Emma Lazarus is an American-born poet who died in 1887. She is perhaps most famous for her poem "The New Colossus," which stands on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The poem was placed there fifteen years after Lazarus had already died. However, she is so much more than just a poem posthumously published. She was born in 1893 to Moses and Esther Lazarus. Both sides of her family were Western-European Jews who had settled in America before the Revolutionary war. Her great-grandmother on her mother's side was also an American poet. They were wealthy Sephardic (Portuguese and Spanish) Jews, and Emma was afforded a lot of freedoms because of it. She mastered both German and French and published her first book at the age of 17, entitled Poems and Translations Written Between the Ages of Fourteen and Seventeen. Fun fact: her father founded the Knickerbocker club along with the Vanderbilts and Astors.
While Emma was young, the feelings in America began to change towards Eastern European Jewish immigrants. The Sephardic were treated respectfully due to their wealth, but their counterparts from Germany eastward were being treated to anti-Semitism. These rising tensions were caused by the increasing amounts of European anti-Semitism driving more and more Eastern European Jewish immigrants to America; however, Emma still felt like an outsider to her Christian classmates. Lazarus sent Ralph Waldo Emerson a copy of her first book. He remained a close confidant and friend of hers for the rest of his life providing commentary and revisions. She even came to Concord to visit him in 1876 and 1869; however, she had many literary geniuses as friends in Europe and America. These friendships are of course due to tot the fact that Emma Lazarus experienced much financial success in Europe and America. By 1882, she had had 50 poems published to literary success, but she wasn't just an author of poems.
Emma was an outspoken supporter of female artists not only writing love poetry but works on war and religion. She was also a firm supporter of the American experiment. Lazarus defended it numerous time from comparisons to the institutions found in Europe. "The New Colossus" was in fact written to auction off to raise money for the Statue of Liberty only to be placed on the statue itself. As Anti-Semitism spread across Europe and America, she became an outspoken spokesperson for American Jews. She fought against Jewish stereotypes and, even before the term Zionist; Lazarus was an unconditional support of a new homeland for Jews in Palestine. Lazarus wasn't just a woman of words, though.Lazarus would regularly visit Russian refugees and the miserable conditions they lived in and volunteered at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. In 1883, Lazarus even formed the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews.Throughout her life, she remained an ardent supporter of the working class, and they continued to be a relevant part of her work.
Unfortunately, Lazarus died at the age of 38; however, she remains known as one of the first renowned Jewish American authors and one of the founders of the Zionist movement. It would be 15 years after her death that her poem was published on the Statue of Liberty where it remains a reminder of America's immigration history, but that poem is only a fraction of the beliefs and hope of the women that wrote them.
