…Blow, Israel, the sacred cornet! Call
Back to thy courts whatever faint heart throb
With thine ancestral blood, thy need craves all.
The red, dark year is dead, the year just born
Leads on from anguish wrought by priest and mob,
To what undreamed-of morn?For never yet, since on the holy height,|
The Temple’s marble walls of white and green
Carved like the sea-waves, fell, and the world’s light
Went out in darkness, — never was the year
Greater with portent and with promise seen,
Than this eve now and here…
(Excerpt from “The New Year: Rosh Hashanah 5643,” by Emma Lazarus, 1882)
I am a huge Emma Lazarus fan. Calling me a “super fan” might be more accurate. I am surprised there are not more of me. I am not sure why the Jewish community is not obsessed with her. In a way that no other American Jew has ever done, her words etched on the Statue of Liberty are part of the fabric of what it means to be an American. That she was an unmarried woman and a Jew in the late 19th century makes her centrality to the American story all the more remarkable. There were no Jews at the writing of the Constitution. There has never been a Jewish president with famous speeches about the meaning of America. There is one and only one Jew whose voice is enshrined on an American monument and our collective American identity:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
And what America means for her in this poem is not complicated. It is an utter repudiation of the scapegoating and demonizing of immigrants that America has seen so much of recently. It is a repudiation of every ugly anti-immigrant sentiment from this administration. And it is an utter repudiation of this Supreme Court’s inhumane and unconscionable decision to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.
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Emma Lazarus speaks with a clarity that over a century has not dampened in any way.
She herself was not an immigrant. Somewhat unusually for a Jew in the 19th century, her family could trace their lineage back a few generations in America. They were part of Shearith Israel, the first synagogue in American history. Her commitment to America being a home for immigrants came from her seeing immigrants arriving from Russia escaping violent pogroms and recognizing the need for safe haven. She also understood that America was a place where old traditions could take new root and be strengthened for it.
What makes her particularly compelling for our day, though, is not simply her stance towards immigration; it is the way in which her Jewishness was not lost in her outward, universal embrace. We are living in a moment where many progressive activists are forced to check one of their identities; people who are fully committed to Jewish peoplehood can feel at odds with progressive politics. I know many people who have had the recent experience of feeling that because of their commitment to Zionism, even a liberal vision of it, they were not welcome in progressive spaces. Their focus on Jewish peoplehood has felt incompatible with a broader commitment to justice.
Emma Lazarus’ poetry surmounts this tension by embracing wholly both the particular and the universal. Her cycle of poems collected in “Songs of a Semite” is an unequivocal and passionate cry for Jewish peoplehood, “Let but an Ezra rise anew, Lift up the Banner of the Jew,” while her “New Colossus” is a call for universal compassion.
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Her poem for Rosh Hashanah in 1882, ends by speaking precisely to her embrace of old and new, universal and particular:
In two divided streams the exiles part,
One rolling homeward to its ancient source,
One rushing sunward with fresh will, new heart.
By each the truth is spread, the law unfurled,
Each separate soul contains the nation’s force,
And both embrace the world.
There is not absolute clarity here on who “the exiles” are, what streams they are parting from, or where exactly “rushing sunward” leads them. But I understand the poem to say that the exiles are the Jewish community; some “rolling homeward,” meaning literally her early Zionist sensibilities that the Jews return to Israel, and figuratively, I take it to mean Jews who are deeply committed to their Jewish identity. Those with a “new heart,” I take to be the spirit of American liberality and openness that she also embodied. Ultimately both are Jewish paths; both are universal paths; both paths are one.
The embrace of an ethic that stands with immigrant communities and rejects the ugliness of recent American policy can also be a soul rolling homeward to its ancient source; it can also be deeply Jewish. Both paths are one.
Rabbi Dan Judson, Ph.D., is the provost of Hebrew College in Newton, MA. He received his doctorate in Jewish history from Brandeis University, and his book, “Pennies for Heaven: The History of American Synagogues and Money,” was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He also likes to tell stories and has appeared on The Moth Radio Hour.