4 comments about Emma Lazarus (Jewish Encounters).

1. With the words of the title of this review, Esther Schor introduces the reader to Emma Lazarus (1849 -1887)in her newly-published biography of this late-nineteenth Century American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and social activist for newly-arrived immigrants. Schor is Professor of English at Princeton University, a poet in her own right, and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her biography of Emma Lazarus is part of a series of books called "Jewish Encounters" edited by Jonathan Rosen and "devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas."
   
   Emma Lazarus is known to most readers only as the author of the sonnet "The New Colossus" which ultimately achieved iconic status with its inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But there is much more to Emma Lazarus than this great poem, as Schor convincingly demonstrates.Schor writes in an accessible, colloquial style that shows great affection and understanding for Lazarus. Although Schor's book includes a substantial amount of analysis of Lazarus's literary work, the focus of the book lies in bringing Emma Lazarus herself to life. Schor's biography, while not constituting the last word on Emma Lazarus, fulfills its goal of showing why Lazarus is worth knowing. Even with this book, and other studies of Emma Lazarus, she remains a complex and elusive figure.
   
   Lazarus was born to an assimilated family of wealthy New York Jews who had lived in the United States for at least four generations. Lazarus received an outstanding private education and became known as a prodigy when her first volume of poems, written between the ages of 14 and 16 was published by her father. As a young woman, Emma Lazarus attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson and had a complicated relationship with him, as Schor discusses at length. Lazarus visited Emerson in Concord twice near the end of his life and became friends with his daughter Ellen. Lazarus was a highly connected woman with friends, male and female, among the most culturally and politically influential people in the United States.
   
   Lazarus made impressive contributions to poetry besides "The New Colossus" and wrote influential essays and reviews as well. Her best work, such as "The New Colossus" deals with her vision of America and with the place of Judaism in the United States. In fact her work tends to fuse together these two subects. As Schor suggests, Emma Lazarus became the first of what would become a long series of Jewish-American writers who would try to express what they deemed to be the ideals of Judaism in secular and literary rather than in traditionally religious terms. Schor argues that Lazarus's work shows an interpenetration of American and Jewish ideals, with America providing freedom, liberty, and economic and cultural opportunity, while Jewish ideals expanded upon concepts of social justice and ethics within the American framework.
   
   Schor argues that there was a Jewish undercurrent to Lazarus's works from its earliest stages, beginning with her poem "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport." Lazarus translated Heine and medieval Jewish poets, and, in 1881 published a volume of poetry titled "Songs of a Semite" which expanded upon Jewish themes. She wrote influential essays which exposed anti-semitism and the Russian Pogroms and considered the meaning of Judaism in American. She worked actively for the well-being of Jewish immigrants to the United States and was among the first to champion the idea of a homeland for Jews in what was then Palestine to escape the ravages of European anti-semitism.
   
   Lazarus remained secular throughout her life, and her own religious convictions can, I think best be described as a sort of nebulous theism. She described herself as an "outsider" to both Judaism and Christianity and, as Schor points out, anticipated the choices and the ambiguities that many American Jews struggle with today in considering their own relationship to Judaism. The complexities of Lazarus's views of Judaism are well-illustrated in a poem she wrote late in her life, "By the Waters of Babylon", the first prose-poem to be written in English. Schor gives a good analysis of this poem, and of many others.
   
   As Schor emphasizes, Lazarus was a paradoxical figure in that she never lost her aristocratic, bearing as a member of America's privileged class and yet worked tirelessly for the health, education and culture of the new immigrants and, with her poem on the Statue of Liberty, redefined the meaning of this national symbol before it was even constructed. For all her activism, Lazarus never quite lost her basic conservatism -- a paradoxical combination that I continue to find fascinating. Emma Lazarus also remains difficult as a person, behind the ambiguities of her friendships with men and women and her Victorian reserve. Lazarus never married. She wrote, but did not publish, a remarkably suggestive sonnet, titled "Assurance" which for many readers, offers insight into Lazarus's own sexuality.
   
