Isaac Mayer Wise’s 1858 Fourth of July address reflects the complexity of Jewish identity in America at an important point in the country’s history. His speech explores the intriguing relationship between religion, patriotism, and the desire for acceptability in a contradictory culture. But as I consider what Wise said, I’m experiencing conflicting feelings. I occasionally have a strong emotional connection to Wise’s message, but my excitement is also tempered by powerful reminders of its limitations. Isaac Mayer Wise’s Fourth of July speech provides a distinctive perspective on the Jewish American experience, especially during a period of cultural and national transformation, which is why I decided to write about it.

It is crucial to consider the historical setting in which Wise gave his statement to comprehend it completely. The middle of the 19th century saw significant changes in the United States. With the Civil War approaching, the nation was sharply split on slavery. The Jewish community was amongst the many groups whose experiences and perceptions were influenced by this political environment. In a largely Christian community at the time, American Jews were starting to claim their identity and frequently aimed for assimilation and acceptance. This goal is reflected in Wise’s address, where he frames the Fourth of July as a celebration of liberty for both Jews and Americans, hoping to bridge Jewish identity with American ideals. 

Wise’s speech’s body captures the excitement that Jews felt at discovering freedom in America, their “promised land.” His words appear true with a passion that embodies freedom and possibility. “Hallelujah for the day when God’s law was verified, one law and one judgment shall be for all of you. Hallelujah for the day when man was restored to his rights when conscience resumed its rightful throne, and the dwarf of superstition was slain. Hallelujah for the birthday of liberty to all nations!” (Wise, 86.) The Jewish community feels a sense of shared victory because of this passage’s loud celebration of independence. Wise effectively expresses the pride and happiness felt by Jews who could finally assert their place in America, a sense that is deeply rooted in the Jewish American experience.

However, Wise’s hesitation on a few of America’s darker circumstances, like slavery, affects the sense of excitement.  While he promotes the ideas of equality and freedom, he fails to address the apparent conflicts in these values, particularly the slavery of African Americans. This speech, given just prior to the Civil War, occurs at a period when the country was strongly divided on the topic of slavery. Wise’s avoidance of the matter is significant raising suspicions about his genuine intentions. It’s possible that Wise intended to preserve the vulnerable cultural balance that Jews had begun to attain in America. By neglecting slavery, he may have hoped to maintain the political position Jews were reaching by the mid-1800s, fearful that being associated with such a sensitive issue might distance him from the larger American public.

Jonathan D. Sarna highlights the cautious attitude in American Judaism: A History explains that Jewish American leaders like Wise “hoped to demonstrate that Jews could be fully American” by uniting with the nation’s values of freedom and equality, even if these values were poorly executed (Sarna 145). This alignment with American ideals enabled Jewish Americans to show themselves as both loyal and distinctive in their faith, reducing conflicts in a predominantly Christian culture. According to Sarna, Wise’s quiet on slavery may have been deliberate, as Jewish leaders sought to create “a space in American life that allowed for both integration and Jewish identity,” avoiding controversial stances that might divide them from fellow citizens (147). As a result, while Wise’s speech honors American values, it also highlights the hurdles to Jewish assimilation in a culture that remains split on basic rights and equality.

Despite this apparent oversight, it is critical to understand the incentives behind Wise’s cautious approach. His goal was to ensure the Jewish community that they were accepted in America and could succeed in their new surroundings. For Jews who had faced centuries of persecution in Europe, America brought remarkable opportunity and freedom. Wise’s speech reflects this optimism by emphasizing the concepts of justice and civil liberties as they apply to Jews. Nonetheless, the absence of slavery and other political issues gives the idea that the celebration of American independence is incomplete, as it does not fully reflect the sacrifices of everyone who live in the country.

Examining the restrictions of Wise’s address reminds me of how literature frequently reflects larger societal themes. For example, the concept of “othering” can be seen in works like Lamed Shapiro’s “White Chalah,” which investigates the complications of identity and cultural integration. Similarly, Isaac Meyer Wise’s speech presents Jewishness in a subtle way, reflecting the battle for recognition in a primarily Christian community. While a particular focus on Jewish experiences is essential it eventually blurs over excluded groups’ shared difficulties, indicating an imbalance between assimilation and the broader desire of equality.

In closing, Isaac Mayer Wise was successful in framing American freedom in terms of Jewish experiences, presenting the country as a place where Jews could finally thrive. However, by ignoring the pressing subject of slavery, Wise provided an incomplete picture of American principles. His speech is unquestionably optimistic, but it is not without faults.  For Jews, Wise’s message was motivating and affirming; nevertheless, for others, particularly enslaved African Americans, the concept of American freedom remained beyond reach.  Ultimately, Wise’s speech is a driving reminder of the complexities of the Jewish American experience and identity. It emphasizes the significance of integrating all voices in an account of liberation, as the desire for individuality and acceptance is eternally connected to the struggles of those who share this land.

Works Cited

Wise, Isaac Mayer. “The Fourth of July.” Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, Jules Chametzky et al., W.W. Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 84-86

Shapiro, Lamed. “White Challah.” Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology, Jules Chametzky et al., W.W. Norton & Company, 2001, pp. 154-155 

Sarna, Jonathan D. “American Judaism: A History.” Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2004.

