In his monumental history “The World of Our Fathers,” Irving Howe wrote of the New York immigrant-Jewish-community life of the lower East Side from the late 19th century to the 1920s. It is a compendium of images as familiar to us now as Paul Revere’s ride or Washington crossing the Delaware: the tenements, the sweatshops, the street markets, the peddlers’ horses falling dead in the summer heat, the piano lessons rising note by tortured note through the open windows.

The American establishment held the immigrants in an ambiguous relationship, needing their labor urgently but rewarding them with slave wages, and shunning them socially, with all sorts of legal restrictions and extralegal torments. The newcomers, well versed in similar Old World horrors, organized themselves and sought justice. Some of them among the Italians and Jews were radicals. The radical-humanist Jewish sensibility, expressing the demand for workers’ rights and women’s suffrage, had no time or patience for God. In this era, for every religious fellow who went daily with his prayer book to the synagogue there was one sitting in a cafe reading a socialist paper.

Of course, brilliantly weaving themselves into the American tapestry at the same time were the descendants of the earlier German Jewish immigration–the Baruchs, the Morgenthaus, the Strauses, the Jewish banking families and megamerchants… thus suggesting to nativist anti-Semites, and torchbearers of the Ku Klux Klan, that Jews could be condemned either as communist scum or capitalist bloodsuckers, depending on the needs of the moment.

Jewish children today read books extolling the achievements of Hank Greenberg, who hit 58 home runs for the Detroit Tigers, or Sid Luckman, who played quarterback for the great Chicago Bears teams of the 1930s, or Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers, perhaps the best pitcher of modern times, though he would not take the mound on the High Holidays of the Jewish New Year. We would not want them to read about that archetype of malevolence, that astoundingly wicked protege of Sen. Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, who showed the gift for American politics of someone descended from the Mayflower. By contrast, we might want to include among our exemplars the young New Yorkers who, within a few years of Cohn’s foul labors, went down to Mississippi to help the black civil-rights voter-registration effort in the 1960s and together with James Chaney, the young black man working with them, were murdered for their efforts… Andrew Goodman… and Michael Schwerner, whose mother taught my children biology in New Rochelle High School…

Is Bob Dylan Jewish? Was that great Whitmanesque chant singer of our time, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg–was he Jewish? Or to put it another way, as I’ve come up in time, here in this rumination, when did I stop writing about Jewish history and start writing about American history?

The United States cannot be conceived in a vision of religious exclusion: the two ideas are incompatible. If you consider a paradigm that merges the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock and the Jews of Ellis Island, something essential emerges. The Puritans proposed for their new land a covenant with God modeled on that of the ancient Israelites. They spoke of America as “Zion.” That Puritan adaptation–according to the historian Garry Wills–is what we usually mean when we speak of our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage. It was the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather who called George Washington the American Moses, King George the pharaoh and the Atlantic Ocean the Red Sea. Via the early Puritans has come the transreligious dimension of American public life whereby our nation is not an end in itself but exists for a higher purpose, a transcendental role–in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “the last best hope of mankind,” or in even more venerable words, “a light unto nations.”

The opportunity presented to the larger American community by this civil conflation of religious traditions has not yet become apparent to many. But in a country where the religion of Jewish public servants has necessarily been held as a private matter, Senator Lieberman is now proposed publicly as a Jewish vice president, his religion, or the assured and undeniable rectitude of his character that he humbly attributes to his religion, being the essence of his electability at this particular time. This is what is so delicious a shock, and makes his nomination, to my mind, one of the seminal moments in American political history. It will be honored as a principled decision of Vice President Gore, yes, but it is the greater, if ironic, achievement of President Clinton that his errant personal behavior has moved the nation forward to its ecumenical destiny.