DACA

A poem by a Jewish woman, Emma Lazarus, which I now type from memory, which we young Jewish children of the 1950s were required to memorize, because its sentiments expressed the heart of America: "Give me your tired your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores. Send these, the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." The words still bring tears to my eyes, because its sentiments are the reason I am alive today, and my grandparents did not die in the European Holocaust. My very existence, and by extension my children's lives, relies upon the public acceptance of these truths: that the heart of America embraces those beleaguered souls who search for democracy and can reach these shores. The President of the U.S., however, praises Nazis and White Supremacists as "good people," and lauds them as supporters of his basic principles. To those Jews who support President Trump: Have you no soul? Do you not understand from whence you came, and how the U.S. that provides refuge for you will vomit you out immediately behind other minorities? Have you no shame, and most critically, have you no heart? You believe yourselves to be safe because of Trump's Jewish daughter, and laud Trump because he supports Israel? It is not Trump, but democracy and its institutions that protect you. The same laws and, more critically, the same virtues that welcomed you to these shores you now reject, believing that your citizen status protects you. But you forget Nuremberg, and that Jews were German citizens. No, I do not anticipate a Holocaust here. But I know for a certainty that the evil you perpetrate on others will be visited upon you, and I cry in anticipation, that the democratic principles that have given you haven can be so despised by the very Jews who have benefitted so magnificently. When Jews say, "Never Again," we do not mean "Never Again to Jews." We mean, "Never Again to humanity," and your cruelty toward foreigners will be neither forgotten nor forgiven. May you repent, and demand that the justice shown to our people in these United States be granted to those children whose lives have been spent on our shores, for only through the sentiments of Emma Lazarus can we hope for a better tomorrow and a continued refuge for our people. When welcome dies for those who have lived their entire lives in the U.S., it will die for all those who do not fit the nativist ideal: European descent, white and Christian. God forbid that day comes, because none will be safe, and the greatness that is America will die, slaughtered by those who believe themselves the elect of God, to the exclusion of everyone else.