A near-unanimous U.S. House passed a resolution on Wednesday marking Jewish American Heritage Month by asking elected officials and other leaders to call out antisemitism and to educate the public about the accomplishments of Jewish Americans.
“It is a resolution that highlights the enduring contributions of Jewish Americans to our country,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who introduced the first Jewish Heritage Month resolution in December 2005, said on the House floor.
Wasserman Schultz has sponsored the resolution since President George W. Bush proclaimed the first Jewish Heritage Month in 2006.
The month celebrates “the generations of Jewish Americans who were integral parts of the rich mosaic of people and heritages that make up these United States,” Wasserman Schultz said.
The resolution singled out several accomplished Jews, including the inventors Irving Naxon (slow cooker), Sylvan Goldman (shopping cart) and Edwin Land (Polaroid instant camera). It also named Ruth Handler, who founded Mattel and invented the Barbie doll, and Ralph Baer, whose “Brown Box” was a prototype for the first multiplayer, multiprogram video game system, as well as the actress Hedy Lamarr, whose concept of “frequency hopping” made possible such wireless communications technologies as wifi, GPS and bluetooth.
“As Jews, we have a long-standing commitment to tikkun olam, a commitment to repair the world,” Wasserman Schultz said. “We take great pride regarding the impact we have made on so many generations of Americans.”
The vote was 421-1, with just one Republican, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) voting no.
Massie was one of the GOP lawmakers who successfully delayed a vote on legislation to extend existing anti-boycott legislation to prevent compliance with boycotts imposed by international governmental organizations like the United Nations.
For the second straight year, the debate took place against a rising tide of Jew-hatred that followed the Hamas-led terror attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The Anti-Defamation League’s annual audit of Jew-hatred reported a record 9,354 incidents of assault, harassment and vandalism in 2024, the fourth straight year of a new annual high and the most since the audit began 46 years ago.
“This House, elected officials at the state and local level, faith leaders, community leaders and university administrators all have an obligation to confront antisemitism,” Rep. Derek Schmidt (R-Kan.) said during the House floor debate.
But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who is Jewish, wondered aloud why Jew-hatred wasn’t called out in the case of Ed Martin, whom U.S. President Donald Trump first tried to install as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. After the Senate balked, Trump named Martin an associate deputy attorney general, which does not require Senate confirmation.
Martin praised one of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrectionists, whom Trump pardoned and who has backed Nazi ideology and posed as Adolf Hitler, The Washington Post reported. Martin called the man, Timothy Hale-Cusanelli, a friend “slurred and smeared” by allegations of antisemitism.
“We must insist that men like Ed Martin and his antisemitic associates and friends have no place representing the people of the United States in our government,” Raskin said. “We must pay more than lip service to the idea of fighting antisemitism.”
Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.), a newly elected Jewish member of Congress, responded that the House debate was neither the time nor the place to discuss Martin.
“A resolution like this that says that people should care about these issues is not the time for people to go and make partisan potshots about antisemitism,” Fine said on the floor. “Antisemitism doesn’t have a monopoly on either party. Both have it. My side does too. But where we fight together to take it on and not to take shots, we actually begin to solve the problem.”
“If a discussion of antisemitism and the contributions of Jewish Americans is not an appropriate time to talk about antisemitism in the government, I wonder what is,” Raskin countered.