Thursday, October 1, 2015

"Dead nations never rise again" ?

When Emma Lazarus read Longfellow's otherwise moving poem about the old Jewish cemetery in Newport, Rhone Island, she hated the concluding line that - with Social Darwinistic finality - flatly stated that dead nations (ie Zion) never rise again.

Emma promptly wrote a poem on the same Newport Jewish cemetery that said, au contraire, America was the new Zion.

I like to think that Dr Henry Dawson caught a little of Emma's determined spirit in his own later Manhattan Project when he told his critics that his (frequently Jewish*) SBEs were 'swimming, not drowning'.....

*By surname, I'm convinced that four of the six SBE patients of his for which we have names, were Jewish...

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