Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus lived a privileged life as one of 19th century America’s literary elite, but it was the plight of helpless refugees that inspired her most famous words.
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849. Her father was a wealthy sugar refiner. The Lazarus family suffered little prejudice over their Jewish heritage. Instead, Emma’s father socialized with the Gentile elite, both in New York and at the family’s summer resort in Newport, Rhode Island. Emma received private tutoring and acquired a love of literature and foreign languages. Her father paid for the printing of
Emma’s first book of poems and translations in 1866, as well as a second edition the following year.
Emma received encouragement from some of the country’s most famous writers. During the 1870s, she became a famous writer herself. She contributed to many of the most prestigious literary magazines and published plays as well as poems and stories. She helped popularize Jewish poetry by translating poems from German, Spanish and, eventually, Hebrew.
In 1881, Judaism became more than a literary interest when Lazarus learned of pogroms – violent riots against defenseless Jewish communities inside Russia following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. Many Russian Jews fled to the U.S., where they encountered hostility due to their ethnicity and religion. When one magazine published an article blaming Jews for the pogroms, Lazarus published a reply and became a public critic of anti-Semitism.
As a member of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, Lazarus saw police beating refugees who were protesting conditions at a compound on Ward’s Island in Manhattan. The refugees were poor in a way Lazarus had never been and spoke a language, Yiddish, that she didn’t understand. But their plight inspired her to become a champion for the rights of Jews around the world and refugees of all kinds in America.
Before the word “Zionist” had been coined, Emma Lazarus believed that Jews should have a country of their own in Palestine. She also believed that Americans, Jews and Gentiles alike, could do more to welcome Jewish refugees to the U.S. As an eloquent advocate for refugees’ rights, Lazarus was invited to help raise money for a pedestal for the giant statue France was building as a gift to the United States. “Liberty Enlightening the World” would welcome immigrants and refugees to New York and the country. For a fundraising auction, Lazarus composed a poem in the fourteen-line sonnet form about the statue. “The New Colossus” was read aloud at the auction on December 3, 1883. It appeared in newspapers and magazines soon afterward to publicize the pedestal project.
Lazarus spent much of the rest of her life in Europe, meeting famous writers and promoting the refugee cause. She took ill in 1887 and died on November 19, not long after returning to New York. She was mourned as one of the greatest Jewish writers of the 19th century, but her writing soon faded into obscurity -except for “The New Colossus.” In 1903, lines from Emma Lazarus’s sonnet were carved into the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, inviting the “huddled masses, yearning to breathe free” to pass through the “golden door” to the United States.
To learn more about Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty National Monument go to www.nps.gov/stli/learn/ historyculture/emma-lazarus.htm.