![]() ![]() Louis Adamic was a Slovenian peasant who came to the U.S. It was not until the 1930s, after the anti-immigration legislation of the 1920s, when pro-immigrationists took the poem up as a kind of anthem. And so the poems that were published, popularized, and anthologized of hers were these Zionist anthems she wrote. Emma Lazarus was famous in that decade as a Zionist. And when it was put up, was there an embrace of it, in the larger public sphere? Not so much, right?Ī. And as you know, it wasn’t until 1903 when a friend of hers, just as a private venture to honor Emma Lazarus, undertook to commission a plaque with the poem on it, and put it on the pedestal. Seems like sensible ethnocentrism to me …īut then the poem is eclipsed, so by the time the statue is dedicated in 1886, it’s not read aloud, it’s not published, it’s just not part of the conversation. So, basically, Emma Lazarus was concerned about the anti-Semitic pogroms that began in Russia in 1881, and not interested in other people’s problems. ![]() I’ve been through Emma Lazarus’ letters many times, and I don’t see her commenting about either piece of legislation. So she writes this poem, and this is where she audaciously brings the demand to the American people on behalf of all the “tired and poor … the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” …ġ882 was also the year of the Immigration Act of 1882, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. That was her Confederate friend who told her that. She at first demurs: “I don’t write on command”-but in her friend’s memoir, the friend wrote, “I reminded her about her work with the refugees, and it hit home.” … So she was asked to contribute a poem, because of her work with refugees, to to build the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, in the fall of 1883. But she taught them English, she worked at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Employment Bureau, she advocated for them, and she started her own fund for them, then went to Europe to try to raise money for them, as well. So, she was deeply involved with them, even though she didn’t speak a word of Yiddish and even though I have to say, as a kind of upper-class snob, she recoiled to some extent from these people who were very religious Jews, and they had an utterly different worldview from hers. She was made aware of the refugee crisis by people who were working with her at the American Hebrew Magazine. She was educated in her father’s library, a very upper-class young woman. She was from a Sephardic family, which is to say she didn’t speak Yiddish she spoke English at home. Rebecca Onion: When Emma Lazarus wrote this poem, in 1883, where was she, in her activism on behalf of Jewish refugees? What political context did the poem come from, for her?Įsther Schor: Lazarus was a fourth- or fifth-generation American from a very wealthy family. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. … I spoke with Princeton professor Esther Schor, who wrote an acclaimed 2006 biography of Emma Lazarus. Uh, wasn’t it Lazarus’s friend from Richmond, VA, Constance Cary Harrison, the Betsy Ross of the Confederate Battle Flag, who persuaded Lazarus to write it? Lazarus’s family had had a lot of business ties to the Confederacy. It was radical even when it was first affixed to the monument: “Emma Lazarus’ poem ‘The New Colossus’ was a political statement written against white supremacist political efforts in her day … ![]() This week, yet another Trump administration official tripped up against “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus’ stirring 1883 sonnet, which was affixed to the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1903.Īnd yet, as the right is ever-ready to point out, the poem has never reflected America’s actual laws. The poem has never represented America’s immigration policy. ![]() The Complicated History of Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” ![]()
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