“Try not to love such a country!” exclaims Mottel the cantor's son, the orphaned Russian Jewish immigrant child in Sholem Aleichem's only New World novel, when he discovers that in America “it's not allowed to hit somebody smaller than yourself” (Adventures of Mottel the Cantor's Son, 260). Mottel's bittersweet Yiddish praise echoes – if unintentionally and somewhat ironically – a declaration made more than a hundred years earlier by the Sephardi banker Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, in an address to George Washington, newly elected President of the United States:

These two passages help chart an important theme in the history of Jewish life in America. For millennia, Jews had lived under the rule of many other peoples, both in the Land of Israel and in exile in Europe, Africa, Asia, and South America. They sometimes enjoyed periods of tolerance, prosperity, and quasi-autonomy; often they suffered oppression, poverty, and violence. Throughout their history, in good times and bad, the Jews were considered to be different – religiously, ethnically, racially, and hence politically – a distinction, by the way, they did not always contest. When they came to America, however, they discovered – whether with unambiguous relief, or cautious optimism, or seasoned skepticism – that America was different.