This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister.

He added: “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”

~ New York Times, December 14, 2025 (1)

To which I would add: An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Jew.

A few days ago, I had one of those “I was today-years-old when I learned…” moments.

I was on the phone with a rabbi friend. This friend, like me, is a feminist, a champion of socioeconomic and racial equality, immigrant rights, LGBTQIA rights, science, the arts, education, and what all of these together amount to, namely, democracy.

She is also a Zionist.

Here is the thing I learned.

Surely you have heard this line:

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”

Well, I am loath to tell you this, but I didn’t know who wrote it, or in what context, until it came up in our conversation. If you’re also in this boat, let me enlighten you without judgment, just as my friend did for me.

Emma Lazarus, the renowned 19th-century Jewish poet, is best known for her 1883 sonnet, “The New Colossus,” source of the famous Statue of Liberty exhortation: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

That same year, she also wrote the above line, which has become part of the American liberal lexicon and is often quoted in social justice circles to address collective responsibility for each other’s liberation. I hope it goes without saying that I fully ascribe to such aspirations, as is evidenced by, well, my whole life.

There is just one problem.

Maybe you can see where this is going.

That problem is that nowadays, there is too often what I think of as an invisible asterisk that whispers: Except for Jews. (2)

It’s important to understand that Lazarus’s intended audience was “the assimilated, comfortable Jews of America who were turning their backs on Jews who were being beaten, raped, and murdered in the pogroms of Eastern Europe.” (3)

In fact, Lazarus spent two years urging mutual responsibility through a weekly series of essays called “Epistles to the Hebrews,” in which she “argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine for refugees fleeing outbreaks of antisemitism in Europe.”(4)

Emma Lazarus, who arguably gave voice to the American dream itself, wrote “Until we are all free, we are none of us free,” not about everybody else, but for other Jews.

Consider what she says after the famous part:

“Until we are all free, we are none of us free. But 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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)