Everything Samuel Adams learned about revolution…

Ira Stoll, a key veteran of the recently defunct New York Sun, has a new book coming out on Samuel Adams (the founding father, not the beer). Is there a Jewish angle to the story? Well, yes, he explains in a recent Nextbook article:

Let’s get this out of the way: Samuel Adams—an organizer of the Boston Tea Party, a member of the Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence—was not Jewish. But he illustrates one of the fascinating features of the Jewish Exodus story—the way it has inspired even non-Jews to fight for their freedom. …

But the link between Samuel Adams, the strand of New England Congregationalism he personified, and Judaism goes well beyond the formal or stylistic, extending into the ideology and rhetoric that motivated Adams and his fellow New Englanders against the British. Again and again, both subtly and directly, Adams placed the American colonists in the role of the Israelites fleeing slavery in Egypt, and likened the British to the oppressive Egyptians.