   Emma Lazarus has been an inspiration to me for her vision of the United States and for her commitment to an ethical, active Judaism with a deeply secular cast. Schor's book will introduce the reader to an American writer who deserves increased recognition. Schor's book also includes an excellent sampling of Lazarus's poetry. Readers who would like to read more of Emma Lazarus may be interested in the selection of her poetry titled "Emma Lazarus" edited by John Hollander in the American Poets Project series of the Library of America.
   
   Robin Friedman



2. Esther Schor has done us all a great favor by her exploration of a "forgotten" figure in American history.
   
   We all know the poem at the Statue of Liberty - certainly the last lines of it. And yet very few people know who wrote it, or what its historical context was. As is the case with many deeply ingrained elements of culture, this poem is assumed to emerged whole from a member of our citizen community.
   
   We learn here that Emma was a very, very remarkable woman. Long before women in American had anything approaching "equal rights," she asserted herself into many political dialogues and won recognition for the intellectual strength of women in America.
   
   Her life is instructive to us all - I learned a lot from this book, which is engagingly written and a real exploration of a vital element of our national culture. It's especially poignant in the current political debate about restricting immigration from Mexico...



3. A worthwhile biography by a scholar who blends critical insight with sheer enthusiasm in a very appealing manner. By the late 1870s and 1880s, Browning, Whitman, Henry James, Emerson (the latter two among her many ardent correspondents) and many others had all praised Emma Lazarus's groundbreaking translations of Heine as well as her own verse that appeared in Lippincott's and the Century. But she was fated to be memorialized exclusively for "The New Colossus," her great paean to American largesse, and by Jewish Americans for the few years of poetry, essays and political activity dedicated to their cause. Representative of this trend, Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) would celebrate her as "the most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry and possibly the most eminent poet among Jews since Heine and Judah Loeb Gordon." Certainly as far as Jewish women of Szold's generation are concerned, Lazarus demonstrated previously unimagined ways of intervening in American public culture. Nevertheless, her achievements have been largely forgotten; among late twentieth century scholars, Lazarus's contribution to Jewish-American history has been condescendingly noted at best. Though Lazarus played a significant proto-Zionist role, she is even ignored in major studies of American Zionism. And yet to fully understand the unusual literary and polemical pedigree of American Zionism, one must begin with a careful consideration of Lazarus's assimilationist strategies--and an acknowledgement of her cultural force. By far the most influential Jewish-American literary figure of the nineteenth century, Lazarus's reflections on the status of the Jew in gentile society and on the question of the Jews' return to Palestine offer a rich literary and historical context for examining later imaginative responses to the perpetually conflicted nature of Zionism in America.
   
   Readers who want to explore Lazarus's poetic vision in greater depth may be interested in Ranen Omer-Sherman's Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature (Brandeis UP 2002)which at times offers a deeper engagement with the poems themselves than Schor attempts. Omer-Sherman explores the poet's lack of complete confidence in the viability of Jewishness in America and demonstrates how Lazarus was torn between her belief in universalism and her proto-Zionist program, between her desire to assimilate and her pained recognition of her marginality in the wake of Emerson's rejection of her work. As for the poems themselves, the best available one is Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings edited by Gregory Eiselein.



4. Interesting book about activist and poet Emma Lazarus, the lady who wrote the Statue of Liberty poem. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

No comments about Struggles in the Promised Land: Towards a History of Black-Jewish Relations in the United States.

No comments about A Young Man in Search of Love.

1 comments about Rites: A Guatemalan Boyhood.

1. Read Pereira's Cross and the Pear Tree if you want to read something worthwhile, even fascinating. This book, however, isn't it. Don't waste your time.

4 comments about Ana Pauker: The Rise and Fall of a Jewish Communist.

