Religious liberty lies at the foundation of what it means to be an American. The founders risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to ensure that we are free to live out our faith without fear or exclusion. But recently, a massive fissure of antisemitism appeared in that foundation. Americans must treat antisemitism for what it is: an assault on religious liberty.
Those who hold traditional or orthodox beliefs on the sanctity of life, marriage, and human dignity are all-too familiar with how challenging it is to live out those beliefs in daily life. The front lines for such challenges have often seen Christians pitted against cultural Marxists. But lately, the ancient threat of antisemitism has once again become a flashpoint.
Some commentators on the right have even asked why Americans should care so much about Israel, going so far as to dismiss claims of antisemitism as simply a desire to be pro-America. Few things are more un-American than to marginalize an entire group because of their religious identity. To tolerate antisemitism is to erode the moral foundation that makes freedom of religion possible for anyone.
Our American experiment rests on the premise that conscience belongs to God, not the state. George Washington made this clear in his famous 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation at the Touro Synagogue—the nation’s oldest—in Newport, Rhode Island: “The Government of the United States… gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
Washington’s words were not merely rhetorical. They expressed a radical departure from the old world, where Jews and other religious minorities were tolerated only at the pleasure of the ruling class. The “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, observed that religious liberty is not a privilege granted by government but “a right toward which all men are equally entitled.”
But antisemitism, in all its pernicious forms, rejects that premise. Whether it manifests in tired tropes and conspiracy theories of Jewish world control, casual online hate, or more sinister threats of violence against Jewish schools and synagogues, antisemitism seeks to make the practice of Judaism dangerous, shameful, or invisible. It denies Jews the very freedom that defines the American promise: the right to worship openly and to participate fully in public life without fear or ostracization.
The illogic of antisemitism should be tragically familiar to those of other faiths, but most especially to Christians, whose history also bears the marks of persecution. Early Christians faced imprisonment and execution under Roman emperors for refusing to worship Caesar. Jewish communities in the same empire were punished for rejecting pagan sacrifices. Both were targeted not for political crimes, but for daring to remain faithful to their religious consciences and their refusal to bow before human power in matters of divine truth.
Centuries later, antisemitism would take new forms—whether by gulags, ghettos, or genocide—just as Christians in other eras and places have faced violent repression. The Soviet Union shut down churches and synagogues alike, seeing both Judaism and Christianity as threats to ideological control. In Maoist China, priests and rabbis were denounced as “enemies of the people.”
Today, the faithful continue to suffer persecution for the same reason: the one thing an authoritarian regime will not tolerate is someone who submits to a higher authority. In the modern West, persecution rarely comes by decree. Instead, it appears through social pressure and moral inversion. Antisemitism thrives in coded accusations of “dual loyalty” or in hostility toward visibly Jewish expression.
Those who profess allegiance to our Constitution must understand that a society that tolerates the persecution of Jews will soon find excuses to marginalize others. Defending the rights of Jewish Americans to live and worship freely is not an act of charity; it is an act of self-preservation for every faith community. History shows that the road from antisemitism to broader religious repression is short and steep.
The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Dachau. It started with words, then with exclusion, then with violence. And if we fail to confront antisemitism today, the Holocaust will not have ended with the gas chambers.
Those who fail to confront antisemitism wherever it appears abandon the very principles that secure freedom for all of us. Religious freedom in America depends on mutual defense. Jews and Christians, along with people of every creed, must stand together against any ideology that seeks to silence faith. When one faith community is targeted, all others are imperiled.
As President Ronald Reagan once said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on to our children.” The fight against antisemitism is therefore not merely a collateral issue. Rather, it is the front line of the larger struggle for the right to believe, to speak, and to live according to one’s conscience. America’s founders understood that religious liberty is the cornerstone of all liberty. To protect it, we must see antisemitism not merely as hate but as heresy against religious freedom itself. And we must answer it—in law, in culture, and in conscience—with unwavering solidarity.