What happens when Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus” is no longer read as a civic creed, but as a provocation about who belongs—and what a democracy owes the vulnerable?
In this episode, Yehuda Kurtzer reflects on the normalization of cruelty toward immigrants in America, the present state violence being carried out in Minneapolis, and the uneasy silence of Jewish institutions when civil rights are clearly under assault. He then turns his lens toward Israel—asking what it means for Jews in both democracies to draw the line not between “us” and “them,” but between cruelty and compassion.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Sunday, February 1st, 2026 from Jerusalem.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”
This is a poem written by a Jewish poet, part of an effort to raise funds for a giant statue in New York Harbor, a poem she only agreed to write because she was persuaded it would be a welcoming symbol to the immigrants that she was actively involved in trying to support. The poem is an American symbol, an image and a story that is part of the canonical story that America has told about itself on and off, sometimes contested, but still deeply part of the landscape.
It’s a Jewish symbol too, not just a product of a Jewish author, but as a reflection of the American Jewish narrative of immigration and our gratitude to this country that has more often than not welcomed us in. It is the fulfillment of a promise we, our people, have made to God and to the stranger, that we care for them and we love them because we too, were once strangers.
Jews and this story, our welcoming approach to immigrants, are a key piece of the anti-Semitic, white-nationalist, nativist, anti-immigrant movement in America. In Charlottesville, their rally intentionally encircled the one synagogue in the heart of the town as they chanted, “Jews will not replace us,” an anti-Semitic variant of “you will not replace us,” the conspiracy theory that whites are being intentionally displaced and supplanted by a project of intentional erasure through open borders. The shooter at Tree of Life in Pittsburgh, similarly motivated by the support of some Jews and Jewish organizations for immigrants and immigration.
You do not insult us, I say, when you accuse us of loving the stranger too much, all you do is comfort us that we are being faithful to our tradition, that we are faithful to our core memories and the responsibilities that they invited in us to live out our values. You remind us with your hateful nativist chance of America’s closing of its doors to our people in our time of need in the 20th century, how it failed us then and failed its promise to itself. You remind us, you accusers, who only tell on yourselves that your fears make you lie.
Ken Cuccinelli, Donald Trump’s illegally appointed Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security back in his first term understood Emma Lazarus and her poem too well, so much so that he actually tried to redact it. He claimed that it should read: “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.” He maintained that its message only applied to white Europeans. I’m sure, by the way, that Jews of the turn of the 20th century, would have been amused to discover upon arrival in America that they were white Europeans.
What has happened in Jewish life and in America and in Israel that makes achzariyut, intentional cruelty towards the stranger so commonplace and so normalized? Neither Charlottesville nor Pittsburgh led to any reckoning in this Trump administration about the corrosive costs of their nativism. They doubled down in policy and rhetoric, and now for weeks and months, for over a year since President Trump’s return to office, we have watched a terror hit American streets in the form of immigration and customs enforcement, the likes of which I have never seen as an American.
Donald Trump does not bear alone the responsibility for this cruelty. As a matter of policy, President Obama before him broke records with 3 million deportations during his presidency, but now that’s looking like child’s play. The Department of Homeland Security today boasts that the current president will exceed that number in his first year of office alone.
And to do so, you need cruelty and you cannot be inconvenienced by such petty distractions as norms. You’ll need a special army, hastily assembled, overwhelmingly untrained, but aggrieved. You’d grant yourself permission for your special army to be masked on one hand and to surveil for immigrants by means of racial profiling and without warrants. You’ll incarcerate people indiscriminately and often unjustly, until they’re coaxed out of prison by the periodic judge who has the courage to insist on it. You’ll blur the line between citizen, legal immigrant, and undocumented immigrant, and you’ll rescind the conditions that allowed some of those immigrants to be in the country to begin with, changing their status retroactively.
You’ll seize a five-year-old child and use him to entrap his parents. You’ll parade people in the street in freezing cold weather in their underwear. You’ll respond to legal protest as though it is rebellion, and your media outlets will tell that story for you. You’ll kill people in the streets and then lie about how and why even in the face of overwhelming video evidence.
Do you remember when Donald Trump said in 2016, right before he was elected, that I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters? Are you paying attention to what’s happening in Minneapolis?
