Like Minded Conservatives

July 1, 2010

On this day, on the eve of our celebration of Independence Day, Barack Obama has decided to mock our celebration and make political manure out of a great American symbol. He delivers a speech designed to set the stage for amnesty legislation (a.k.a. massive Democrat voter registration program). Let’s look at the facts ...

Obama tells us …

“ … A young woman named Emma Lazarus, whose own family fled persecution from Europe generations earlier took up the cause of these new immigrants. Although she was a poet, she spent much of her time advocating for better health care, housing for the newcomers. And inspired by what she saw and heard she wrote down her thoughts and donated a piece of work to help pay for the construction of a new statue. The Statue of Liberty, which actually was funded in part by small donations from people across America. Years before the statue was built, years before the it would be seen by throngs of immigrants craning their necks skyward at the end of a long and brutal voyage, years before it would come to symbolize everything that we cherish, she imagined what it could mean.  She imagined the site of a giant statue at the entry point of a great nation.  But unlike the great monuments of the past, this would not signal an empire.  Instead, it would signal one's arrival to a place of opportunity and refuge …”

Fact: The family history does not sound like they fled persecution, it seems they had a pretty good life, for many generations  …

“Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849. She was the daughter of Moses and Esther Nathan Lazarus. Her father was a wealthy sugar merchant. Emma and her sisters were educated by private tutors and spent their summers at the seashore in Rhode Island.”

“Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of Moshe Lazarus and Esther Nathan, Portuguese Sephardic Jews whose families had been settled in New York since the colonial period.”

“The Lazarus family, of Sephardic origins, had acquired wealth generations earlier and, like others in their aristocratic circles, they looked down on the new-moneyed folk. Theirs was the genteel Victorian society of New York's exclusive Union and Knickerbockers clubs, and their children grew up tutored in music, language, literature, and arts, far removed from the excess of the Gilded Age”

Fact:  Emma Lazarus, a Jew, took up the cause of persecuted Russian Jews, some of whom migrated to the United States. It does not seem that the plight of other immigrants held her interest. 

“The turning point in Lazarus's life was the outbreak of violent anti-Semitism (hatred of Jewish people) in Russia and Germany during the early 1880s. When a writer defended these activities in the Century Magazine, Lazarus wrote the angry reply "Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism" in the next issue. From this moment on she began a private crusade for her people. “

“… she began to organize relief efforts for the thousands of Jewish immigrants crowding into the United States and to write a series of articles for the magazine ‘American Hebrew’.”

“In her writings, Lazarus set forth her ideas and plans for the rebirth of Jewish life by a national and cultural revival in the United States and in the Holy Land.”

 “In the winter of 1882, multitudes of destitute Ashkenazy Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York; Lazarus taught technical education to help them become self-supporting.”

Fact: Lazarus became a strong supporter of Zionism and a Jewish state in Palestine …

“In 1883 Lazarus sailed for England, where she was received with great enthusiasm for her work on behalf of Jewish immigrants.”

“Lazarus suggested that assimilated American Jews should recognize their privileged status as well as their vulnerability in America, that all Jews should understand their history in order not to be misled by anti-Semitic generalizations, and that Eastern European Jews should emigrate to Palestine.”

“And in the third essay, ‘The Jewish Problem’ (February 1883), she observed that Jews, who are always in the minority, ‘seem fated to excite the antagonism of their fellow countrymen.’ To this problem she offered a solution: the founding of a state by Jews for Jews in Palestine. Lazarus promoted Zionism throughout the 1880s.”

“With determination, she called on Jews to establish a national homeland in Palestine as a haven from anti-Semitism, and to that end she organized the Society for the Improvement of East European Jews to help resettle victims of Russian oppression in Palestine.”

Missing factual information: None of the references mentions “spending much of her time advocating for better health care and housing for the newcomers”. She was primarily an advocate for Zionism.

Facts about the poem:

“Lazarus wrote ‘The New Colossus’ in 1883 ‘for the occasion’ of an auction to raise money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The poem was singled out and printed in the Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition at the National Academy of Design because event organizers hoped it would ‘awaken to new enthusiasm’ those working on behalf of the pedestal.”

 “These words were not originally attached to the statue. The poem, which was written in 1883 to help raise money for the statue's pedestal, was forgotten until it was rediscovered in a Manhattan used-book store. The text was only placed on the pedestal in 1903, and it transformed the statue's meaning.”

Fact: Lazarus’ life is defined far more by a struggle to define her faith as compared to a “Mother- Theresa-like” figure to America’s immigrants of the 1880s

“However, as observed through modern perspective, Lazarus is seen as a person writing from the outside, a person set apart from the people she sought to guide and aide, a defender of the Jews who is hardly one of them.”

