When they arrived in Milwaukee, they continued to speak Yiddish in their homes and lived in neighborhoods populated by other “greenehs,” new immigrants, and extended family members.
This story is common. They gave birth to children who spoke without accents and married other Americans, who made their way in the world of Jell-O molds, Chevrolets, higher education and respectable jobs.
Two generations later, I married a man from Israel who became an American immigrant. Our children, like my parents, see the world from two perspectives — as the native and as the newcomer.
Our story is typical in the United States, a country built and populated by immigrants. So inherent is the ideal of sheltering newcomers that it is immortalized at the Statue of Liberty with Emma Lazarus’ poem, “The New Colossus,” which ends with the words:
Give me your tired, your poor
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
The nation has strayed far from that ideal to SB 1070, Arizona’s new immigration bill that was signed into law April 23. The law, which is supposed to take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends, requires that police check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being an illegal immigrant and makes failure to carry immigration documents a state crime.
The law has been roundly condemned as a mandate to discriminate on the basis of race and ethnicity. If illegal immigrants are discovered, they are to be transferred immediately to the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection.
As American Jews, we should find this particularly troubling. We must be alarmed by the notion of Arizona police officers stopping Latinos and asking, “Papers please.”
Not long ago, we were strangers in the U.S. Not long ago in Europe, Jews were forced to carry identification papers and lived in fear of being stopped or questioned. This singling out of Jews in Europe led to horrific end. What will become of immigrants in this country?
Like European Jews in our recent past, will immigrants, legal and not, be afraid as they shop, visit museums and eat in restaurants? Will they learn to distrust police officers rather than depend on them for protection from real harm?
A look at our Jewish texts leaves no question as to how we should behave. Leviticus 19:33-34 instructs us to act with love and compassion toward immigrants: “The strangers who sojourn with you shall be to you as the natives among you, and you shall love them as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
Leviticus 24:22 tells us, “You shall have one law for the stranger and citizen alike.” That extends to “the powerful, the poor, the Israelite, the non-Israelite, the stranger and the citizen. This is the Torah’s social vision,” wrote Rabbi David Hoffman in a 2007 analysis of that text for the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Among the estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona, according to the Associated Press, most are not Jewish. (Some are, and my colleague, a Jewish journalist from Phoenix, told me that many Latino Jews are already avoiding the drive across town to their synagogue for fear of being stopped.)
We Jews have an obligation to stand up for others and behave as our brothers’ keepers. We must learn from history, be informed by our tradition, register our protest to this new law and work to prevent other such attempts to harm undocumented immigrants.
Our immigration problem is long-standing and deep, built on a system that depends on cheap labor and for years, has allowed the steady flow of bodies and drugs through porous borders. The real solution, neither quick nor superficial, is for comprehensive and compassionate reform on a national level rather than the creation of a police state in Arizona.
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