1. Sorry, no arguments will convince me to relativize the following fact: at the time of her political activity, Ana Pauker had to know the criminal (genocidal, to be accurate) nature of the political party she was a leader of. My mother still cringes when she remembers the slogan "Ana Pauker si cu Dej - baga spaima in burgeji" (Ana Pauker and [Gheorghiu] Dej scare the bourgeois) cried out at forced mass rallies. The "bourgeois" mentioned in this aggresive rhime had reasons to be scared of Pauker. Hundreds of thousands Romanians are estimated to have been emprisoned for political reasons, thousands of them tortured and killed, burried without a grave. Pauker believed she can "change things from inside?". Would _you_ join the Nazi party (for example) to improve its ethics???



2. This is a sound and wise biography of Ana Pauker. An exceptional volume. An examination of the Romanian communist system and its leaders was long due--beyond false anxieties. And Levy does it so superbly, blending history with years of archival and interview-based research. A lucid cut in the political life of a controversial Romanian communist leader, Ana Pauker.



3. "Ana Pauker" is an excellent and compelling biography that blows old notions about East European communists out of the water. While hardly glossing over Ana Pauker's serious delusions and often cynical compromises, Robert Levy meticulously and convincingly demonstrates that Pauker was remarkably resistant to Soviet dictates during the most perilous years of Stalin's reign. This is a fascinating, well-written account based on recently unearthed communist archives and personal interviews of participants and eye-witnesses. Anyone interested in communist history or contemporary East European Jewish history will find this book utterly informative.



4. "Ana Pauker" is an excellent and compelling account that blows old notions of East European communists out of the water. While not glossing over Ana Pauker's serious delusions and often cynical compromises, Robert Levy convincingly demonstrates that Pauker was remarkably resistant to Soviet dictates during the most perilous period of Stalin's reign. Meticulously documented with a massive amount of archival documents and interviews of participants and eye-witnesses, this wonderfully written book is a must-read for anyone interested in communist and East European Jewish history.

No comments about Cynthia Ozick (Bloom's Modern Critical Views).

4 comments about Martin Luther: Hitler's Spiritual Ancestor.

1. "Hitler's spiritual ancestor" is a short book that tackles some very large questions. The author Peter Wiener wrote the book towards the end of World War II and was a Christian of German origin. The huge questions that he tackles include: "How could the German people allow Hitler to lead them into a war that was so brutal, destructive and remorseless?", "Who was Martin Luther...really?" and "What part did Martin Luther's teachings play in the horrific genocide of the second world war?". Although the author doesn't answer all these questions completely (then again who could?), he brings up some excellent points and allows the reader to "see for themselves".

   This work does not portray Luther as the "Great Reformer" that many theologians remember him as. The author does an excellent job of portraying Luther with 'warts and all' and he does this by using Luther's own writings against him. He argues that Luther set the scene for the bloodiest genocide in human history. His teachings, and his philosophy were instrumental in paving the way for a German nation filled with people that had a warped idea of Christianity and humanity. In fact the author portrays it as a "pseudo-political German religion" that puts the nation first and Jesus second. After hundreds of years of being indoctrinated by Luther and his unbelievable theology, it is no wonder that the people of Germany were so easily able to accept Hitler and his maniacal, nationalistic ideas of ethnic cleansing.




2. !!!!
   Mr. Wiener is playing on people's ignorance of Martin Luther to sell books.

   Just looking at the photo on the page is enough to convince any thinking individual that the author has an obvious ax to grind and is willing to try and color the publics rational thought process by any means, especially guilt by association, to effect a negative opinion of Martin Luther, the great Protestant reformer whom we owe so much to this day.

   Martin Luther was one of the most courageous spirits in human history who at the same time never lost his humanity. When all the world was sucked up into Catholicism's inconsistencies and power, Martin Luther stood alone and said God was not owned by the Catholic Church, thus allowing a freedom that had been denied to Christians for hundreds of years before and enjoyed hundreds of years afterwards, to this day. Perhaps the freedom we now enjoy is enjoyed too recklessly and in vain as evidenced by such books as Wiener's.

