Political Quotes

“President Washington, in the summer of 1790, penned a letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. In it, he explained the key advantage that would set our new Republic apart from all prior nations. Here in the United States, he assured the Jewish community: "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." Not liberty for some, but liberty for all. To secure equal liberty, the President explained, we would establish and maintain a government that "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." We would require "only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." That commitment to reciprocal basic decency and responsibility for everyone who lives here is sewn into the fabric of the American political culture. The United States doesn't always live up to that promise, Mr. Speaker. All too often, there have been efforts to privilege some Americans over others, to create a hierarchy, to bully particular American communities because of their religion, their ethnicity, their skin color, or their national origin, for cynical and political gain. Certainly, in the Jewish community, we know what it means to be treated sometimes as a scapegoat. We see that incidents of anti-Semitism across America remain at record highs today.”