The one non-Christian speaker at a mass prayer rally on the Nationwide Mall on Sunday was an Orthodox rabbi who bought the group applauding in opposition to antisemitism.
Rabbi Meir Soloveichik leads New York Metropolis’s Congregation Shearith Israel and is a senior fellow at Tikvah, the conservative Jewish suppose tank. He additionally sits on the Non secular Liberty Fee that President Donald Trump convened final 12 months.
Talking to the group who had assembled for a rally on the Nationwide Mall referred to as “Rededicate 250” that goals to place religion on the middle of celebrations to mark this 12 months’s semiquincentennial of the USA, Soloveichik described the Jewish historical past of one of many nation’s most iconic songs.
“God Bless America” was written by Irving Berlin, who as a baby witnessed his dwelling village in Russia burned in a pogrom and wished to thank the nation that gave him refuge, Soloveichik defined. He mentioned that many years after writing the lyrics, Berlin resurrected them because the Nazis expanded their ambitions within the late Nineteen Thirties, premiering the music on the radio the day after the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938.
“On the very second when darkness deepened overseas, America raised its voice, united within the music that Irving Berlin wrote,” Soloveichik mentioned. A number of moments later, he famous, “The prayer that’s ‘God Bless America’ was carried by American troopers who defeated evil, liberating Europe and the world. And it’s a reminder as hatred of Jews makes itself manifest once more that antisemitism is totally un-American.”
The road drew substantial applause, in keeping with a number of movies of the occasion.
The rally together with Trump’s name for Jews to look at “Shabbat 250” the day earlier than drew combined reactions from American Jews. Some, significantly within the Orthodox world, mentioned they appreciated any effort to extend Shabbat and non secular observance. Others mentioned the occasions represented an inappropriate merger of church and state, in addition to an appropriation of Jewish values in service of Christian nationalism.
Soloveichik didn’t immediately handle any of the debates throughout his four-minute handle. However he did say that the endurance of Berlin’s music factors to a singular function of the American character.
“The facility and recognition of ‘God Bless America’ reveals to us,” he mentioned, “that America’s ardour for prayer and its love of liberty are all the time intertwined.”
Along with “God Bless America,” Berlin is known for authoring one of the crucial enduring Christmas songs within the American canon, “White Christmas.” Much less well-known is an anti-lynching anthem that he wrote across the identical time as he popularized “God Bless America.” Berlin additionally devoted songs to Ellin Mackay, the Catholic socialite he wed in 1926 in an intermarriage that sparked each familial tensions and nationwide scrutiny.
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