Emma Lazarus

Known best for the lines of “The New Colossus” engraved on the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus is brought vividly to life in this work by Princeton Professor Esther Schor. Skillfully drawing on letters undiscovered till the 1980’s, Schor presents a highly readable portrait of this fascinating and wide-ranging Jewish American writer who died at the age of 38. The book is one of the first of the exciting Jewish Encounters series published by NEXTBOOK. Born into a wealthy Sephardi family in 1849, Lazarus became part of New York elite literary circles after her father published her first book of poems when she was only seventeen. Many of her poems were on Jewish themes, including ones on anti-Semitism. One poem, entitled “Raschi in Prague”, recounts the legendary narrative of the medieval commentator’s meeting with the duke and vizier of Prague. Lazarus’s literary work attracted the attention of Emerson in the United States, and of writers and artists such as Browning, Henry James, William Morris and Burne-Jones. Schor’s biography outlines how in her short lifetime, Lazarus developed a reputation as critic, activist, and philanthropist as well as poet. She took up the cause of the new Jewish immigrants who came to America after the Russian pogroms of 1881/2; she herself worked in the employment bureau of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society on the Lower East Side, and strove to provide industrial training for refugees in New York. She was the first well-known American to publicly make a case for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. According to Schor, “She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her- a feminist, a Zionist and an internationally famous Jewish-American writer before these categories even existed”.