America’s Founding Fathers and Judaism

While American Jews have always admired the nation’s founders for their vision, they tend to ignore that these great men had little respect for Judaim as a faith.

As an American Jew, I am a great admirer of the Protestant men who founded this great country. But I am troubled by the reality that most of the founders only knew Jewish reality through the “Israelites” of the Hebrew Bible and had little understanding of Jewish history, belief and culture as they all developed in the Diaspora. The granting of religious freedom was not done with an understanding of the rich heritage of Judaism. Rather, this freedom was given with the understanding that it would be used to negate traditional Jewish identity. It was simply the logical outcome of political ideology, not love of Jews.

The Jerusalem Post, 2010