Emma Lazarus

Her father refined sugar, and her mother's people had been in New York since the seventeenth century — the Lazarus line ran back to the 23 Portuguese Jews who fled Recife for New Amsterdam, and a great-great-grandmother on the other side wrote verse. She was the fourth of seven children, taught at home by tutors in American and British literature and in German, French and Italian, and she was writing lyrics at 11. Her first collection appeared in 1867, made of poems composed between the ages of 14 and 17. William Cullen Bryant approved of it. Ralph Waldo Emerson got the dedication of the next one. Almost nothing in the household was Jewish in practice: the family stayed clear of the synagogue and of the community around it.

Most of what she wrote had nothing to do with statues. She translated Heine well enough that the versions are still preferred, wrote a novel about Goethe, a verse tragedy about the painter Ribera, and a five-act play about Jews burned during the Black Death. Songs of a Semite, in 1882, is the first book of Jewish American poetry. Her renderings of the medieval Hebrew poets of Spain entered the ritual of American synagogues and stayed there. BriefHistory tells the story of the sonnet and the monument it rewrote. This page is about the woman, who had five years left.

The creed she wrote for the golden door was not the program she was arguing for. Between November 1882 and February 1883, in a series of essays called An Epistle to the Hebrews, she pressed for Jewish technical education, an independent Jewish nationality and Jewish return to Palestine — 14 years before Theodor Herzl convened a congress on the subject. She had come to all of it late. Her family had kept its distance from the synagogue, and it took the Russian pogroms of 1881 to send her to the Torah, to Hebrew and to the immigrant relief offices. She helped found a vocational institute, worked the employment bureau of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, and then criticized how the society was run. She also followed Henry George and campaigned for his single tax on land.

She came back from her second European trip too ill to recover and died on November 19, 1887, at 38, most likely of Hodgkin's lymphoma. Two volumes of the poems appeared in 1889. Her papers went to the American Jewish Historical Society and her letters to Columbia, a federation of Jewish women's clubs took her name in 1951, and the National Women's Hall of Fame admitted her in 2009. The sonnet, meanwhile, became something to fight over. In August 2019 the acting head of the federal immigration agency offered a corrected version — give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet — and the argument that followed was about whose country it is.

Emma Lazarus's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Poems and Translations book
  Written between the ages of 14 and 17 1867
• Alide: An Episode of Goethe's Life book
  Her first prose 1874
• Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heine book
  Still regarded as among the best English versions of Heine 1881
• Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems book
  The first volume of Jewish American poetry, dedicated to George Eliot 1882
• An Epistle to the Hebrews article
  Fifteen essays in The American Hebrew arguing for a Jewish nation in Palestine 1883
• The New Colossus other
  Donated to an auction for the Statue of Liberty pedestal fund 1883

• 1860 aged ~11 Writes her first lyrics at 11
• 1867 aged ~18 Her father publishes Poems and Translations William Cullen Bryant commended it.
• 1871 aged ~22 Dedicates Admetus and Other Poems to Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 1881 aged ~32 The pogroms that follow the killing of Alexander II turn her toward Judaism She began studying Hebrew and Jewish history and working with arriving refugees.
• November 2, 1883 aged 34 The New Colossus is read at the opening of the pedestal fund exhibition It was the first entry read that night, and then it dropped out of sight.
• October 28, 1886 aged 37 The Statue of Liberty is dedicated and her poem plays no part in it She was alive, and 37.
• November 19, 1887 aged 38 Dies in New York two months after returning from Europe
• 1903 aged ~54 A bronze plaque with the sonnet goes up inside the pedestal Georgina Schuyler had campaigned for it since 1901.
• 2009 Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame

• Henry George 1839–1897
  Argued for the single tax on land values in Progress and Poverty. followed his economics
• Benjamin N. Cardozo 1870–1938
  Judge and Supreme Court justice whose opinions became foundational to American tort, contract, and common-law reasoning. relative
• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. dedicatee and influence
• Irving Berlin 1888–1989
  Songwriter whose vast catalog, from 'God Bless America' to Broadway standards, helped define the American popular songbook. set her lines to music
• Jacob Riis 1849–1914
  Photographer and reporter whose documentation of New York tenements drove housing reform campaigns. photographed the same tenements
• Emma Goldman 1869–1940
  Anarchist orator and editor whose free-speech and birth-control agitation led to her 1919 deportation. came through the door she described