Mosaic’s Year in Review: Jews, Christians, and the United States

As 2020 comes to a close, Mosaic is looking back at the work we published this year. On Monday we looked at Jewish responses to the coronavirus pandemic, and yesterday we highlighted Mosaic’s writing on Israel and the Middle East. Today, we focus on Jews and Christians, and in particular on American Jews and American Christians and the ways they’ve influenced each other.

Jews and American Religion

American Christianity is bound up with Jewish ideas, which means that the latter can be heard in the dominant chords of American cultural memory. The scholar Daniel Slate reminded us that Jewish ideas were even present in the formative history of America that predates the establishment of the United States. Americans were then, and remain, an unusually religious people. So it makes sense that, soon after independence, the Bill of Rights would codify the protection of religious freedom. This year, we hosted the eminent jurist Michael McConnell to discuss the state of religious freedom in the American judiciary, and with the lawyer Jeremy Rozansky we looked at contemporary efforts in the academy to redefine religious exercise in a way that disadvantages American Jewry. For America’s Independence Day, Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver explained how religion in America relates to patriotism and civic belonging.