In the 1950s, the future of observant Judaism in America appeared to be so precarious that leading sociologists were predicting its imminent demise. But, like an animal that has been taken off of the endangered species list, it made a remarkable recovery. By the 1990s and 2000s, it was beginning to thrive to such an extent that sociologists had to amend their prognostications: The data now show that by 2050, the United States’s Jewish population will likely be majority Orthodox. In the past several decades, observant Jews, once confined to the shadows, began to attain increasingly prominent positions in public life. The most prominent of them all was Joe Lieberman, the four-term Connecticut senator and first-ever Jew on a major party’s presidential ticket, who died on March 27 at the age of 82.

Lieberman was a great source of pride (or “nachas,” as we say) for American Jews, and for American Orthodox Jews in particular. I vividly remember the excitement I felt as a Yeshiva University High School student in 2000 when Al Gore chose him to be his running mate. When my classmates and I heard that an Orthodox Jew had been chosen to be on a presidential ballot, we realized that a new day had dawned for observant Jews in America: Henceforth, we would no longer feel that we would need to leave our Judaism at home to participate in American life in the public square.