For some reason, Abraham was especially associated with prayer by post-Civil War American Jews, writes Jenna Weissman Joselit:

“Abraham Prays,” declared the American Israelite [in 1878] in an unabashed salute to the biblical figure and his humanity, noting how “humane emotions overpowered him, commiseration moved his heart and tongue and lips, and he prayed.”

It’s not clear what prompted the weekly to hold forth on Abraham’s belief in prayer; no archaeological discovery, no brouhaha within the ranks of biblical scholars, no impending theological schism seemed to have occasioned it. All the same, the American Jewish newspaper made much of Abraham.

Like their Gentile compatriots, 19th-century American Jews did a lot of praying in public settings, but in the years that followed that activity became increasingly confined to the synagogue—a trend that gave new importance to one particular prayer:

One of the few features of the Sabbath prayer service that Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Reconstructionist denominations had, and continue to have, in common, a “prayer for the government” was sacrosanct. The phrasing of its sentences as well as the language in which they were delivered might differ from one branch of American Judaism to the next, but the essential theme—the providential nature of the American experiment—remained constant.

Supplicants no more but citizens, members in full, of the republic, American Jews were now at liberty to cultivate a different relationship to the state and to power than their European cousins; consequently, they brought a different tone to their devotions. No longer compelled by either law or custom to make themselves small, they excised what Sarna describes as the “uniquely plaintive quality” of the Old World entreaties in favor of the more confident, assertive pose of well-wishers.

In October, a young Mauritanian national murdered an Orthodox Jewish man on his way to synagogue in Chicago. This alone should be sufficient sign of the rising dangers of anti-Semitism. Nathan Diament explains how the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act (AAA) can, if passed, make American Jews safer:

We were off to a promising start when the AAA sailed through the House of Representatives in the spring by a generous vote of 320 to 91, and 30 senators from both sides of the aisle jumped to sponsor the Senate version. Then the bill ground to a halt.

Fearful of antagonizing their left-wing activist base and putting vulnerable senators on the record, especially right before the November election, Democrats delayed bringing the AAA to the Senate floor for a vote. Now, the election is over, but the political games continue.

You can’t combat anti-Semitism if you can’t—or won’t—define it. Modern anti-Semites hide their hate behind virulent anti-Zionism. . . . The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act targets this loophole by codifying that the Department of Education must use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of anti-Semitism in its application of Title VI.