Emma Lazarus – activist, poet and translator

Emma Lazarus is best known for her sonnet The New Colossus which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty. Lines from this work are inscribed on a bronze plaque installed on the Statue’s pedestal in 1903. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…Send these the homeless, tempest tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door”.

What is less known is that she was involved in aiding refugees who had fled antisemitic pogroms in Eastern Europe. She was born into a large, wealthy Jewish family. One of her ancestors was from Germany but the rest of the family originated from Portugal and were among the first 23 Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after fleeing from Recife, Brazil to escape the Portuguese Inquisition.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, Lazarus studied American and British literature and several foreign languages including German, French and Italian. A collection of her Poems and Translations included translations from Schiller, Heine, Dumas and Victor Hugo. Her renderings of Heine’s verse are considered the best in English.

One of her most notable articles was “An Epistle to the Hebrews” in which she touched upon the Jewish problems of the day, urged a technical and Jewish education for Jews and repatriation for Jews to Palestine. She is considered to be one of the first advocates of Zionism.

She returned to New York after completing a second trip to Europe in 1887 and died two months later. Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Ann Englander