Emma Lazarus, 1849 - 1887
"Give me your tired, your poor,Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
Emma Lazarus' famous lines caught our national imagination and continue to inspire the way we think about freedom and exile today. Written in 1883, her celebrated poem, "The New Colossus," is engraved on a plaque in the Statue of Liberty. Over the years, the sonnet has become a part of American culture, serving as everything from an Irving Berlin show tune to a call for immigrants' rights. One of the first successful Jewish American authors, Lazarus was part of the late nineteenth century New York literary elite, and was celebrated in her day as an important American poet. In her later years, she wrote bold, powerful poetry and essays protesting the rise of anti-Semitism and arguing for Russian immigrants' rights. She called on Jews to unite and create a homeland in Palestine before the title Zionist had even been coined. Although Lazarus had published occasionally in the Jewish press, she became a regular contributor to the American Hebrew in the early 1880s. This weekly, edited by Philip Cowan, printed "Judaism the Connecting Link Between Science and Religion" and "The Schiff Refuge" in 1882, "An Epistle to the Hebrews" in 1882-1883, "Cruel Bigotry" in 1883, and "The Last National Revolt of the Jews" as well as "M. Renan and the Jews"-an essay, which won first prize in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Young Men's Hebrew Association-in 1884. In "An Epistle to the Hebrews," a series of fifteen open letters that appeared between November 1882 and February 1883, Lazarus suggested that assimilated American Jews should recognize their privileged status as well as their vulnerability in America, that all Jews should understand their history in order not to be misled by anti-Semitic generalizations, and that Eastern European Jews should emigrate to Palestine.
At the same time that Lazarus was writing more self-consciously as a Jew, she was also writing as an American. Her 1881 essay "American Literature" (Critic) defended American literature against the charge that America had no literary tradition and that America's poets had left no mark. "American Literature" was followed by "Henry Wadsworth Longfellow" (American Hebrew) and the eulogy "Emerson's Personality," both published in 1882. The latter appeared in the Century, three months after "Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" and two months after "Russian Christianity vs. Modern Judaism." Lazarus also published the poem "To R.W.E." in 1884 (Critic).
Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" in 1883 "for the occasion" of an auction to raise money for the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The poem was singled out and printed in the Catalogue of the Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition at the National Academy of Design because event organizers hoped it would "awaken to new enthusiasm" those working on behalf of the pedestal. As a Jewish American woman, Emma Lazarus faced the challenge of belonging to two often conflicting worlds. As a woman she dealt with unequal treatment in both. Lazarus used these difficult experiences to lend power and depth to her work. At the same time, her complicated identity has obscured her place in American culture.
Primary Source: Jewish Women's Archive