A JEW WROTE THE WORDS ON THE STATUE OF LIBERTY

EMMA LAZARUS - Remember her contribution during Jewish American Heritage Month

Another Jew who saw the United States as a haven for her people, the Jews, was Emma Lazarus, who was born to wealthy Sephardic Jews in New York City in 1849. Emma was a precocious poet at a young age, and she composed many poems and essays which attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a leading American poet and essayist. She carried on a life-long correspondence with Emerson as well as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Emma Lazarus wrote essays and commentaries attacking the anti-Semites of the day. As a mature woman she became concerned for the plight of the Russian Jewish immigrants. She did volunteer work on Wards Island, where the immigrants landed from overseas. “In her writings Lazarus set forth her ideas and plans for the rebirth of Jewish life by a national and cultural revival in the United States and in the Holy Land” (Brody, Seymour, Emma Lazarus: A Poetess and Helper of Immigrants, 1996).

Sadly, at the height of her career, Emma was stricken with cancer and died at only 38 years of age. However, Emma Lazarus’ name lives on in the words of her most famous poem, a sonnet entitled The New Colossus. These words, written in 1883, are engraved on a memorial plaque that was affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903: 

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!” 

The compassion in this young woman’s heart for the downtrodden Jews was truly a blessing, and her words radiated hope just as the lamp of the Statue of Liberty radiated light to the weary travelers.

--Excerpt from Destiny of the Jews, Master's Thesis by Nancy Petrey, 2004.