Throughout much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, American newspapers often tied Thanksgiving to the Jewish holiday of Sukkot ("Feast of Tabernacles.")
The connection seems obvious - the Pilgrims were religious and modeled themselves as the Jews of the New World, and Sukkot is a harvest festival.
But after World War II, those articles all but disappeared in annual descriptions of Thanksgiving. Why the change?
It seems that scholars could not find any evidence that the Pilgrims themselves ever associated that first Thanksgiving in 1621 with the Jewish festival. No one made that connection until Unitarian minister Rev. Alexander Young wrote about it in 1841. None of the American proclamations of the festival mention the Bible.
Nevertheless, the claim is plausible, if not documented. The Jews who went on pilgrimage festivals would give the voluntary thanks-offering (todah) when they reached the Temple, and the English translation of the Bible uses the word "thanksgiving" for this.
So the evidence is thin that American Thanksgiving is based on Sukkot. But that doesn't mean that Jews shouldn't give thanks. As the American Israelite wrote on Thanksgiving 1920:
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