• Glenn Beck is moving his “Restoring Courage” rally next month in Jerusalem from the Temple Mount to an as-yet-determined location; having it at the Temple Mount is seen as making him an assassination target and also as gratuitously provocative and tasteless, although he only cited the former reason. [Huff Post]

• When an earthquake hit New Zealand earlier this year, it killed 181 people, three of them Israeli. One of them, according to a new report, was in Mossad. [Haaretz]

• Jeff Goldberg says Michele Bachmann loves Israel not wisely but too well. [Bloomberg Views]

• Michael Walzer visits Hebron. [Dissent]

• Jason Diamond apologizes for having inadvertently worked for the international campaign to delegitimize the Jewish state. [Jewcy]

Oh yes, there is a new Beastie Boys video. (And, oh yes, Spike Jonze directed it.)

• Michael Walzer has the sanest summation I’ve yet read of the past week in the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. [Dissent]

• Arthur Goldreich, a Jewish South African who heroically hid Nelson Mandela in the early 1960s, died at 82. [AP/Haaretz]

• Rachel Isaacs became the first openly gay rabbi to be ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, the main clerical school of the Conservative movement. [The Sisterhood]

• The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum applauds the arrest of suspected Serbian genocidaire Ratko Mladic. [USHMM]

• So apparently everyone always knew about DSK? [Daily Intel]

Boy, this guy can really play Tetris (be sure you fast forward to the five-minute mark).

In fact, she comes every year; the haggadah we use includes her famous sonnet, “The New Colossus.” I’ll read aloud the words she lent the Statue of Liberty—“Give me your tired, your poor/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”—and we’ll all feel good. We’ll feel good dissing the “brazen giant of Greek fame,” a stand-in for Pharoahs everywhere. We’ll be glad to bring the Exodus story home to our own “sea-washed, sunset gates.” And we’ll congratulate ourselves for universalizing the meaning of the Exodus, giving a “world-wide welcome” to exiles from everywhere.

A Night of Questions, the Reconstructionist haggadah that features readings from Lazarus alongside others from Abraham Lincoln and the political theorist Michael Walzer, reminds us that “Whoever expands upon the story of the Exodus is worthy of praise,” as the haggadah says. Emma Lazarus’s famous poem does just that, reviving the famous Passover exhortation “Let all who are hungry come and eat” and turning it into a tenet of American life.

When Lazarus—a wealthy New Yorker of Sephardic heritage—wrote those words in 1883, she had no idea that they would someday speak not only for the Statue, but also for the country. The statue lay in pieces in a warehouse in Paris; it would be three more years before it was transported to and assembled in New York. And America itself was under construction. Nativism was a more likely path than inclusiveness. It was only in 1903, 16 years after Lazarus’s death, that her friend Georgina Schuyler undertook to have her poem emblazoned on a bronze plaque to be affixed to the base of the Statue of Liberty. Liberty’s torch was the pillar of fire that led the Israelites by night to America, a Promised Land.

Of course by 1924, the “Golden Door” had closed. The seas no longer parted for immigrants—including millions who might have eluded Hitler—and America had turned back on its own promise. But readers of the haggadah know that freedom is something to be renewed in every generation, not something given once for good.

Emma Lazarus knew what it means to live a double life, as American and as Jew. We are in exile and we are at home. We are slaves and we are free. We are bearers of a universal fire and guardians of our own particularity.

I feel the contradictions keenly at the pair of seders I attend. At the seder I lead—a gathering of friends who love Jews more than Judaism—I play the role of the wise child. My job is to ask the right questions that will help them to find as much meaning as matzo in a ritual that is largely alien to them. A week before the seder, I email each person a question that expands the seder outward to touch on human rights, sweatshop labor, the trafficking of women, and holes in the ozone layer. To some (the three therapists among us), I send questions that narrow the seder to the dimensions of the psyche: What is your personal Egypt, your narrow place?

At the other seder I attend, that of my learned brothers and sisters-in-law, I play the role of the child who barely knows how (or what) to ask. My siblings recount their most recent shiur, my Schechter-educated nieces take turns speedreading in Hebrew, and no one needs questions about climate change to tell them that why all this matters and just how deeply.

