For most of Jewish history, the Jew has been considered an alien microbe--sometimes useful, sometimes virulent--within the larger citizenry of nations where Jews settled after the Diaspora that began with the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 A.C.E. The difference between the United States and all of Christian Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century was that the U.S. had a secular constitution that guaranteed full civil rights regardless of religion. Although Jews here did of course face considerable social and educational and economic discrimination, it was not sanctioned legally. The Jewish success story in America was made possible by America's separation of church and state.

In the famous opening line of The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Saul Bellow declared, "I am an American, Chicago born--Chicago, that somber city--and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, then admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." Bellow was declaring himself independent of a past in which a Jew was always a Jew was always a Jew first, yet he was also a distinctively Jewish American writer--a member of a generation that would make an indelible impression on American letters.

America, by virtue of its freedoms, has also posed a considerable threat to Jewish identity--if Jewish identity depends on the practice of ancient religious beliefs within the Jewish community. Intermarriage poses a serious threat. When a Jew marries a non-Jew, unless one parent converts and the children are raised as observant Jews, Judaism as a religion clearly loses its force for that family, and the Jewish religious community is weakened. I certainly understand why most rabbis--whether Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox--disapprove of intermarriage. As an atheist, I cannot share that disapproval. But in spite of intermarriage, Judaism as a religion (sometimes in forms that previous generations would not have approved) is much stronger in America than it is in Europe. But the flourishing of American religion is not unique to American Jews (or Jewish Americans, if you prefer). It is just part of the freedom encouraged by the separation of church and state.

What Jewish identity means if one is not an observant Jew is unclear. I am a half-Jew, American born. My mother was a Roman Catholic, my father a Jew who denied his identity and converted to Catholicism. (For anyone who is interested in this story, I tell it in Half-Jew: A Daughter's Search for her Family's Buried Past. The book is out of print but available on a number of used book Web sites.) By traditional Jewish religious standards, I am not a Jew at all. I do consider myself culturally Jewish, in that Jewish history, and the Jewish experience in America, has informed my life in ways that have been affected by my father's experience--for better and for worse.

Most of what could be called "cultural Jewishness" is positive, at least in America. This has to do with the enormous contributions Jews have made to American literature, art, entertainment, scholarship--to the American language itself--as a result of the unique civil freedom that America gave Jews even before the decline of social anti-Semitism.

But part of cultural Jewishness certainly has to do with the historic sense of being an outsider. I have been appalled on this thread, for example, by anti-Semitic comments linking my atheism with my "Jewish" name. Some of these bloggers have assumed that I agree with the kind of neo-conservative Jews who regard unqualified support for every Israeli government action as a litmus test of being a "good Jew." Even though I have said, over and over, that I disagree entirely with the Jewish neocons who were among the chief architects of the war in Iraq, I am often called to account for what I consider the despicable beliefs of people like William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz. The heart of anti-Semitism is calling one Jew (even a half-Jew) to account for the actions and beliefs of other Jews.

One of the conspicuous omissions of the PBS series on Jewish Americans, by the way, is an analysis of the Jewish neoconservative movement. Because American Jews have historically been associated with liberalism, the subject of Jewish neocons is a touchy one within the larger Jewish community. Also, I know a number of liberal Jews who are fearful that when the public realizes what an important role Jewish neconservatives played in providing the intellectual rationalization for the Iraq disaster, they will blame all American Jews for George W. Bush's foreign policy mess. I think these nervous liberal Jews are too fearful, and have too little faith in America. As far as I'm concerned, the neocons like Kristol and Wolfowitz have simply proved that a Jew can be just as stupid as anyone else--say, Bush. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney. Only in America.

One thing I will never understand is why neoconservative Jews are so unmindful of their own history that they have embraced a political alliance with the Christian Right. If the eighteenth century equivalents of right-wing nut cases like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had prevailed, we would have had a Christian government and the Jewish story in America would have unfolded very differently. Jews owe everything to America's secular traditions and legally secular government. That is why Jews have historically been among the strongest defenders of the separation of church and state. I once asked Michael Medved, a conservative Jewish talk show host and a religiously observant Jew, if it didn't bother him that right-wing evangelical Christians often tell him that they're praying for his conversion. No, he said, because after all, America was a Christian nation. This is an outstanding example of right-wing Jewish historical amnesia. Americans are a predominantly Christian people, but Mr. Medved and his ilk owe their success to the fact that this was emphatically not set up as an official Christian nation.

One of the unique challenges America has posed to Jewish identity--and poses even more strongly today--is that it does not provide negative stereotypes as the basis for constructing a positive sense of self. "We are not what you goyim say we are" was very much a part of Jewish identity and Jewish self-presentation in Christian Europe. Who are Jews, what is a Jew, in a country in which persecution does not create an automatic sense of community identity? In recent years, the memory of the Holocaust has served as a Jewish touchstone, but that is certainly not enough. Yes, American Jews escaped one of the greatest crimes of history (and there is even a certain amount of guilt associated with that, especially for those whose relatives perished in Europe) but that does not tell us what Jewish identity means today. Nor can American Jewish identity be constructed out of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. American Jews can hardly be defined by the fact that they are hated by radical Islamists.

It makes more sense to speak of plural American Jewish identities than of American Jewish identity in the singular. In truth, and although it has taken a long time, American Jews can be anything they want. Jews can argue all they want among themselves about what Jewish identity means; America will never impose an identity on them. That is a gift.