nazis had the Jews wear. Those wearing the star were to be shunned and excluded. Today, in addition to individual Jews living around the world, we have a Jewish collective—the Jewish nation-state of Israel where more than half of the Jews in the world reside. And what we see today is that Israel is often treated as the collective Jew and labeled as the villain. For example, some accuse the Jewish state of being the world’s worst violator of human rights, while being stunningly indifferent to the human-rights abuses by countries such as North Korea, Iran and China. Irwin Cotler, an internationally renowned human-rights lawyer, former justice minister of Canada and the first Canadian special envoy to monitor antisemitism once summed it up this way: “If traditional antisemitism sought to deny individual Jews their place in society, today’s newer form of antisemitism seeks to do the same to the Jewish collective, it seeks to deny Israel its place in the society of nations. No other country is told it has no right to exist.” That is contemporary antisemitism and yet many people still don’t recognize it as such. To effectively address antisemitism, we also need to understand Jewish identity. Judaism is an ethno-religion, a belief system inextricably connected to cultural heritage, traditions, history—and land. The connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel permeates the Jewish calendar, Jewish lifecycle events, Jewish law, Jewish prayer and Jewish history. For centuries, Jews have not only prayed facing Jerusalem, they have prayed to return to Jerusalem. L’Shana Habah B’Yerusahlayim “Next Year in Jerusalem” is heard each year at the Passover seder and again at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Did you know that over half of the 613 Commandments in the Pentateuch are connected to the Land of Israel and can only be fulfilled in the Land of Israel? But not all Jews are religiously observant. So, what does it mean to be part of the Jewish people if you are not defining your Jewish identity according to religious belief or Jewish religious practice? To be part of the Jewish people, means you believe that you belong to a people with an ancient heritage, a shared collective memory of the ancient story. The story we tell at the Passover seder of the liberation of the Jewish people from slavery, well, as part of the Jewish people, those were my ancestors. The story that we tell at Chanukah, of the Maccabees that saved the Jewish people, those were my ancestors, too. It’s not possible to separate the ancestral history and heritage of the Jewish people from the land of Israel. Israel is where the identity of the Jewish people was cemented. It’s where the Jews lived as a people, with a king, a code of law and a Temple. Today, to be a “Zionist” means you recognize and celebrate the Jewish people’s connection to one another—and the Jewish people’s deep-rooted tie to the land of Israel. It means you believe that the Jewish people have a right to self-determination in some borders in their ancestral homeland. To be a Zionist does not mean that you have no criticism of Israel’s policies. You can criticize the Israeli government and still be a Zionist. At this point, I should also make clear that not all Jews are Zionists. Just as not all Jews are Sabbath observers. Jews define their identity in many different ways. The existence of Jews who do not observe the Sabbath, however, does not change the fact that if you were to ask a Jew who incorporates some level of Shabbat observance into their life why they do it, they would tell you that the Sabbath observance is a core component of what it means to them to be Jewish. Similarly, the fact that some Jews don’t define their identity as including Zionism does not negate the fact that for most Jews, recognition of the Jews’ history as a people indigenous to the Land of Israel is an integral component of how they define their Jewish identity. One does not have to be a Sabbath observer, to recognize discrimination of a Sabbath observer. Similarly, one does not have to be a Zionist to recognize the discrimination of Zionists. To demand that a Jew shed their Zionism as the price of admission is comparable to demanding that a Catholic disavow the Vatican or a Muslim shed their connection to Mecca. It’s discriminatory, biased and immoral. And yet today—on college campuses and beyond—the vilification, demonization and shunning of “Zionists” is becoming normalized. What is worse is that at the same time, the Jewish people’s identity as a people and the Jewish people’s history in the land of Israel is being erased and denied. There is now a term for this. It’s called “Erasive Antisemitism.” Take, for example, the “Zine” circulated by Students for Justice in Palestine last semester at Boston University. Under the title “What is Zionism” it says: “We do not accept the term ‘Jewish people’ in any form whatsoever … .” And then it goes on to say: “For us, there is only one Jew (like all Jews know there is only one GOD), and that is a religious Jew.” Since when does SJP have the right to define Jewish identity? Since when is it acceptable to tell Jews that they must disavow their people’s history and heritage and define themselves as only a religion? Believe it or not, this is not a new phenomenon. It has happened before. In Europe, when Jews were offered emancipation and equal rights for the first time. In 1789, when the French National Assembly debated whether the French Declaration of the Rights of Man should apply to Jews, Count of Clermont Tonnerre said, “The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals.” The Jews of France were told that if they did not abandon their sense of Jewish peoplehood and pledged allegiance only to France, they would be expelled. With a choice like that, many Jews complied. They announced: “France is our Zion!” The situation was repeated seven years later in 1796 before the Dutch Parliament. There, they debated how they could give Dutch citizenship to a Jew if he felt connected to Jews in England, France or Germany. One of the Dutch parliamentarians proposed that the Jews take an oath that began: “I, so-and-so, declare that I do not belong to any other people, nor any part of a people, but solely and only to the people of the Netherlands.” Accusing Jews of dual loyalty is another ancient antisemitic trope. Jews throughout time have proven over and over again to be patriotic, loyal citizens of the countries in which they live while still celebrating their Jewish heritage. Indeed, the child of the couple whose wedding Benjamin Rush attended proves just that point. The son of Rachel Phillips and Michael Levy was the American naval hero Uriah Levy. He was a U.S. Navy commodore and the first Jewish person to hold that rank. He admired Thomas Jefferson and the founding father’s ideals of religious liberty, so much so that in 1834, Levy purchased Jefferson’s estate at Monticello, which had fallen into a state of disrepair. Levy spent his own money to restore and preserve Monticello. He buried his mother there and then bequeathed the estate to the American people. That is how the couple that Rush saw standing under the Jewish marriage canopy 238 years ago helped preserve an important piece of American history for future generations. My challenge to you today is to respond to differences the way that the founder of Dickinson College, Benjamin Rush, responded to differences when he was invited to his first Jewish wedding. Embrace the difference with curiosity and positive enthusiasm. Learn not only about each other’s customs, traditions, history and heritage; spend some time learning more about your own. Don’t shun, silence and exclude others. Instead, listen, share and engage. Be proud of who you are without putting other people down. Because if you are able to do that, you will create a community here that is truly a safe, welcoming space for all. And then, you will be able to build together the better society that our country so desperately needs.