{"id":1477,"date":"2026-06-24T11:09:34","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1477"},"modified":"2026-06-24T11:09:34","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T11:09:34","slug":"the-history-of-american-jews-exposes-the-fundamental-questions-of-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1477","title":{"rendered":"The history of American Jews exposes the fundamental questions of citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<div><audio><\/audio><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>The history of American Jews\u2019 citizenship makes the president\u2019s case to eliminate birthright citizenship, now awaiting a Supreme Court decision, no surprise\u2014but this should offer little comfort. <\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1475\">At Jersey Kebab, a new immigration fight | Inquirer South Jersey<\/a><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>The central plotline of the story of Jews in the United States tends to revolve around citizenship: Jews arrived, gained citizenship, the end. Yet this story accounts for neither how citizenship has worked for Jews nor how it works in general. A far more accurate history of Jewish citizenship in the United States exposes the persistent political questions asked, answered, and unresolved when policymakers try to decide who is and isn\u2019t \u201cAmerican.\u201d <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>For the past 250 years, American leaders have used citizenship law to draw and re-draw the lines of individual belonging through collective categories. From the beginning, Congress granted \u201cany alien being a free white person\u201d access to citizenship, writing into naturalization law in 1790 broad thresholds for membership. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment revolutionized citizenship by opening it to \u201call persons born or naturalized in the United States.\u201d Yet Congress also legislated that for the purposes of naturalization, \u201call persons\u201d only included \u201cfree white persons\u201d and \u201caliens of African nativity\u2026and African descent,\u201d not Chinese people or \u201cAsiatics.\u201d <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Jews who immigrated from Europe tended to gain access to naturalization as \u201cwhite\u201d under citizenship law, but government officials found Jews a useful\u2014and sometimes confounding\u2014guide to help them apply the law, even when Jews were not directly involved. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Take a 1909 naturalization appeal from four men, described in their rejected application as \u201cArmenians by race.\u201d The men were not Jewish, but Judge Henry Cabot Lowell, who presided over their appeal, nonetheless found himself contemplating Jewish citizenship. Harvard-educated and hailing from an elite Boston family, Lowell consulted scientific treatises to conclude that \u201cHebrews\u201d and Armenians were both \u201cAsiatic\u201d in origin. Prevailing scientific racism of the day convinced him that neither met the threshold of whiteness. As he wrote in his decision, it was \u201chard to find loophole for admitting the Hebrews\u201d to citizenship. But at least until Congress acted, he saw no reason to exclude Armenians if Jews could benefit from the loophole.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Jewish leaders panicked when they witnessed high-level government officials slotting them into racialized categories other than \u201cwhite.\u201d They understood that the historical fact of citizenship would not necessarily protect Jews in years to come, especially as eugenicist ideas gained traction among policymakers designing new restrictive immigration laws. In the early 20th century, elite Jews lobbied politicians, filed reports, intervened in naturalization cases, and testified at congressional hearings to bolster Jews\u2019 claims to citizenship. Their efforts met partial success. As passed in the 1920s, immigration quota laws dropped the classification of Jews as \u201cHebrews,\u201d instead counting Jews among others of their same \u201cnational origin.\u201d Still, the countries from which most Jews immigrated, such as Russia and Poland, now faced some of the harshest restrictions. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>In practice, the new quota laws reduced the number of Jews who could naturalize and raised suspicion about those who did. Foreign-born Americans from many different backgrounds experienced discrimination that legal status did not avert. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>But accusations of foreignness and dual loyalty clung to Jews in unique ways, as illustrated by a remarkable case from 1947. That year, a naturalized Jewish man sought to return to the United States after living in British-mandate Palestine for over a decade. Detained by U.S. border control agents, the Ukrainian-born man learned that his American passport had been revoked under a 1940 law that prohibited naturalized citizens from living abroad for over five years. Native-born citizens were not subject to the same law. The ACLU, American Jewish Committee, and American Jewish Congress seized on this fact to call the law unconstitutional and defend the Jewish man on his appeal. But for the Jewish organizations, the constitutional violation was a piece of a much larger threat to Jewish citizenship in the United States. When Congress authorized the 1940 statute, it did so under pressure from a State Department official who insisted that \u201cthese Zionists\u201d regularly manipulated the protections of American citizenship for their own nationalist ends.