Trump betrays The American Dream
They celebrated the sanctuary and hope that country offered to the world’s tired, poor, huddled masses. The possibilities offered by America were so great that shorthand was needed — The American Dream became the life map for the world’s forlorn. Millions, including countless thousands of Irish people, invested their life’s blood in that country so their children might walk tall and live lives better than theirs.
Harburg was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and grew up in a Yiddish-speaking, Orthodox Jewish home in New York. Arlen was Jewish as well. His family came from Lithuania so, in the dark days of 1939, they would have had a sharp appreciation of how fate might have treated them very differently had their families not escaped to America.
