This year marks the two-hundred and tenth anniversary of a now-forgotten survey that arguably launched America’s Thanksgiving tradition.
And on its anniversary, we should pay special heed to what it tells us about the relationship between the United States and Israel.
On November 24, 1813, a New England woman named Hannah Mather Crocker delivered what she titled “A Thanksgiving Sermon.” Although there had been earlier declarations of Thanksgiving nationally and locally, especially in New England, Crocker’s sermon was perhaps the decisive marker of the start of our annual November celebration.
Breitbart News detailed Crocker’s sermon four years ago. You can read all about it here.
What makes Crocker’s sermon all the more important today is that it singled out America’s treatment of Jews as an especially important aspect of our history and a cause for American patriotism.
“Let us be encouraged, my American friends, and hope the Lord will visit us soon with his mercy and in some particular manner, as we have reason to be thankful that we are the only nation under whose government his own particular people, the Jews, have never been persecuted,” she wrote.
It’s easy to see that in terms of world events today, Crocker would instruct us to be thankful that the United States is standing by Israel in its war against Hamas.
As Breitbart’s Joel Pollak has pointed out, defending Sirael has a deep “connection to the United States, one that goes back to the founding of the nation.”
The early colonists in Massachusetts looked to the model of Biblical Israel as they built their new society. Later, as historian and ambassador Michael Oren has shown, many early American leaders — notably, President John Adams — embraced the idea of a revived Jewish state in the Holy Land itself.
In 1790, President George Washington, received a letter from the Jewish congregation at Newport, Rhode Island — whose Touro Synagogue remains the oldest in the U.S. — and replied with a declaration that remains a foundation for the concept of religious liberty in America.
His letter explained that “liberty of conscience” would be treated as an expression of our “natural rights,” not “tolerance” by one group to another. He also promised the U.S. would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.”
And, crucially, President Washington promised that for “every one” of the “Children of the Stock of Abraham” in the U.S. “there shall be none to make him afraid.” It was an explicit commitment to fight antisemitism, though that word had not been invented yet.
Today, eighty years after the Holocaust, the safety and security of the State of Israel is seen by Jews as a guarantee of our own security. When Israel is attacked, we are threatened — as seen by the many threats to Jewish communities in recent weeks.
That does not mean Ameica must go to war over Israel, or support every Israeli policy. It does mean that when Israel is faced with the kind of attack that took place on Oct. 7 — whole families murdered; women raped and tortured; children and the elderly taken hostage — it is evident that the same evil spirit that propelled the Nazi genocide still thrives at the core of anti-Israel terror. The fact that pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the U.S. celebrated the attack showed that such hatred exists in the U.S. as well.
We, as Americans, must support Israel’s war of self-defense against a genocidal enemy because doing so is essential to the defense of liberty in our own country.
As we learned in the Second World War, when America turns a blind eye to the persecution of Jews, we also abandon our own defenses.
Support for Israel is an expression of, not a contradiction of, American patriotism. “America First” includes support for Israel, or it is not American at all.
That is something we can all be thankful for.
