Emma Lazarus

Sometimes you put something into Google Book and the play turns up right away.

This is the last place that I've been chasing down are two plays by Emma Lazarus, who very famously wrote the poem that's on the Statue of Liberty and has a lot of thoughts about immigrants and welcoming them, which are very relevant to the days that we live in.

So I started chasing down these plays and then I put them into Google Books and they popped right up and that was amazing.

There are a couple plays that I'm currently chasing down, which were censored by the British Theatre Censorship Office, which existed from like The Master of the Revels in Queen Elizabeth's time all the way through to 1963, which is wild.

And what's exciting is a lot of the plays that are on there are plays that were already on the list, which is awesome.

And then I can check them off.

And then there's a lot of new stuff, like this Emma Lazarus, which I like saw in a JSTOR article seven years ago and just like filed for future reference.

So it's been really exciting to drag things up that I sort of knew were interesting, but didn't have a place to put them.

And on page 70, you know, in January 2017, President Donald Trump banned refugees from Muslim majority countries from entering the U.S.

Soon after the ban was announced, Senator Chuck Schumer stood beside a dozen new Americans and gave an emotional address, citing the words of Emma Lazarus, give me your tired, give me your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

Schumer then took a breath, and he didn't outrightly cry, but then, of course, people started to pick on him, including Donald Trump.

And you say in the book, predictably, on page 71, President Trump himself joined the mocking chorus in an interview response.

Uh, the Statue of Liberty there in New York Harbor, we've all seen it.

Uh, there's a, uh, a, a poem written by Emma Lazarus called The New Colossus, and part of it is emblazoned there on the Statue of Liberty, but it says, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free." And, you know, for two centuries, that, you know, open-armed invitation has kind of been the American ethic of, of people migrating here.

But the, quote, "huddled masses yearning to be free," with the influx of Islam, they're not yearning to be free.

They're coming here yearning to implement, uh, the restrictions of freedom, which is, uh, found in Sharia law.

What are you doing? What is the lesson you have to come up with today? And sometimes they give me, most of the time the teachers are awesome, and they give me the lesson plan.

And so I come up with just the introductory part and go, "Here's the introductory part." I had one of the paras was in with a class with me the very first day I taught there, which was, uh, in mid-September, and the lesson was on the Statue of Liberty, and we did a whole thing about immigration and Emma Lazarus' great poem that's, that sits on the base, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," et cetera, et cetera.

And she was like, "Oh, I remember you.

You're Ms.

[laughing] In the case of the title, Slam That Golden Door, I think I'm correct in assuming that Lew did not want me to attack the gold standard.

[laughing] The Golden Door, of course, comes from the last line of one of Lew's favorite poems, uh, the one by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty.

Uh, the line that reads, "I lift my lamp beside the golden door." The golden door meaning presumably the gateway to the utopia of goodies that the European immigrants expected to find in the United States.

The statue, of course, never had anything to do with the open borders policy that it was hijacked to symbolize.

Uh, pro- possibly.

Um, no hablo Español, so I don't know if I have, like, Argentinian fans or not.

But, like, this is why, right, like, every single time, right, Emma Lazarus is a Sephardic Jew who puts this stupid S- you know, statue, poem on a statue, and so my country has to be destroyed.

And just Sam, just, it's a, it's a criminal indictment of our ruling class, and I, this, I've, I've listened to this before.

Groups advocating the setting up of a Jewish state had first begun popping up around the United States in the 1880s.

Emma Lazarus, the poet whose words would adorn the Statue of Liberty, promoted Zionism throughout this decade.

A precursor to the American flag was created in Boston in 1891.

So Emma Lazarus wrote the famous poem on the Statue of Liberty saying that people from all over the world should be allowed into the United States without exception.

She made it sound like anybody could come here while she was promoting her own people having her own country.

A precursor to the Israeli flag was created in Boston in 1891.