There are reasons to look away. You could appeal to the earthly reasons to do so. The economic fears that are invited with mass immigration to America from poorer countries, fears that nevertheless are mostly dispelled by economists. You might believe the worst story told about some set of immigrants about their pension for corruption or crime, or worse. Some may be true, some like the president’s claim that Haitians in Ohio were eating their pets, mendacious lies meant it to dehumanize.
And then if you believe those stories, you’d need to map those stories onto the entire population of those immigrants. It’s astonishing to me that Jews do this sometimes, of all people. This is literally the story of how slanderous conspiracy theories about Jews resulted in mass killings and exiles in the places where we had taken to root.
You might look away because it’s human to do so. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum says, “We have so many devious ways of refusing the claim of humanity.” She goes on to say, “Rousseau speaks of the imagination’s tendency to engage itself sympathetically only with those who resemble us, whose possibilities we see as real possibilities for ourselves. Kings don’t pity subjects because they think they will never be subjects, but this is a fragile stratum, both false and self-deceptive. We are all born naked and poor. We are all subject to disease and misery of all kinds. Finally, we are all condemned to death. The sight of these common miseries can therefore carry our hearts to humanity if we live in a society that encourages us to make the imaginative leap into the life of the other.”
And then, and now in my own voice, if you don’t live in such a society, if the politicians are those that are inciting hate and fear of the other, when “stranger danger” is normalized, that imaginative leap that Nussbaum asks us to consider becomes harder and harder.
There are other reasons, maybe closer to home, that make it possible to look away and easy to not speak up. I sometimes struggle in my role in thought leadership here at the Hartman Institute to speak up about domestic political issues in America, precisely because I care about pluralism and Jewish peoplehood, and I fear that by speaking about partisan issues in a partisan moment, I will fall into a partisan trap, which will hamper my ability to invite conversation across difference on those issues that I care about.
Surely there are some of you listening out there that have already decided based on what I’ve said, that all I’m offering is liberal partisan, anti-Trump clap trap, and in our hyperpolarized environment, that kind of conclusion is inevitable.
Liberals in general sometimes stay silent because we fear being accosted by a rhetorical fallacy that someone might say to us, oh, you don’t like the current policy, well, what’s your policy and what’s your strategy to deal with unfettered immigration? This is a logical fallacy because moral objection, raising our voice about what we see as something wrong is something that is legitimate on its face. It does not need to provide an alternative to what is happening in the present. And still, that’s a silencing tool and it works too often.
And I think some Jews are silent now in America because they feel squeezed, unsure whether opposition to the president will term him and his policies against the Jewish community. There’s clearly some in the administration who would love to see that happen. Or maybe ’cause they feel that they don’t want to have to make common cause with opponents to the presidents who they cannot stand alongside for other political reasons, including those peoples’ antipathy towards the state of Israel.
I think major Jewish institutional leaders, most of whom have stayed silent through this American domestic crisis, are paralyzed by these fears right now, but the result I find astonishing and embarrassing. We have no shortage of press releases on any given antisemitic incident, but Americans—fellow Americans—are being gunned down on the street as part of an anti-constitutional assault on civil rights, and somehow this doesn’t rise to the level of being considered a clear and present danger to the Jews in this country?
When did we forget that our civil rights are intertwined with the rights of others and with the integrity of a system that is supposed to protect those rights for all of us? How can all of those fears that we hold right now—about the Jewish people, about antisemitism, about anti-Zionism—how can all of those fears stand in the way of the moral and political obviousness of a clear-eyed, clear-hearted, clarion, clear-voiced response to what is taking place in America right now?
I’m proud to see so many rabbis standing up to do this these days. Sometimes I worry that rabbis self-style as prophets, but there are also moments of such moral obviousness that all of those hesitancies fall away. We are in a golden age of cruelty and it’s overwhelming to confront. Those who have the courage to do so have my admiration.
I’m in Israel this week. My heart is in the Minnesota North, and I am in the uttermost East. There’s plenty of cruelty here to share. Last night, some 50,000 Israelis, Jews and Palestinians took to the streets of Tel Aviv to protest the epidemics of violence against Palestinian citizens of Israel and the horrifying escalation of unpoliced, unprosecuted violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the tragic ubiquity of the phrase, “there are no innocents in Gaza,” which runs counter to the official ethos of the Israeli army itself, a self-satisfying phrase meant to exonerate the speaker from seeking compassion for the other, even in the business of warmaking.
I’ve also been thinking a lot, while here, about Police Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s campaign to reintroduce the death penalty to terrorists. The death penalty runs counter to a longstanding Israeli ethos that opposes the death penalty that was only violated once for the killing of Adolf Eichman. And that runs counter to the overwhelming antipathy to the death penalty in the rabbinic tradition.
