Jews, Immigration, and the Limits of Empathy

by Max Daniel

IN LATE 1954 MY FATHER BOARDED AN OCEAN LINER AT THE PORT OF PIRAEUS, GREECE, together with his parents and two younger siblings. Several weeks later they arrived at New York Harbor en route to their final destination, Chicago, where my uncle had already lived for several years. It was there where most of my cousins, siblings, and I were born—the first generation in America.

More than an ocean separated them from their former home. Years of war, famine, occupation, and civil strife had torn through Greece. Few other groups were as impacted as its Jews. Only 10-15% of the country’s prewar Jewish population survived. Seeing no future for Jewish life in a place where the Holocaust was still a fresh wound, my family looked toward America to rebuild.

A commitment to Jewish community and a desire to emigrate were scarcely enough for those who had lost so much. Alongside the passage of the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 that enabled them to migrate to the United States, my family received financial, educational, material, and occupational assistance from Jewish organizations like HIAS (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) and the JDC (Joint Distribution Committee), together with local Jewish federations in Greece and Chicago. Among Holocaust survivors and refugees, they were very fortunate.

Family, community, continuity, resilience, aiding the needy, welcoming the stranger—all of these Jewish values shaped my family’s immigration experience. Many other immigrants, Jewish and otherwise, have had their migratory paths shaped by benevolent actors and efforts inspired by similar principles. They were welcomed, taken in, supported, and given opportunities to flourish in their new homes, overcoming many hurdles on their path to America. It is reassuring when the story of American immigration and Jewish values aligns so neatly. These ideals are perhaps nowhere more evident than on the base of the Statue of Liberty, where verses from “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus are inscribed. “Huddled masses yearning to breathe free” has become synonymous with the benevolent narrative of America’s attitude toward immigrants, and Jews are always eager to claim the poem’s author, Emma Lazarus, as one of their own.

Indeed, the values of welcoming the migrant, traveler, and stranger are deeply embedded in Jewish tradition, ritual, and history. Before “Jew” or “Israelite” became identifiers, the Torah describes the patriarch Abraham as ha‘ivri, “Hebrew,” a term thought to mean “migrant” or “one who crosses,” referring to the journey from Ur to Canaan. Abraham’s life story advances this theme, describing his subsequent departure to Egypt to seek relief from famine. (Today we might call him a climate change refugee.) The root of the Jewish value of hospitality comes from the Torah story of the three visiting angels who stopped at Abraham and Sarah’s tent. The gracious welcome they received has served as a key lesson and precedent in the Jewish ethical tradition.

From the inception of the Jewish people, migration has been central and foundational, as has the imperative of kindness to travelers and guests. The fall festival of Sukkot commands Jews to build tent-like structures in commemoration of the Israelites’ desert camps. The spring festival of Passover asks them to imagine themselves as slaves fleeing Egypt. Migration and refugee narratives are formative contributors to Jewish identity, emphasizing the value of radical empathy. Jews are to put themselves in the shoes of past exiles in order to understand present ones. This value is codified as a commandment throughout the Torah and rabbinic literature. The classical example is found in Exodus 22:20: “You shall not wrong or oppress a stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Especially as formulated by Reform Judaism, creation in the image of God (b’tzelem elohim) implies the principle of universal human equality. Jews are exhorted to pursue justice and repair the world (tikkun olam) not only for their own benefit, but for the benefit of all. In keeping with modern Enlightenment and social reform ideologies, interpretations of Jewish values have come to reflect the reality of an integrated and emancipated Jewish public no longer comfortable grounding its ethics exclusively on God-given commandments or a unique historical destiny that risks alienating non-Jews.

Major American Jewish organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, and the American Jewish Congress have been particularly active in various immigration and civil rights reform efforts. Religious, historical, and universal Jewish values lay behind political and social initiatives to treat the stranger and foreigner well. One example can be found in a 1958 essay by a young U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. His A Nation of Immigrants, posthumously updated and reissued as a book in 1964, was first commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League to help counter xenophobia and advocate for immigration reform. By defining the United States in this expansive way, Kennedy sought to shape an all-inclusive conception of a nation that would embrace, rather than minimize, its residents’ diverse origins.

