Liberty Enlightening the World

[samiaseo222]

This, too, goes back many years, and Prof. MacDonald traces in considerable detail the sustained Jewish pro-immigration effort. Israel Zangwill, author of the eponymous 1908 play The Melting Pot, was of the view that "there is only one way to World Peace, and that is the absolute abolition of passports, visas, frontiers, custom houses... " He was nevertheless an ardent Zionist and disapproved of Jewish intermarriage.

Although the statue of liberty, properly known as , was a gift to the United States from France as a tribute to American political traditions, the sonnet by the Jewish Emma Lazarus helped change it into a symbol of immigration. Affixed to the base of the statue several decades after its contruction, the poem welcomes to America "huddled masses yearning to breath free/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore."



Prof. MacDonald has discovered that implausible phone number list arguments about diversity being a quintessentially American strength have been made by Jews for a long time. He reports that in 1948 the American Jewish Committee was urging Congress to believe that "Americanism is the spirit behind the welcome that America has traditionally extended to people of all races, all religions, all nationalities."

Of course, there had never been such a tradition. In 1952, the American Jewish Congress argued in hearings on immigration that "our national experience has confirmed beyond a doubt that our very strength lies in the diversity of our peoples." This, too, was at a time when U.S. immigration law was still explicitly designed to maintain a white majority.