The motto on the Great Seal of the United States is "novus ordo seclorum"--a new order of the ages. The revolutionary nature of America was particularly true for Jews. For thousands of years they had lived in states in Europe and the Arab countries in which anti-Semitism was actively promoted or tacitly encouraged by the political authorities. Life in America, by contrast, was remarkable for the relative absence of official anti-Semitism. Here there were neither powerful anti-Semitic political parties or officially sanctioned barriers to the social and economic advancement of Jews, and the local and national governments protected the property and lives of Jews. As Washington noted in his famous letter of 1790 to the Newport, Rhode Island, synagogue, the policy of the United States was neither to sanction bigotry nor to assist persecution. "The children of the stock of Abraham" and Christians will "possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities and citizenship." In this land where freedom was code, defining Jewish identity is the great theme.
             While America was not the Promised Land, to Jews, it was the land of promise, and for every Jew who settled in Palestine between 1880-1920, at least forty immigrated to the United States. Not surprisingly, it was a Jew (Irving Berlin) who composed "God Bless America" and another Jew (Emma Lazarus) who wrote "The New Colossus," the sonnet placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty that proclaimed America to be a refuge for the "huddled masses yearning to be free." Nor was it unexpected that a Jewish immigrant would title her autobiography The Promised Land, as Mary Antin did in 1911. In this "goldenah medinah" the great theme of Jewish history was not confronting anti-Semitism but defining Jewish identity. In the United States the government did not concern itself with the Jews, and there was no official rabbinate with the power to define Jewish identity or to determine the financial, relig...