Emma Lazarus:
Sephardic Woman of Letters
Orit Rabkin

With her famous words, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” Emma Lazarus created the compassionate verbal image of a Jewish mother for the Statue of Liberty in the New York harbor, welcoming the millions of Jews who were “refuse” from Russia and Eastern Europe and the tired and poor of every other land.

As the first Jewish woman and Sephardic poet of importance in the modern era, Lazarus struggled with recognition and acceptance among her peers during her short lifetime. More than a century later, her words have entered the national canon, overshadowing the words of other writers from her time. When she passed away in 1887 at the age of thirty-eight, her poem, “The New Colossus” had not yet become famous as it is today. She had written the poem in 1883 to help raise funds for the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, and twenty years later in 1903 the famous lines were inscribed on a bronze plaque and placed on that pedestal. Those words are among the most widely known and quoted lines of poetry in the United States. They have entered popular culture, quoted by school children, used by song writers like Irving Berlin and Lee Holby, and regularly referred to by politicians.

ISBN: 9781935604327. Paper. $22.95. 276 pages 

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