American Jewish advocacy on immigration issues was prominent throughout the 20th century: petitioning President Theodore Roosevelt to protect refugees from Tsarist Russia in the early 1900s; facilitating the departure of Jews from Nazi Germany in the 1930s; helping to pass the Displaced Persons Act in 1948; and marching in Washington, D.C. on behalf of Soviet refuseniks in the 1970s and 80s. American Jews often explained to the (nonJewish) public that they were acting upon “Judeo-Christian” universal values meant to cast racism and other types of discrimination as un-American. Jewish leaders also hoped such activism would help to discourage antisemitism. Jewish commitments to such objectives have been rooted in centuries-long practices. Redeeming the captive (pidyon shevuyim) has been a consistent pillar of Jewish communal ethics since antiquity, often taking the form of raising funds to rescue Jews from captors or persecutors. Medieval rabbinic commentator Maimonides saw this commandment as paramount, and its longstanding emphasis among Jews likely influenced the wide communal appeal of immigration advocates in our own times.

Especially after the fall of the Soviet Union and the arrival of thousands of Russian-speaking Jews, the primary goals of Jewish immigration advocacy were largely accomplished (not to discount the many immigrant Jews who continue to rely on such services). Organizations like HIAS have since pivoted toward providing immigrant aid for other communities, and grassroots activists like those behind Never Again Action in 2019 have united Jews in protest against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s treatment of Latin American migrants in their custody. Many American Jews active in these efforts draw on their understanding of Jewish history and values of social justice—immediately obvious in the name of Never Again Action, an explicit reference to Holocaust remembrance.

Since the multicultural turn in American life around the late 1960s and its fitful embrace of explicit expressions of ethnic and racial pride, Jews have become more willing to publicly claim their identity as an ethical and moral compass. Earlier generations of American Jews feared anti-Semitic backlash in response to outspoken displays of Jewishness, preferring to work in smaller, less visible settings rather than staging large demonstrations. Tragically, this fear was reawakened in October 2018, when eleven Jews were murdered at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue. Claiming Jews were responsible for a national influx of dangerous “invaders,” the gunman targeted the congregation, which had recently participated in HIAS’s National Refugee Sabbath. Yet in spite of this tragedy, there are no indications that Jews have become less public or vocal in their immigration-related advocacy. If anything, it has only increased.

Yet for all the light given off by Lady Liberty’s beacon and its message of promise and shelter, it nonetheless casts a shadow. The poetic summons to the “huddled masses” delivers a patronizing message that assumes inferiority and expects eternal gratitude, an all-too-common refrain directed against immigrants. As the deadly Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 suggests, newly arrived immigrants living and working in dangerous industrial conditions could only find the promise of “breathing free” to be morbidly ironic.

In fact, the experience of immigration in America, whether Anglos and Scots in the 18th century, Germans, Irish, Jews, and Italians in the 19th century, or Guatemalan, Vietnamese, and Nigerians in the 20th century, has been far from universally positive. In contrast to the benign nature of my own family’s story, others have experienced the break-up of families and communities, culture shock, depression and despair, isolation and exclusion. Even among immigrant Jews, there were those who cursed the day they arrived in America, often with the Yiddish expression a klug tsu Columbus (a curse on Columbus).

Many other Americans, albeit for very different reasons, have had ample reason to curse Columbus as well. Those absent from the idealized narrative of John F. Kennedy’s “nation of immigrants” have tended to be its most victimized. An understanding of American immigration must surely include the trafficking and enslavement of Africans, the expulsions of Native Americans, transitory migrants, displaced people, and the annexations of territories from the Philippines to Puerto Rico. While African Americans and Native Americans are not typically considered immigrants, their experiences have for too long been denied, dismissed, or discounted in dominant American immigration histories.

More recent scholars have foregrounded Black and Native perspectives, showing that the history of American immigration has been decisively shaped by questions of who were deemed fit to do certain kinds of work, who were