   It is absolutely asinine to try to link Martin Luther to the holocaust and Hitler.

   Martin Luther in truth was the spiritual ancestor of nearly e-v-e-r-y-one today. Hitler distorted so many truths and perverted every good thing he could, falsified so much and smeared so many, I don't see how you can blame the victims of such mischaracterizations or use them as a scapegoat.

   Even the Bible has been used for evil. I don't see how any one can blame Martin Luther if Hitler found something in Martin Luther's writings to pervert. But that is the book game these days---try and smear someone's good name in order to sell books.

   After a while those who are truly interested in the truth will understand what a grave injustice Weiner has tried to do to a person who has done so much for humanity, even still today, while others like Wiener are only interested in destroying for destructions sake which leads you to ask the question, "Is Hitler Wiener's ancestor?"




3. Any person who has read Wiener's book and taken it at face value needs to read the book written in response to it in its historical context. Gordon Rupp's book, "Martin Luther, Hitler's Cause of Cure: In Reply to Peter F. Wiener," 1945, dismantles Wiener's thesis by: showing his use of quotes out of textual and historical context; his use of English translations of Luther taken third-hand from German-to French-then to English; dependence on secondary sources, and his failure to follow the development of Luther's thought. Luther has been blamed for many of the world's ills, isn't it time the blame be placed on the right sources and writers work for resolution of the problems instead of using Luther as a "whipping boy."



4. It seems to me that there are many here who treat Luther as a demi-god. To them Luther could do no wrong because he saved us from the big, bad Catholic Church.
   
   I am tired of people apologizing for Luther's comments, saying that he is being taken "out of context". How do you take it "out of context" when you read that Luther said that we should round the Jews into their synagogues and burn it down? Is there a way that can be taken in a nice way? I have read how the apologists for Luther explain away his quotes, such as when he said we should "sin boldly". It doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
   
   Or how can this be taken out of context?
   
   "Christ committed adultery first of all with the woman at the well about whom Saint John tells us. Was not everybody about Him saying: `Whatever has he been doing with her?" Secondly, with Mary Magdalene, and thirdly with the woman taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even Christ, who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died"
   
   How can that statement be taken out of context? How can it be, within the right context, that it is all right to say that our Lord was a fornicator?
   
   The author was not a Catholic. He did not have an axe to grind. He does nothing but quotes from Luther to speak for himself. The quotes are extensive. Even if half of the can be explained away, it still shows a very dark side to Luther.
   
   By contrast, the apologists for Luther are Lutheran or at least Protestant. I would like to see a non-Protestant defend Luther. Then their arguments would carry weight.
   
   Luther was a very complex individual. One minute he could write something very beautiful, the next minute he could write something very ugly. His apologists try to explain away his uqly quotes. His detractors ignore his
   beautiful quotes. But the truth is that he was capable of saying both.

1 comments about World History Biographies: Anne Frank: The Young Writer Who Told the World Her Story (NG World History Biographies).

1. Attractively designed, this latest entry in the National Geographic World History Biographies is packed with information. Organized into brief, readable chapters, the book covers Anne's early years, her life growing up, her family's being forced into hiding at the Annex, and their discovery and deportation. It describes Anne and Margot's tragic deaths at the ages of 15 and 19 from typhoid at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, just months before liberation. A timeline of World War II and Holocaust events runs across the bottom of many of the two-page spreads. Statistics, maps, and information are interspersed about the European Jews, their customs, beliefs and holidays. Much of the book's information is in text boxes, juxtaposed on top of other information. There are lots of black and white and color photos, some of which were taken by Otto Frank showing Anne's early life. The visual appeal of Anne's plaid diary cover is the backdrop for the table of contents and some of the pictures, including those at the end which show young would-be writers how the story of the publication of Anne's diary have resulted in subsequent play and movie adaptations, and sustained the world's continued fascination with her life. Included are a glossary, bibliography, websites, and an index. The author has also written Eleanor of Aquitaine and Mandela for this series. The narrative's casual, informal tone seems to be meant to introduce younger readers to Anne Frank's life, and sometimes clashes with the somber information and very graphic concentration camp pictures, which are more appropriate for older readers. For ages 11-14. Reviewed by Andrea Davidson

