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A story worth sharing

A story worth sharing

Pharaoh's downfall in the Red Sea (Exodus 14). Wood engraving, published in 1886.

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Rabbi Charles E. Savenor serves as the Executive Director of Civic Spirit that provides training in civic education to faith based day schools.

When America’s founders were imagining the great seal of this new democracy, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson suggested featuring a depiction of the Exodus from Egypt. The Israelites’ overcoming oppression of a powerful king and reaching freedom captured their imagination, as they saw themselves in this triumphant story.


While this biblical narrative inspired many revolutionaries, some of their contemporaries harbored reservations about the powerful appeal of this particular story. Slaveholders in the British West Indies and American South worried about how enslaved people would hear the Exodus story and the conclusions they would draw from it. Their fears only increased in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution in 1804. In an attempt to safeguard against another rebellion of those seeking freedom, slaveholders not only limited literacy, but also censured the Bible. So much so, in 1807 a version of the Bible was produced without mention of the Israelite Exodus.

This so-called “Slave Bible” may have removed the Exodus from its pages, but the human desire for freedom and liberty can never be erased. In fact, we know from the many African American Spirituals - like “Let My People Go” and “Go Down, Moses” - that the Exodus story framed slaves’ aspirations of reaching a “Promised Land” where freedom is a shared norm.

As the Jewish people celebrate Passover this week, the Exodus story is retold and embraced anew. What makes Passover special is not just the telling of the tale, but the internalization of its values and visions through rituals, questions, and conversation.

Our celebrations of Passover, Easter, and Ramadan are also elevated by the storytellers as much as the story. At our holiday tables, we are all educators. Many of us will be in multigenerational settings where we are receivers of our most cherished narratives that one day we will be expected to pass down to our students, children, and grandchildren. Relaying these experiences through our eyes, we become what Abraham Lincoln calls a “living history, ...a history bearing the indubitable testimonies of its own authenticity.”

It is important for us to consider that just as the Exodus has inspired hope on these shores, so too has the American experiment in democracy seeded dreams around the globe. At a time when democracy is challenged near and far, our role as a “living history” about the American story is more important than ever. Despite the United States’ challenges, divides, and conflicts, ours is a story worth sharing.

Tomorrow’s leaders need to hear not just the triumphant memories of yesteryear, but also visions of what our nation can become when a sense of common purpose prevails. When we embrace the opportunity to share how responsibility, integrity, listening, and compromise contribute to the free society in which we live today, we plant the seeds of hope.

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When Good Intentions Kill Cures: A Warning on AI Regulation

Kevin Frazier warns that one-size-fits-all AI laws risk stifling innovation. Learn the 7 “sins” policymakers must avoid to protect progress.

Getty Images, Aitor Diago

When Good Intentions Kill Cures: A Warning on AI Regulation

Imagine it is 2028. A start-up in St. Louis trains an AI model that can spot pancreatic cancer six months earlier than the best radiologists, buying patients precious time that medicine has never been able to give them. But the model never leaves the lab. Why? Because a well-intentioned, technology-neutral state statute drafted in 2025 forces every “automated decision system” to undergo a one-size-fits-all bias audit, to be repeated annually, and to be performed only by outside experts who—three years in—still do not exist in sufficient numbers. While regulators scramble, the company’s venture funding dries up, the founders decamp to Singapore, and thousands of Americans are deprived of an innovation that would have saved their lives.

That grim vignette is fictional—so far. But it is the predictable destination of the seven “deadly sins” that already haunt our AI policy debates. Reactive politicians are at risk of passing laws that fly in the face of what qualifies as good policy for emerging technologies.

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U.S. President Donald Trump discusses economic data with Stephen Moore (L), Senior Visiting Fellow in Economics at The Heritage Foundation, in the Oval Office on August 07, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Getty Images, Win McNamee

Investor-in-Chief: Trump’s Business Deals, Loyalty Scorecards, and the Rise of Neo-Socialist Capitalism

For over 100 years, the Republican Party has stood for free-market capitalism and keeping the government’s heavy hand out of the economy. Government intervention in the economy, well, that’s what leaders did in the Soviet Union and communist China, not in the land of Uncle Sam.

And then Donald Trump seized the reins of the Republican Party. Trump has dispensed with numerous federal customs and rules, so it’s not too surprising that he is now turning his administration into the most business-interventionist government ever in American history. Contrary to Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” in the economy, suddenly, the signs of the White House’s “visible hand” are everywhere.

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Hands holding bars over "Se Habla Español" sign

AI generated

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On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a 6–3 decision from its “shadow docket” that reversed a lower-court injunction and gave federal immigration agents in Los Angeles the green light to resume stops based on four deeply troubling criteria:

  • Apparent race or ethnicity
  • Speaking Spanish or accented English
  • Presence in a particular location
  • Type of work

The case, Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, is still working its way through the courts. But the message from this emergency ruling is unmistakable: the constitutional protections that once shielded immigrant communities from racial profiling are now conditional—and increasingly fragile.

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