Or how widely. That the Exodus story has legs is not news. It’s been a quarter-century since Michael Walzer laid at the feet of the Exodus two distinct traditions of revolutionary politics (and yes, velvele, there are traditions of revolution). In one—for Walzer, the wrong one—we are ever waiting for the messiah. This type of revolution is other-worldly in that it entails a hope for change that exists in the imagination, in which there is perfect righteousness and justice. By contrast, the other tradition, the one Walzer prefers, teaches instead the necessity of taking action in the here and now of history, not dreaming about revolution, but marching toward righteousness and justice—proximal righteousness; rough justice. As he wrote in his 1985 book Exodus and Revolution:

So pharaonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world. The “door of hope” is still open; things are not what they might be—even when what they might be isn’t totally different from what they are. We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:

—first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;

—second, that there is a better place, a world more attractive, a promised land;

—and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” There is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.

Walzer’s challenge to use the Exodus as a moral imperative is clearly a challenge to universalize it. But do we, in universalizing Exodus, and by extension the Passover story, lose it as a Jewish story?

In a 2001 talk called “Universalism and Jewish Values,” Walzer observed what Emma Lazarus already knew: Not all universalisms are the same. The universalism Walzer claims for Judaism, which he derives from both Biblical and Talmudic sources, is what he calls a “universalism of the weak.” For him, it is a “low-flying universalism,” the voice of the dispossessed. Of necessity, Walzer observes, Jews have always had to grant other nations their sovereignty and other peoples (within limits) their moral agency. Walzer makes us look back to Lazarus and ask, how Jewish is her universalism? Is it, too, a universalism of the weak? In other words, is Lazarus’s “golden door” also Hosea’s “door of hope”?

Yes and no. Lazarus’s sonnet, like her commitment to assist the Russian refugees, is indeed a Jewish vision; it came from a sense of herself, a fourth-generation American, as another in a long line of Jewish exiles. But her Jewish universalism, while it takes the part of the poor and wretched, is hardly “low-flying.” On the contrary, hers is a universalism from above, in which affluent, modern Jews welcome exiles not to a wilderness, but to developed, hospitable cities. And there are other differences. First, whereas the sources, according to Walzer, are preoccupied with the agency of “other nations,” Lazarus regards poor refugees as a nationless mass whose agency itself has been suppressed; presumably, it is only now to be realized. Second, her Exodus is presided over not by Moses but by “a mighty woman,” a “mother of exiles” who guides not with pillars of cloud and fire, but by the “imprisoned lightning” —electricity? technology?—of her raised torch.

Iniviting Emma Lazarus to our seder reminds us that we are Jews of latter days. Our immigrants don’t hanker after Egypt; they call their family on cellphones. In lieu of the revolutionary purges of the Levites, we have benevolent societies and welfare agencies. When we expand our seder to include “The New Colossus” we modernize and universalize, but as we do, weigh all that has changed for us as ethical Jews, alongside all that has not.

Esther Schor is a professor of English at Princeton University and a contributing editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of the Nextbook Press biography Emma Lazarus.

Equally wide-ranging and diverse are the Americans for whom Moses was a household name and a moral touchstone. In their darkest days, the Pilgrims sought comfort by reading about Moses’ tribulations, Feiler tells us, as did the founding fathers for whom the “reluctant leader of Israelite slaves end[s] up as the favorite son.” An affection for Moses also ran in families: Henry Ward Beecher and his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe were quite smitten with him. But then, so, too, were Cecil B. DeMille and Martin Luther King Jr. Feiler’s inventory of Moses’ fans and champions is so encompassing and expansive, you have to wonder whether there was anyone at all in America who did not cotton to the man.

Drawing on dozens of vignettes, the author goes further still, insisting that there’s hardly an American institution that has not been touched by Moses’ staff. Feiler is so taken with his subject, in fact, that he is moved to write in one of the book’s most eye-opening sentences that “Moses is our true founding father. His face belongs on Mount Rushmore.”

