Every Hanukkah, Jews retell the story of the Maccabees, the ancient heroes of the second century BCE, who wrested Jerusalem from the tyranny of the Greek empire.
This year was no different. But as Hanukkah draws to an end, we near ever closer to the 250th birthday of the United States—which gives us reason to tell the story of another set of Jewish heroes as well: those who helped wrest the other Promised Land, America, from the tyranny of the British Empire.
Three weeks after the Declaration of Independence was signed, a man named Jonas Phillips became the proud owner of one of the 200 copies of the Declaration that had been distributed throughout the colonies. Phillips, a devout patriot and the president of a synagogue in Philadelphia, sent his copy to an acquaintance in Amsterdam on the eve of the Revolutionary War, along with a letter in Yiddish expressing strong optimism for the patriot cause. “The Americans have already made themselves like the states of Holland,” he wrote, alluding to the Dutch separatist movement against their Spanish Empire that started two centuries earlier.
