Not many Jewish Americans can trace their roots in this country back five generations, but I can. With that comes not just pride in legacy, but also a unique sense of responsibility always to remember what this country meant to the Jewish people who journeyed here.

My great-great-grandmother fled Hungary at the turn of the 19th century, escaping the antisemitism that haunted Jewish life in Europe. She arrived in a country that was far from perfect. Jews were met with suspicion.

My great-great-grandmother came anyway because she believed in what America represented. Democracy. Justice. Opportunity. And freedom, not just from tyranny, but toward dignity. So slowly and painstakingly, she built a life here. She worked hard to become a citizen, a teacher, and raise a family.

That story is nothing short of the American Dream. It is a dream built on a promise, one that began not just with immigration, but with the very birth of this nation.

The promise of America to the Jewish people was not an accident of modern tolerance. It was codified at the nation’s birth.

In 1790, President George Washington sent a letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, R.I., whose words stand as one of the most radical guarantees ever offered by a government to a religious minority: “For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance … ”........

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