SOURCE: "The Jew as Modern American Writer," in The Commentary Reader: Two Decades of Articles and Stories, edited by Normal Podkhoretz, Atheneum, 1966, pp. xv-xxv.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following essay, he details the rise of the Jewish-American writer.

Emma Lazarus, who wrote those lines inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty ("Give me your tired, your poor … Your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free"), was the first Jew whom Ralph Waldo Emerson ever met. Emerson's daughter Ellen, an old Sunday-school teacher, noted how astonishing it was "to get at a real unconverted Jew (who had no objections to calling herself one, and talked freely about 'our Church' and 'we Jews'), and to hear...