Recalling the Roots of Jewish American Heritage Month

The United States has a long tradition of celebrating its diverse communities with heritage observances throughout the calendar year. And yet not all communities arrive at that recognition through the same journey. For Jewish Americans, the road to a nationally recognized heritage month was not one of waiting to be invited — it was one of building the table themselves. 

Jewish American Heritage Month, observed every May, was officially recognized in the U.S,. in 2006 by President George W. Bush, following congressional resolutions passed by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Sen. Arlen Specter. But the real architects of the month were not in Congress. They were community leaders and institutions in South Florida, led by the Jewish Museum of Florida. They organized, advocated, and demonstrated that this story was one worth telling on a national scale.  

That pattern — the community doing the work before the recognition arrives — is, in many ways, the defining story of Jewish life in America. 

The history of American Jewish immigration begins in September 1654, when 23 Jewish men, women, and children arrived in New Amsterdam, now known as New York City. A second wave followed in the mid-1800s, primarily from German-speaking states, and a third — the largest — brought well over two million Jews from Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Romania between 1880 and the onset of restrictive immigration quotas in 1924. Each wave brought people fleeing something — persecution, pogroms, poverty — and each wave rebuilt, contributed, and became American, while remaining distinctly Jewish. 

That dual identity — fully American, fully Jewish — has always been the community’s negotiation with this country. Though facing continued strife, they never stopped building: in law, science, literature, music, civil rights, and medicine. Louis Brandeis became the first Jewish justice of the Supreme Court, pioneering the legal concept of a right to privacy. Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi Germany, spent over two decades at Princeton and reshaped the foundations of modern physics. Ruth Bader Ginsburg transformed American gender equality law from the bench. These are not footnotes to American history — they are among its most defining chapters. 

Today, more than 7.5 million Americans identify as culturally or religiously Jewish. It’s a community whose diversity is itself often invisible; and whose complexity does not always fit neatly into public narratives. Jewish Americans span every political persuasion, every region of the country, every profession, every shade of religious observance from Orthodox to secular. They include Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews, Jews of color, LGBTQ+ Jews, immigrants and families whose roots in America stretch back generations. That diversity does not always fit neatly into public narratives — and when a community is flattened into a monolith, it becomes easier to stereotype, easier to scapegoat, and harder to defend. Invisibility, in that sense, is not just an oversight. It is a condition that antisemitism exploits. 

Those costs are measurable, and they are growing. In 2024, the Anti-Defamation League documented 9,354 antisemitic incidents across the United States — a 344% increase over five years and the highest number recorded since the organization began tracking in 1979. (ADL) The FBI documented 1,938 antisemitic hate crimes in 2024 alone. This represents 69% of all religion-based hate crimes in the country, despite Jews comprising just 2% of the U.S. population. (Combat Antisemitism Movement)  

Alongside these statistics, something else is happening. Nearly one-third of Jews report increased participation in Jewish life in the wake of rising antisemitism (ADL) — a surge in engagement, in community-building, in the insistence on being seen clearly rather than erased quietly. It is, in its own way, continuous with a 370-year tradition. 

Jewish American Heritage Month is an opportunity to engage with that full story — not just the contributions, which are extraordinary, but the conditions under which they were made. A community that has navigated discrimination, restrictive immigration laws and exclusion from institutions, but has still managed to enrich virtually every dimension of American life, deserves more than a footnote in May. It deserves the kind of serious, sustained attention that transforms a heritage month from a calendar observance into a genuine reckoning with who built this country — and who is still building it.