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Emma Lazarus (July 22, 1849 November 19, 1887) was an American poet born
in New York City.
She is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear
on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty[1] placed in 1903.[2]
Lazarus was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus and Esther
Nathan, Sephardic Jews[3] whose families, originally from Portugal, had been settled
inNew York since the colonial period. She was related through her mother to Benjamin
N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.
From an early age, she studied American and British literature, as well as several
languages, including German, French, and Italian. Her writings attracted the attention
of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
She was also an early admirer of Henry George, and was a part of his Single Tax
movement for a number of years.[4]
Lazarus wrote her own important poems and edited many adaptations of German
poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine.[5] She also
wrote a novel and two plays in five acts,The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama
about the titular figure and The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short
story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.[6]
Lazarus began to be more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George
Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogromsthat followed
the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence,
thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of
Settlement to New York, leading Lazarus to write articles on the subject as well as the
book Songs of a Semite (1882). Lazarus began at this point to advocate on behalf of
indigent Jewish refugees and helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New
York to provide vocational training to help destitute Jewish immigrants become selfsupporting.
She is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear
on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty[1] placed in 1903.[2] The
sonnet was written for and donated to an auction, conducted by the "Art Loan Fund
Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty" to raise funds
to build the pedestal.[7][8] Lazarus' close friend Rose Hawthorne Lathrop was inspired
by "The New Colossus" to found the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.[9] Lazarus is also
known for her sixteen part cycle poem 'Epochs' .[10]
She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887.[11] She
returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip and died two months later
on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma.
She is an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She argued for the creation
of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term
Zionism.[12] Lazarus is buried in Beth-Olom Cemetery in Brooklyn.