In his exuberant telling of Moses’ popularity and far-reaching impact on virtually every nook and cranny of American life, Feiler can’t help sounding a little like the author of The Da Vinci Code. He moves at breakneck speed and peppers his prose with lots of “aha”s. Cycling quickly through broad swaths of time and complex historical phenomena as if they were stops along the Tour de France, Feiler dispatches George Washington’s putative relationship with Moses, say, in a brisk couple of pages before moving on to something else entirely. His account accumulates encounters, quotes, and choice details, overwhelming the reader with a mountain of information.

And yet, there’s nary a footnote in sight. Instead, the book’s authority rests largely on Feiler himself. He puts his quest for Moses the American at the center of the narrative, seeking out thinkers like Peter Gomes, Jonathan Sarna, and Michael Walzer for tête-à-têtes about the biblical character’s impact on America; visiting museum curators; donning the costume that Charlton Heston wore when he played Moses in DeMille’s The Ten Commandments; and even meeting with George W. Bush in the White House for a chat about Moses’ impact on the presidency.

After making my way through America’s Prophet, I don’t doubt that America—then, as now—found the Israelite leader to be a most congenial fellow, bending him to its own political, rhetorical, and symbolic uses. But the Moses who inhabits these pages ends up being so protean and malleable a figure that it’s hard to figure out where he begins and America ends. Feiler’s unabashed celebration of his subject, whom he likens at one point to a “kind of American Hamlet,” leaves little room for nuance, equivocation, and the sifting of sources. The hundreds of references to and perspectives on the man that animate the book end up sounding the same note: three cheers for Moses. The net effect is to flatten rather than clarify his appeal.

In the end, Feiler is so busy trumpeting America’s affinity for the biblical figure that you are left to wonder what the affinity actually proves. What does it say about this great big republic of ours that so many of its leaders made use of Moses and the Exodus story for their own ends—as a call to arms, a rallying point, a cautionary tale? Why did the United States clasp Moses to its bosom when so many other God-fearing nations did not? Where are we to draw the line between religion and politics or, for that matter, between religion and the public square? By the time we put down America’s Prophet, we’re none the wiser. But we sure can cite chapter and verse.

Jenna Weissman Joselit is a professor of Judaic studies and history at George Washington University. She is currently at work on a book about America’s relationship to the Ten Commandments.

If books could make peace, everyone in the Middle East would have been singing “Kumbaya” around a campfire for years now. Still, one can hope that the vast and ever expanding range of publications on the subject of Israelis and Palestinians might convince a few of the militaristically minded participants in the conflict to put down their rifles and pick up a pair of reading glasses. Avi Shlaim’s Israel and Palestine: Reflections, Revisions, Refutations (Verso, September), for example, may inflame more than it conciliates—the Oxford don has called Zionism “the real enemy of the Jews,” and spoken up in support of sloppy anti-Zionist polemicist Norman G. Finkelstein—but at least Shlaim perpetrates only figural violence.

• • •

Not so the acts considered by Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger in Jewish Terrorism in Israel (Columbia, October), which range from assassinations of Roman leaders in the first century C.E. to protests against the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. Specialists in the study of security trained at the University of Haifa, Pedahzur and Perliger cast a wide net, and conducted many interviews, in a bid to understand why some Jews have chosen violence as the means to achieve their goals. The authors suggest that religion in and of itself does not produce terrorism, but that “it takes a major threat to the community of believers or to its most sacred values to radicalize its members.”

The Israeli Black Panthers—named in homage to the African-American group after a visit to Israel by activist Angela Davis—never quite radicalized to the extent their American namesakes did. Protesting for the civil rights of Mizrahis, Jewish immigrants from Arab lands, these Panterim Skhorim burned Golda Meir in effigy in the early 1970s and stole rich people’s milk, but they quickly turned to electoral rather than brutal methods. Sami Shalom Chetrit, a Morocco-born Israeli poet and scholar, praises the Panthers and other groups with similar goals in a survey of Mizrahi activism, titled Intra-Jewish Conflict in Israel: White Jews, Black Jews (Routledge, October).

