Taking as her point of departure Andrew Porwancher’s The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, which explores the first treasury secretary’s possible Jewish origins and many Jewish connections, Juliana Geran Pilon discusses the American Founders’ attitudes toward Jews:

John Adams described Jews as “avaricious,” as did Benjamin Franklin, who thought greed to be entrenched in the Jewish psyche. Yet they both expressed great admiration for the Hebrews. Adams declared them to have influenced the affairs of mankind more, and more happily, than any other nation, ancient or modern, going even so far as to describe them as “the most glorious Nation that ever inhabited the earth.” Franklin also exhibited an “inconsistent mix of bias and tolerance toward Jews and their faith.” (He always included synagogues among the beneficiaries of his donations to the building of houses of worship.)

Franklin’s ambivalence, writes Porwancher, “made him typical of several other Founders.” Only George Washington’s utter “lack of prejudice against Jews was of a piece with Hamilton’s, although the former never developed the extensive ties to Jews that the latter would.”

In 1787, [Hamilton] took up the cause of his alma mater, King’s College, renamed Columbia, whose 1754 charter had just come up for renewal. The New York State legislature wanted to wrest control from the board of trustees, but Hamilton was instrumental in thwarting that plan. The charter was also updated to revoke explicitly the administration’s power to “prescribe a form of public prayer.” It even abolished any requirements “which render a person ineligible to the office of president of the college on account of his religious tenets.” A new trustee was also named to Columbia’s board: Gershom Seixas, a Jew. “Seixas and Hamilton had previously sat together on a board of regents that oversaw education writ large in the state of New York,” writes Porwancher, “but now—for the first time since higher education began in America with the founding of Harvard in 1636—a Jew would serve as a trustee of a specific college. Columbia would not have another Jew on its board until 1928.”

Reviewing Stranger Than Fiction, a new history of the 20th-century novel, Joseph Epstein draws attention to what’s missing:

A novelist and short-story writer who gets no mention whatsoever in Stranger Than Fiction is Isaac Bashevis Singer. When from time to time I am asked who among the writers of the past half century is likely to be read 50 years from now, Singer’s is the first name that comes to mind. His novels and stories can be sexy, but sex, unlike in many of the novels of Norman Mailer, William Styron, or Philip Roth, is never chiefly about sex. His stories are about that much larger subject, the argument of human beings with God. What Willa Cather and Isaac Bashevis Singer have that too few of the other novelists discussed in Stranger Than Fiction possess are central, important, great subjects.