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>The court rejected the Jewish man\u2019s appeal, and in doing so diminished the distinctly Jewish dimension of the case by tying him to other naturalized Americans, such as Japanese-Americans, whose constitutional rights to equal protection could be overridden by national interests according to recent Supreme Court precedent. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Citizenship debates routinely entangled Jews\u2019 status with that of other groups because the categories of citizenship were neither self-evident nor self-executing. Only in motion, by scrutinizing groups, comparing them to one another, and gauging the changing winds of national interests, did government officials bend citizenship to their will. <\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1473\">Mr. Edison brings old-school glamour \u2014 and chef Matt Levin \u2014 back to Center City<\/a><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>In a remarkable exchange on the Senate floor in the spring of 1964, two senators debated the exclusion of religion from proposed anti-discrimination legislation targeting federally-funded programs. Albert Gore, Sr., a Democrat from Tennessee, contended that Jews lacked shelter under the law\u2019s categories of \u201crace, color, or national origin\u201d because Jews were a religion. Joseph Clark, a fellow Democrat from Pennsylvania, countered that those categories protected Jews just fine because many Jews lacked any faith, so whatever discrimination they faced must be race-based. Signed into law that summer as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, the statute (unlike many others in the same law) did not include religion among its protected categories. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>For many decades, the question of Jews\u2019 standing under Title VI seemed to be resolved in practice, as government officials and Jewish leaders agreed that its jurisdiction did not include Jews. But it was only a matter of time before the answer faded back into a question. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Over the last two decades\u2014and especially since Oct. 7, 2023\u2014government officials and many Jewish leaders have argued that Jews should have standing in anti-discrimination laws on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Detractors argue that Jews\u2014or certain expressions of Jewishness such as Zionism\u2014do not fit squarely into those categories. The arguments matter because the categories of citizenship law are consequential, but their answers aren\u2019t intrinsic to citizenship. Rather, citizenship remains a tool to ask questions about belonging; as political aims change so too will its meaning.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>For American Jews, citizenship has not offered a singular point of arrival or a final answer to the puzzle of national belonging. This lesson from the history of American Jews may offer some reassurance that Trump\u2019s bid to overturn birthright citizenship is just another stop on a zig-zagging journey. Whether the Supreme Court endorses the administration\u2019s tendentious reading of the 14th Amendment or not, the twisted and entangled process of arguing over citizenship will continue.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>A less sanguine lesson from the same history should warn all American citizens that an attack against birthright citizenship is an attack against them. No one is naturally or natively a citizen, wherever they were born. Political leaders are constantly remaking citizenship\u2014just look at how the categories used to define, question, or defend Jews have changed over time. The protections of citizenship are as mutable as they are unreliable. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Faith in any fundamental meaning of citizenship not only misses the point but also carries profound risk. Even the most capacious understanding of citizenship will not resolve the question of human belonging, but the starkly narrow one on offer from the Trump administration today threatens our ability to keep asking the question. <\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><i>Lila Corwin Berman is a professor of history at NYU and author of <\/i><i>Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship<\/i><i>. <\/i><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><i>Made by History<\/i><i> takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1471\">Cherry Hill is home to these iconic dishes | Inquirer Cherry Hill<\/a><\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>American Jews&#8217; history is tangled up with battles about belonging and who counts as &quot;American.&quot;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1476,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The history of American Jews exposes the fundamental questions of citizenship - Corporate Movers USA<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/corporate-movers-usa.com\/?p=1477\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The history of American Jews exposes the fundamental questions of citizenship - 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