Featured Events

Shabbat Services followed by Guest Speaker Dr. Bruce Thompson

Topic: The American Presidents And The Jews
Never more than 3 percent of the population, American Jews have nevertheless played an outsized role in American politics, and in the thoughts of some of our greatest presidents. The two greatest, Washington and Lincoln, offered eloquent defenses of religious liberty, with Jews as their touchstones. And during the twentieth century, two of the giants, FDR and Harry Truman, reacted in very different ways to the Zionist movement’s campaign for American recognition of the State of Israel during the crucial decade of the 1940s. To understand how these four great presidents related to the American Jewish community in moments of crisis is to go a long way toward understanding the larger arc of American Jewish history.