Emma Lazarus and her poem “The New Colossus” was forgotten until 14 years after her death. Now inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, the poem, and the poet, now stand as worldwide symbols of hope and freedom for all. William Maxwell Evarts, chairman for the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty and author Constance Cary Harrison requested that Emma write a sonnet to be used as a fundraiser for the art and literary auction in 1883 to raise funds in order to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. She wrote “The New Colossus” to commemorate the plight of immigrants, especially the Russian Jewish immigrants, whom she personally helped after they fled Russia and its violence. Lazarus was born into a wealthy sugar refining family of Portuguese Sephardi Jewish descent on July 22, 1849. She lived at 18 West 10^th Street for most of her life. As a young girl she learned Greek and Latin classics, and modern literature from Germany, Italy, and France. By the 1860’s and 1870’s she began publishing her poetry, with her first commercial volume, called Poems and Translations , released in 1866. This volume received great attention from poets and critics including Ralph Waldo Emerson, a famous poet who became her friend and mentor. Having lived through the American Civil War and the Gilded Age, which ended around the turn of the century, she saw Manhattan change tremendously and because of her life experience, was a strong advocate for change. Lazarus was also an outspoken advocate for Jewish causes and a Jewish homeland. She was an early believer of what is now known as the Zionist movement. She spent much of her life helping and sympathizing with a wide-range of immigrants, but especially Russian Jewish immigrants on Ward’s Island. She died from Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1887 and is buried in Beth-Olam Cemetery in Brooklyn. In the summer of 2012 the Museum of Jewish Heritage had an exhibition, Emma Lazarus: Poet of Exiles, created for the 125^th anniversary of the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. The exhibition included rare artifacts of hers and gave insight to what her life was like in the 1800s. She was involved in the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Society for the Improvement and Colonization of East European Jews and the Hebrew Technical Institute. Emma Lazarus wrote the “Songs of a Semite” (1882) to help combat anti-Semitism. Since the Statue of Liberty was complete on October 28, 1886, it has stood as a symbol to all immigrants on their approach to New York and America. According to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Lazarus’s “words turned the statue into a beacon of hope for newcomers.” "Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,/The wretched refuse of your teeming shore /Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,/I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This article was written by Deborah Coopersmith, an 11th-grader from Yeshivah of Flatbush High School in the Summer of 2015 as part of a partnership between Literary Manhattan and the New-York Historical Society Summer Scholars program. Click here to learn more.

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