No comments about The Elephant and My Jewish Problem: Selected Stories and Journals, 1957-1987.

1 comments about Fraulein Rabbiner Jonas: The Story of the First Woman Rabbi (Arthur Kurzweil Book).

1. I had always thought, as did most American Jews, that Sally Preisand of Reform Judaism was the first woman formally ordained in the early 1970s.
   
   I was astonished to learn, in the 1990s, that the first woman rabbi was actually Regina Jonas, an Orthodox woman who was ordained by Liberal (Reform) Judaism in Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s.
   
   After an extremely dramatic and fascinating life, Rabbi Jonas vanished from history after her death at Auschwitz in 1944. Records of her life and achievements gathered dust in an East German archive, until her files were discovered after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany.
   
   Concealed in those dusty files was a story that would make a good film. Jonas was born and brought up as an Orthodox Jew in a dangerous, poverty-stricken Berlin slum. As a child, she was so determined to become a rabbi that none of her classmates thought of laughing at her.
   
   She struggled resolutely through Berlin's Reform rabbinical seminary, supporting herself by teaching endless Hebrew and religion classes to restless schoolchildren and finally triumphed when she received Reform ordination and a rabbinic pastor job with the Berlin Jewish community in her early thirties.
   
   Her triumph was short-lived. She assumed a back-breaking workload, caring for hundreds of German Jews whose rabbis had been forced to flee abroad or been sent to Nazi prisons. Jonas felt unable to leave Germany because she could not abandon her widowed elderly mother or her desparate congregants.
   
   And then -- as if her life were not complicated enough --- Jonas, a pretty and very intense woman in her late thirties, who had hitherto avoided involvements with men, believing that a woman rabbi should remain single to demonstrate the seriousness of her commitment --- Jonas fell passionately and happily in love with a much older male Reform rabbi, a widower who had been called out of retirement to serve as the last pre-WWII rabbi of Hamburg.
   
   During the last chapters of her biography, I was alternated between admiration at her wonderful care of her distraught congregants, gladness that she found a supportive and admiring fiance, and a deep sadness knowing that I would lose this remarkable woman to the concentration camps. But the story had yet another twist.
   
   Deported to Theresienstadt, Jonas joined a group of people working for psychologist Viktor Frankl, who assigned her the toughest rabbinical job of her life: greeting newly arrived Jews, helping them get oriented, and keeping their morale up.
   
   By the time Jonas and her mother were deported to Auschwitz and their deaths in 1944, Regina Jonas had packed more adventure --- and certainly done more good in the world --- into 42 years of life than most of us experience in eighty years.
   
   And Jonas is not presented as a plaster saint. She had a strong sense of humor; a bit of a temper; was deeply spiritual but could be quite aggressive; and based on her rise from slum child to middle class rabbi, she possessed a kindness and ability to empathize with people from all walks of life.
   
   I started crying at the end of the book. I felt as if I'd lost a friend. As the lay leader of a Jewish Renewal women's havurah (prayer and study group), I did a report on the book for my group and they loved the book. It's good reading not only for women interested in spirituality, but also for anyone male or female who admires a hero in any field.
   
   I gave this four stars instead of five only because the author could have provided a little more background on Germany, the Nazi era, the camps Jonas was sent to, etc. As a German Jew, I think this era of German history is so familiar to her, that she may not have been aware that many English-speaking readers born long after WWII have little specific knowledge of that era.