Ben Gvir’s campaign to bring back the death penalty is of course laced with hypocrisy. He himself has been indicted more than 50 times for incitement to terror and violence, but he seeks to only punish the enemy “other,” the Palestinians, certainly not the teens and adults running rampant setting fires to villages and terrorizing farmers under Israeli control in the West Bank. I can only describe this as a kind of bloodlust, born of newfound power and maybe insecurity, translating into hatred for the other. And I can find precedent for Jews in Jewish history who acted this way, but I cannot find precedent for any justification.
In contrast, Maimonides, in one of his most provocative teachings, says that a person who is especially quarrelsome, a person who seeds hatred between people, a person who is cruel—with such a person we are supposed to be suspicious of the legitimacy of their Jewish lineage.
After all, Maimonides says, are we not meant to be the children of the merciful? Was not the covenant with Abraham predicated on God’s belief that Abraham would teach his descendants to act rightly and do what is just? Is not the covenant at Sinai tethered to those foundational commitments repeated over and over to care for the vulnerable, for once we were vulnerable? Therefore, Maimonides concludes, perhaps one who is willfully cruel is not one of us.
I don’t cite this argument to exonerate me or my fellow Americans or my fellow Jews of the possibility of their own cruelty. This is not a “there’s no true Scotsman” argument. The truth is we are cruel because we are human. And I wish it was otherwise. And our peoples, Jews, Israelis, Americans, we’re gonna have to find a better way to become better humans.
I am just taking an era of boundary drawing by Maimonides eagerness that the fundamental divide in the world is not between people on the basis of their faith, their ethnicity, their citizenship status, or whatever else. Maimonides wants us to draw a line between the cruel and the kind. He wants us to choose sides.
The stories in Israel and America are not the same, but they’re connected through those of us who care about the success of democracy in both places. One of my colleagues here at Israel this week looked at me with such sadness as we spoke in hushed whispers about Minnesota. I admit I was grateful to get this from him. I was glad he was paying attention. Sometimes Israeli Jews pay less attention to the challenges of America that are not related directly to Israel or to Jews, but he saw how much it afflicted me and how much it should afflict him.
He said to me, “You know, it’s so sad. We around the world look to you in America to be the beacon of democracy, and to watch this happening…” He trailed off and I said, “I know. And I know that now we in America are the permission structure for this cruelty to be considered okay elsewhere.”
I raise my voice as a Jew and we raise our voices as Americans. At the heart of being American, at the heart of being a Jew is the responsibility to a covenant. Our Constitution in America is our Sinai moment, and no betrayal of it by politicians frees us from its obligations.
You know, the Talmud offers one version of the story of the revelation at Sinai, saying that God held the mountain over the Israelites and threatened them that if they did not receive the Torah, they would be buried there. Nevertheless, they later came to accept the Torah of their own free will and with their own consent. I read this text to say that it’s our responsibility in every generation to once again accept our covenantal responsibilities. We are not free from it because our ancestors accepted a covenant that we didn’t choose to. We gain the nobility of choice every time we tether ourselves to its obligations.
None of what I’m talking about today is about me. And none of it is specifically about you. It is about we, the people who must raise our voices in re-accepting the covenant of Americanness, its promise of the rule of law, its care for its citizenry and its hospitality to the stranger.
In 1861, President Lincoln beseeched his fellow Americans, in his first inaugural with the country on the cusp of Civil War, that we must appeal to the better angels of our nature. Desperate to hold the country together, he sought to remind Americans of the better angels of our nature, that we can be the best versions of ourselves. Four years later, entrenched in war at his second inaugural, he continued to insist that even his political enemies were under the watchful eye of the same God, temporary enemies we had to defeat in order to reunite with them in a more perfect union.
This is our template for Americans and this is for us, as Jewish Americans. We Jewish Americans are no less engaged in the project of building a Jewish and Democratic state as Israelis are. It is in our self-interest to do so, for the benefit of our Jewishness and our Americanness, that these be reinforcing value systems. And Americans more generally, people of kindness and of wisdom, good people who are watching the overreach of our politicians well beyond the legitimate political debates that should be possible and even such a contentious topic as immigration, we the people, right now, need to be the better angels of our nature. We need to see ourselves as better than this. We cannot allow this to be the story of our America.
