I don’t know how it happened but my invitation to President and Dr Biden’s Rosh Hashanah reception at the White House on the morning of Friday 30th seems to have got lost in the mail.

This is the first time that a President has held a Rosh Hashanah reception. I was so looking forward to seeing Dr Jill vibrate her uvula.

The uvula is the bit at the back of the throat whose vibration produces the guttural sound in Hebrew. When the Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade ruling on abortion in June, Meghan Markle said she had a “guttural” reaction. She did not mean that it made her clear her throat. She meant “visceral”. The viscera are the guts. You can see the chain of Latin association that the duchess had in mind, if not stomach.

Dr Jill seems to have her own Latin associations in mind. In July she flew to San Antonio, Texas to address the annual conference of the Latino civil rights group UnidosUS on the “Quest for Equity”.

This seemed like the right time to tell America’s largest minority that the diversity of the “Latinx” peoples was “as distinct as the bodegas of the Bronx, as beautiful as the blossoms of Miami, and as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio”.

For some reason, the Latinos of the US took exception to being compared to breakfast foods and corner shops. It’s almost as if they exist only to serve the real Americans and blow the leaves off their lawns. The Latinos are indeed diverse, so much so that some of them aren’t Hispanic at all. The Brazilians speak Portuguese, so they should be called Lusitanians.

The Hispanics-who-aren’t-always-Hispanic take even more exception to being called “Latinx”. In 2020, Pew Research reported that only 3 per cent of them used the term. Its existence had yet to filter into the bodegas of the Bronx: 76 per cent said they had never heard of it.

A year later, Bendixen & Amandi International, a polling firm specialising in Latino outreach, found that only two per cent of Hispanic voters were willing to mutilate their mother tongue in order to please an Anglo college professor. Forty per cent, Newsweek reported, found it “bothersome or offensive”, and 30 per cent said they were less likely to support a politician who used it. The more they hear it, the less they like it.

The First Lady also mispronounced “bodegas” as “bogadas”. When I asked the men who blow the leaves off my lawn, they said a “bogada” is the stroke of an oar. I told them to get back to work before I called the Customs & Immigration Service.

American politicians always struggle with languages. It’s almost as if they’re grubbing for votes and reading from a script they’ve never seen before.

I once endured a synagogue address from Joseph Kennedy III, who was then representing our Massachusetts fiefdom in the House of Representatives. He had slowed the traditionally paralytic pace of our Shabbat services to a coma when he turned to the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We all woke up and listened closely as Kennedy III intoned with statespersonlike gravitas: “We need to avoid another… frittata.”

Again with the breakfast foods. Kennedy III had confused the Italian vegetable omelette with the Palestinian tradition of starting the day with a hearty intifada. We are all gutturally attached to these edible symbols of identity. You see it every time you enter a bogada and order a Miami blossom.

American life is an ethnic comedy. Most of the players happily play their part, everyone sending themselves up in stereotypes.

The alternative is to make it an ethnic tragedy. Political profit can be made from that and it keeps the college professors off the streets, but it is a recipe for conflict. Eventually it will turn social life into one long frittata.

It is preferable for Dr Jill to mangle her Spanish and President Joe to struggle with the visceral pronunciation of “metuchah”.

It would also be fine if the administration supported the brave women of Iran as they protest against compulsory head-covering, rather than offer their clerical tormentors a nuclear weapon.

Look at the people who lead it, and it’s easy to find 5783 reasons to be pessimistic about the future of the United States. But there are millions of reasons to be optimistic.

Most Americans are decent people, deeply troubled by the direction their country is taking. As some dude once said, the world is a narrow bridge with the consistency of a two-day-old breakfast taco. Shanah tovah, mis amigos.

Dominic Green is a Wall Street Journal contributor and a fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute