Emma Lazarus
July 22, 1849 — New York City, New York
Emma Lazarus was an American poet, essayist, and Jewish activist whose 1883 sonnet "The New Colossus" — now engraved on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty — contains the lines "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," which have become the defining expression of America's promise to immigrants.
A Poet from Sephardic New York
Born on July 22, 1849 in New York City, Emma Lazarus was the fourth of seven children in a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family whose American roots stretched back to the colonial era. She was educated by private tutors and began writing poetry as a teenager. Her father Moses, a successful sugar merchant, privately published her first collection when she was seventeen. Ralph Waldo Emerson noticed her work and became her mentor and correspondent, praising her gifts but, to her considerable hurt, omitting her from his 1874 anthology of American poetry. She published translations of German poetry, wrote a verse drama, and contributed essays and poems to the literary journals of the day, establishing herself as a serious literary figure by her early thirties. But it was events far from her literary circle that would draw out her deepest and most enduring work.
The Cause of Her People
The pogroms that swept through Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1880s sent waves of Jewish refugees to New York's Lower East Side, and Lazarus volunteered at the immigrant reception station on Ward's Island, witnessing conditions of severe overcrowding and desperate poverty firsthand. The experience transformed her. She began writing essays championing Jewish immigration, advocating for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine (making her one of the earliest proto-Zionist voices in America), and attacking both European antisemitism and American indifference with increasing passion. Her 1882 essay "Was the Earl of Beaconsfield a Representative Jew?" and her series "An Epistle to the Hebrews" (1882–83) mark a writer fully committed to her community's survival and dignity.
Did You Know?
When Lazarus wrote "The New Colossus" in 1883, it was for a fundraising auction to help finance the construction of the Statue of Liberty's pedestal. The poem did not appear on the statue itself until 1903, sixteen years after her death, when her friend Georgina Schuyler campaigned to have a bronze tablet with the sonnet installed inside the pedestal. The poem was largely forgotten during Lazarus's lifetime; its central role in defining American immigration mythology grew slowly over the following century.
A Short Life, an Immortal Verse
In 1887, Lazarus died from what was described as cancer in New York City at the age of 38, having never seen her poem placed on the Statue of Liberty — an event that would not happen for another sixteen years. She is buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Queens, New York. Her final collection, Songs of a Semite (1882), is considered the pioneering work of modern American Jewish poetry. Her rehabilitation in literary history accelerated through the 20th century; she is now recognised not only as the author of one of the most quoted lines in American cultural memory, but as an important bridge figure between the genteel literary culture of mid-Victorian America and the emerging literature of ethnic identity and immigrant experience.