“Yet her work has not held up well over time. Except for her sonnet, it is mostly unknown and unread. It has not held up in part because her talent was not a major one (many of her poems are insubstantial; her essays too antagonistic). Essentially, however, it has not held up because much of it no longer rings true. Like her letters, her poems reflect the discomfort of a woman who was not totally at home in the Christian world she inhabited but had not quite found her footing in the Jewish one either. It has the feel of outsideness, of a writer who held herself too much apart, too much above the people she sought to defend and counsel. The outsideness has stood in the way of its survival.”

Facts about the Statue of Liberty …  which is not the “Statue of Immigration”.

“The people of France gave the Statue to the people of the United States over one hundred years ago in recognition of a friendship established during the American Revolution. Over the years, the meanings of the Statue have grown until she has become an international icon of freedom and liberty, the most recognizable symbol of democracy in the world.”

“The Statue of Liberty officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World, dedicated on October 28, 1886, is a monument commemorating the centennial of the signing of the United States Declaration of Independence, given to the United States by the people of France to represent the friendship between the two countries established during the American Revolution. It represents a woman wearing a stola, a radiant crown and sandals, trampling a broken chain, carrying a torch in her raised right hand and a tabula ansata, where the date of the Declaration of Independence JULY IV MDCCLXXVI is inscribed, in her left arm.”

 “The idea of the Statue originated around 1865 with Edouard de Laboulaye who saw the United States as a country that had proved that democracy was a viable type of government. De Laboulaye also saw the gift as a way to reflect his wish for a democracy in France. ”

“On October 28, 1886 the dedication of the Statue of Liberty took place in front of thousands of spectators.”

“A bronze plaque in an exhibit on the second floor of the pedestal is inscribed with the sonnet ‘The New Colossus’ by Emma Lazarus. It has never been engraved on the exterior of the pedestal, despite such depictions in editorial cartoons …. The name ‘Mother of Exiles’ was never taken up as the statue's name.”

Missing factual information: there is no evidence that immigration was part of the inspiration for the Statue of Liberty.

“The classical appearance of the Statue of Liberty is based on the mythological Roman goddess Libertas, who represented liberty and freedom. The right foot is raised and her left forward as if trampling broken shackles. The torch represents enlightenment. The Keystone in her hand represents knowledge. Libertas has been the symbol of independence, freedom as well as social justice for 2000 years.”

“The torch was first associated with Liberty in Augustin Dumont's Genius of Liberty on the July Column, a monument inaugurated in 1840. The idea of bringing light to the world was then expressed with a torch by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in his Imperial France bringing light to the world and protecting Agriculture and Science in 1866.”

Fact: The Statue of Liberty itself was not funded by small donations from people across America

“Since the Statue was a joint effort between American and France, it was agreed that the American people were to build the pedestal, and the French people were responsible for the Statue and assembly. In France, public fees, various forms of entertainment and items with the Statue on it were ways to raise money. This was also tried in the United States- but with limited results. Joseph Pulitzer stepped in and was able to raise the remaining money for the pedestal using his newspaper ‘The World’.”

Missing factual information: It seems unlikely that Emma Lazarus “imagined the site of a giant statue at the entry point of a great nation … years before the statue was built”. There is absolutely no factual information to support any role Lazarus had in association with the Statue of Liberty prior to 1883. Further it seems that her role was very minor, almost an afterthought  

Fact: Good, bad or indifferent, Lazarus was a prolific writer. Listed below are titles of books, poems and essays that she published. You decide if Obama has painted a true picture of this woman’s life…

Poems and Translations: Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Sixteen (1866)

Admetus and Other Poems (1871)

Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life (1874)

The Spagnoletto (1876)

Outside the Church (1872)

Phantasmagoria (1876)

The Christmas Tree (1877)

The Taming of the Falcon (1879)

Echoes (1880?)

Progress and Poverty (1881)

Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine (1881)

American Literature (1881)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1882)

Emerson's Personality (1882)

Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems ( 1882)

Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew? (1882)

Russian Christianity vs. Modem Judaism (1882)

The Jewish Problem (1883)

Judaism the Connecting Link Between Science and Religion (1882)

The Schiff Refuge (1882)

An Epistle to the Hebrews (1882-1883)

The Last National Revolt of the Jews (1882-183)

An Epistle to the Hebrews (1882–1883)

Cruel Bigotry (1883)

The New Colossus (1883)

To R.W.E. (1884)

M. Renan and the Jews (1884)

The Poet Heine (1884)

A Day in Surrey with William Morris (1886)

By the Waters in Babylon, Little Poems in Prose (1887)

The Poems of Emma Lazarus, I and II (posthumously 1888)

References

http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ki-Lo/Lazarus-Emma.html

http://jwa.org/historymakers/lazarus/new-colossus

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lazarus

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/lazarus.html

http://www.nps.gov/stli/historyculture/index.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty