If you want to really understand “Sesame Street,” watch any segment in which Oscar the Grouch springs out from the tin can he calls home to sing about how much he loves trash. He’s done so many times over the decades, starting in 1970 during the show’s very first season, when a gleeful Oscar —…
Updated on August 14: This article has been updated to reflect more recent comments made by USCIS acting director Ken Cuccinelli. Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, caused a stir Tuesday morning by misquoting “The New Colossus,” the poem that famously occupies the base of the Statue of Liberty, while…
(JTA) — A Trump administration official changed Emma Lazarus’ famous poem engraved on the Statue of Liberty in arguing for immigration restrictions. Asked about the Jewish poet’s words by an NPR reporter on Tuesday, Ken Cuccinelli, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services acting director, gave the old words a new twist. “Give me your…
We have arrived at the safest and most secure part of the year: We are exactly 364 days away from the next Grammy Awards. The musical awards ceremony, which showers celebrities with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of awards, based on unknowable criterion in an interminable televised ceremony, has come and gone in 2018….
Stephen Miller, the white nationalist aide to President Trump took on a somewhat strange new enemy yesterday: Emma Lazarus. Lazarus, a relative of the United States’s first Jewish settler, wrote the poem “The New Colossus” to raise funds for the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1883. That poem, most famous for the lines…
It’s surprisingly difficult to pinpoint the Jewish ghosts and haunts of New York. Although museum directors and tour guides rack their brains, they often end up stumped. Google searches on “Jewish ghosts New York City” yield no results. Of course, spirits usually seem to be disembodiments of famous figures. Some died tragically of disease, others…
On June 13, Harvard University Press published a luxuriantly definitive Variorum edition of poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson, which may cast light on a still-remembered episode in American Jewish literary history. The poet Emma Lazarus, whose “New Colossus” adorns the Statue of Liberty, knew Emerson personally, and her admiring essay “Emerson’s Personality” was collected in…
Most people encounter Emma Lazarus only inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” written in 1883, has become inextricably identified in the public mind with the wave of immigration to the United States from the 1880s until 1924. However, a new free mobile tour produced by the Museum of…
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