This chapter tracks the dynamic interaction between Jews and America or, more precisely, with the idea of America as they understood it during the nation's first century of existence. It focuses on three foundational figures: Mordecai Manuel Noah, Isaac Mayer Wise, and Emma Lazarus. Noah portrays Jews as beneficiaries of the American system and also describes them as bearers of an ancient tradition that produced America in the first place. While Noah sees America as a new phase in Jewish national existence, Wise emphasizes America's role in purifying Judaism as a religion. Lazarus devoted herself to celebrating Jewish heroism and galvanizing a sense of collective purpose among American Jews. In the glorious visions of Noah, Wise, and Lazarus, as in those moments in subsequent American Jewish culture when their rhetoric resurfaces, the chapter explores an America that represents an ideal, a promise of Jewish self-determination and fulfillment.

Religious/civic activism among women marked direct entry into and participation in the public sphere. This chapter discusses religious activism with regard to the three nineteenth-century women poets: Penina Moise, Rebekah Hyneman, and Emma Lazarus. While some of Moise's poems reflect contemporary women's culture, her main body of writing is emphatically public. Most Moise hymns in any case address public rituals and are intended as common prayers. As with Moise, the few comments on Hyneman's work focus interpretation through the women's culture that Jewish women shared with other nineteenth-century women. Emma Lazarus is among the first writers self-consciously to regard America as fundamentally ethnic. For Lazarus, as for Moise and Hyneman, it is affiliations that launch and give force to poetic voice, voice that is addressed to others in a community in which religious selfhood becomes conjoined or redefined through further gendered, ethnic, and national identities.