What can Israel—or any country—do about its legacy of internal conflict? Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi takes up this question in Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination and the Dilemmas of Commemoration (SUNY, August). Pedhazur and Perliger discuss Yigal Amir’s assassination of Rabin in 1995, of course, but Vinitzky-Seroussi—a sociologist at the Hebrew University whose last book interpreted the bizarre ritual of the American high-school class reunion—concerns herself not with the murder itself but with Israeli society’s responses, examining all the memorials and monuments, speeches and songs that mourned, or capitalized on, Rabin’s death.

• • •

One thing Israelis have mostly managed to agree on, lately, is the proper way to pronounce Hebrew. The language revivalists who transformed Hebrew into a modern spoken language called their new accent Sephardic (though it was only partly based on the speech of Sephardic Jews)—but at first, in the late 19th and early 20th century, most poets wouldn’t write stanzas to fit the new pronunciation. Miryam Segal’s A New Sound in Hebrew Poetry: Poetics, Politics, Accent (Indiana, September) describes how this gradually changed, and how the new accent turn into the standard for everyone except for some Yiddishists, Hasids, and of course all those few well-intentioned Hebrew school alumni who speak Hebrew with New Jersey or Long Island accents.

If it weren’t for the accent developed by Israeli poets, the rhymes in Ami Rubinger’s Hatul gadol, hatul katan—a popular Israeli children’s book published in 2004—might not roll off the tongue quite so comfortably as they do for this kid . But now that Rubinger’s picturebook has been translated into English, by Ray Baitner, as Big Cat, Small Cat (Abbeville Kids, August), even those with no Hebrew accent at all can enjoy it. Note that while Rubinger’s illustrations may delight your 2- to 5-year-old, he is more than just a children’s author; his other titles including Sefer ha’ziyunim hagadol, or, as it’s called in English, The Big Fucking Book, which is exactly what it sounds like.

If you’d rather stick to something kid-friendly—or if all the conflict in the Middle East just makes you want to curl up and go to sleep for a while—When I First Held You: A Lullaby from Israel (Kar-Ben, September), by veteran Israeli children’s author Mirik Snir and her daughter, Eleyor, a designer of children’s clothes, will sweetly fit the bill.

• • •

Troubled as it is, Israel holds no patent on Middle Eastern tensions. It doesn’t even lead the field. A new publication of the Saban Center for Middle Eastern Policy—a part of the Brookings Institution bankrolled by, yes, Haim Saban, the Mighty Morphin Power Broker—suggest no fewer than nine possible approaches the United States might take in its relations with Iran. While laying out these possibilities, the book, Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran (Brookings Institution, September) proposes that all of them pose risks—and, oh, yeah, Israel’s fate hangs in the balance.

Then there’s Iraq. The pressing question is not exactly when the U.S. military should leave; it’s how that can possibly be accomplished without inciting more violence, fomenting more terrorism, and inflicting more suffering on Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers. In Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq (Penn, September), Michael Walzer, Nicolaus Mills, and a team of contributors propose that answers should be sought both in previous cases of military departure—including the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza—and in ethical considerations about the consequences of withdrawal.

• • •

For readers who prefer conflicts on a scale a little more intimate than the geopolitical, two new novels present tenuously Jewish women looking out for others’ children. In Julie Buxbaum’s After You (Dial, September), Ellie Lerner cares for her dead friend’s 8-year-old daughter, Sophie. Though Buxbaum comes from “a tribe of New York Jews,” and though she gives her heroine a first boyfriend named Stuart Tannenbaum, the closest Ellie herself comes to acknowledging Jewish ethnicity is admitting to Sophie, “Books are almost a religion for me.”

Meanwhile, Tassie Keltjin, the college student heroine of Lorrie Moore’s widely praised A Gate at the Stairs (Knopf, September), whose Jewish mother married a Lutheran, calls herself a “quasi Jew” and takes a job as a nanny. Even she can’t escape heated talk about the Promised Land, though. Eavesdropping on the “transracial, biracial, multiracial” “support group” for whose members she babysits, Tassie hears someone recall the famed vegetarian “I. B. Singer speak[ing] of the holocaust of chickens.” A series of punning riffs on animal rights and the Holocaust follow, leading to one of the group’s Jewish participants proclaiming, more than a little tongue-in-cheek, “That’s why we got Israel, baby. We’re not chicken anymore.”