Passover 2024: Until all of us are free, none of us are free
The seder reading below comes from Emma Lazarus, an American poet, whose writing became widely associated with the US civil rights movement.
From Emma Lazarus to the US civil rights movement
Emma Lazarus was an American poet best known for her words carved into a bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty that begins “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Lazarus also wrote a series of articles in 1883 titled “An Epistle to the Hebrews” where she discussed the rising anti-semitism of her day.
In one of these articles, her phrase “Until we are all free, we are none of us free” was later captured eloquently for use by the US civil rights movement:
- “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free”, as spoken by the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer in her 1971 speech at the founding of US National Women’s Caucus.
- “No one of us can be free until everybody is free” is how American author and poet Maya Angelou described Martin Luther King’s legacy.
A seder reading from Emma Lazarus’ Epistle (1883)
“I do not hesitate to say that our national defect is that we are not “tribal” enough; We have not sufficient solidarity to perceive that when the life and property of a Jew in the uttermost provinces of the Caucuses are attacked, the dignity of a Jew in free America is humiliated…
Until we are all free, we are none of us free.
Lest we should justify the taunts of our opponents, lest we should become “tribal” and narrow and Judaic, rather than humane and cosmopolitan like the anti-Semites of Germany and Jew-baiters of Russia, we ignore and repudiate our unhappy brethren as having no part or share in their misfortunes- until the cup of anguish is held also to our own lips.”
This Passover, let’s commit ourselves in word and deed:
Until all the hostages in Gaza are free, none of us are free.
For my other Passover posts this year and prior years, see my Passover blog.