In my mind there exists a city of worlds. Every window I look in is a different story, a different adventure, a different life. Thousands of people live in this city in my mind: people that have introduced themselves to me, that have divulged their most ugly and beautiful workings despite not knowing me, that wave and say hi when I walk down the street. And then there are the people I have not met yet. Some of them I will meet soon and some of them I will never meet. It does not affect their lives very much to talk to me, yet I am irrevocably changed because of them. I first discovered this city when I was around nine years old, and I have never been able to ignore it since. They talk loudly, for one thing. Loudly and constantly. Every day. “Here is who I am and what I love and why you should care about me and my life specifically.” Sometimes I listen very carefully. Other times I have to gently quiet them to be able to go about my day. Living in this city is equal parts exciting and exhausting.

The exhaustion is what isolates me the most, I think. I am constantly bombarded with the knowledge that I am the only one who can hear these people, that I am the only one they can tell their stories to. I exist as both a therapist and a stenographer. And, also, my own person with my own life. The only way for people besides me to hear the stories of my mind-citizens is for me to write them down, something I have slowly been improving at over the past decade. These written accounts must be transcribed, or else I might become lost in a city of a thousand screaming voices. I need other people to share this burden, to take turns under this crown that both gives me everything and gives me everything.

The importance of storytelling in my life is why the poem “Long Story” by Maggie Anderson immediately caught my attention. The fact that it opens with the speaker’s saying, “I need to tell you…” (Anderson, line 1) was incredibly influential to me because I have never known another person with the same intrinsic “need” to be a storyteller. The speaker knows that no one reading this poem will have the same level of understanding or interest in her hometown that she does, but she tells the story anyway. I know that no one else will care about the citizens of my city the way I do, but I write down as much as I can anyway. This facet of myself has made me feel alone for a long time, but now I can confidently believe that there are other people who see themselves in the same way I do. I exist within a group of similar-minded people whose cities may be as different from mine as night and day, but who have these cities, nonetheless.

As the poem continued, more than just that singular connection stood out to me. The speaker describes stories as being “shaped by sound” (Anderson, lines 56-57), something I did not know that I also believed until I read those words. To me, the “sound” of a story is represented by tone, which is created by all the different, specifically-chosen descriptive words. When I write, I do not even have to be consciously aware of the tone; it weaves itself from every verb and adjective used to make a scene fuller and more realistic. The last stanza of “Long Story” is a perfect example of sound created by tone. Despite how the speaker describes herself talking “in the flat voice of [her] people” (Anderson, line 64), the way she writes the mining tragedy is far from flat. It may seem so to her, who lives with tragedy always right around the corner, but even her unconscious word choices mean something important. That importance is only amplified by me, the reader, who makes my own sense of the words based on my background. The end of the last stanza contains phrases about the tragedy that make it feel whole to me; the speaker describes the “useless picks and axes” (Anderson, line 71), “the women crying and screaming” (Anderson, line 75), and the “buried ones… deep inside the burning mountain” (Anderson, lines 76-78). She is just doing her best to convey the event as she understood it, but my mind fills in all the gaps. I can picture axes, women screaming, and burning mountains because of my own experiences, and my interpretation of this scene will be different from anyone else who reads it.

Thinking that abstractly made me contemplate the contents of what I write: the stories of the people in my mind and the way I share them. I often relate everything back to myself, which I think is mostly universal, but the author is only half of a written work. Readers take the specific words, the deliberate phrasing, and bring the story to life using their backgrounds. Just like how I did for “Long Story”, other readers will make my writing whole through their own, specialized experiences with the topics I discuss. The stories I depict will have a different meaning to myself than to other people who read them, but those differences only add to the importance of the work itself. Since reading this poem, I have found myself making some choices with the readers in mind, nothing drastic, but in the way of knowing how much more beautiful the story could be from its different perspectives. “Anything that happens here has a lot of versions…” (Anderson, line 43), the speaker tells us, and she takes pride in it. I have learned to take pride in it too. The perspectives are what make a story real because that is how life works. There is not one side to anything.

I was not born into a storytelling community like the speaker of this poem. I moved around a lot when I was younger, enough to never see the changes in my cities or to know the communities that truly called them home. External stories never were appealing to me, but I did always have a mind full of hidden histories. “History is one long story of what happened to us…” (Anderson, line 28). There is a reason the word “history” already has “story” hidden inside it. Stories are integral to me, my culture, because of how widespread and abstract they can be. They are what the author intended, through tone, through phrasing, but they are also what readers make them out to be. They have a million and one meanings, none more important than the others, and they are what connects us even when the world feels so divided. Stories remind us of the past and they project us into the future. And all of them are worth telling, no matter how little you think your reader knows or cares. “Long Story” by Maggie Anderson solidified to me that “storyteller” was a character trait more common than I thought and it reinforced the importance of perspective upon every work of art we make. I write for me, I write for the people in the city within my mind, and I write for you. For readers everywhere. In the hopes that maybe, one day, something I say will impact someone else in the way this poem has impacted me. Ultimately, is that not just what life is? The little ways we impact others and the little ways they impact us back? How beautifully complex. How wondrously simple.

Literature Cited

Anderson, Maggie. “Long Story.” 1992