Emma Lazarus

by Esther H. Schor and Esther Schor

Book Overview

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award

The definitive biography of the poet whose sonnet "The New Colossus" appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming immigrants to their new home.

Emma Lazarus's most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her--a feminist,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805242163
• ISBN13: 9780805242164
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Schocken Books Inc
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

"Give me your tired, your poor,"

Interesting book about activist and poet Emma Lazarus, the lady who wrote the Statue of Liberty poem. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

worthy work of an unjustly neglected figure

A worthwhile biography by a scholar who blends critical insight with sheer enthusiasm in a very appealing manner. By the late 1870s and 1880s, Browning, Whitman, Henry James, Emerson (the latter two among her many ardent correspondents) and many others had all praised Emma Lazarus's groundbreaking translations of Heine as well as her own verse that appeared in Lippincott's and the Century. But she was fated to be memorialized exclusively for "The New Colossus," her great paean to American largesse, and by Jewish Americans for the few years of poetry, essays and political activity dedicated to their cause. Representative of this trend, Henrietta Szold (1860-1945) would celebrate her as "the most distinguished literary figure produced by American Jewry and possibly the most eminent poet among Jews since Heine and Judah Loeb Gordon." Certainly as far as Jewish women of Szold's generation are concerned, Lazarus demonstrated previously unimagined ways of intervening in American public culture. Nevertheless, her achievements have been largely forgotten; among late twentieth century scholars, Lazarus's contribution to Jewish-American history has been condescendingly noted at best. Though Lazarus played a significant proto-Zionist role, she is even ignored in major studies of American Zionism. And yet to fully understand the unusual literary and polemical pedigree of American Zionism, one must begin with a careful consideration of Lazarus's assimilationist strategies--and an acknowledgement of her cultural force. By far the most influential Jewish-American literary figure of the nineteenth century, Lazarus's reflections on the status of the Jew in gentile society and on the question of the Jews' return to Palestine offer a rich literary and historical context for examining later imaginative responses to the perpetually conflicted nature of Zionism in America. Readers who want to explore Lazarus's poetic vision in greater depth may be interested in Ranen Omer-Sherman's Diaspora and Zionism in Jewish American Literature (Brandeis UP 2002)which at times offers a deeper engagement with the poems themselves than Schor attempts. Omer-Sherman explores the poet's lack of complete confidence in the viability of Jewishness in America and demonstrates how Lazarus was torn between her belief in universalism and her proto-Zionist program, between her desire to assimilate and her pained recognition of her marginality in the wake of Emerson's rejection of her work. As for the poems themselves, the best available one is Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings edited by Gregory Eiselein.

Universal Interest

Esther Schor has done us all a great favor by her exploration of a "forgotten" figure in American history. We all know the poem at the Statue of Liberty - certainly the last lines of it. And yet very few people know who wrote it, or what its historical context was. As is the case with many deeply ingrained elements of culture, this poem is assumed to emerged whole from a member of our citizen community. We learn here that Emma was a very, very remarkable woman. Long before women in American had anything approaching "equal rights," she asserted herself into many political dialogues and won recognition for the intellectual strength of women in America. Her life is instructive to us all - I learned a lot from this book, which is engagingly written and a real exploration of a vital element of our national culture. It's especially poignant in the current political debate about restricting immigration from Mexico...

A Woman I Would Like You to Know

With the words of the title of this review, Esther Schor introduces the reader to Emma Lazarus (1849 -1887)in her newly-published biography of this late-nineteenth Century American poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and social activist for newly-arrived immigrants. Schor is Professor of English at Princeton University, a poet in her own right, and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her biography of Emma Lazarus is part of a series of books called "Jewish Encounters" edited by Jonathan Rosen and "devoted to the promotion of Jewish literature, culture, and ideas." Emma Lazarus is known to most readers only as the author of the sonnet "The New Colossus" which ultimately achieved iconic status with its inscription on the Statue of Liberty. But there is much more to Emma Lazarus than this great poem, as Schor convincingly demonstrates.Schor writes in an accessible, colloquial style that shows great affection and understanding for Lazarus. Although Schor's book includes a substantial amount of analysis of Lazarus's literary work, the focus of the book lies in bringing Emma Lazarus herself to life. Schor's biography, while not constituting the last word on Emma Lazarus, fulfills its goal of showing why Lazarus is worth knowing. Even with this book, and other studies of Emma Lazarus, she remains a complex and elusive figure. Lazarus was born to an assimilated family of wealthy New York Jews who had lived in the United States for at least four generations. Lazarus received an outstanding private education and became known as a prodigy when her first volume of poems, written between the ages of 14 and 16 was published by her father. As a young woman, Emma Lazarus attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson and had a complicated relationship with him, as Schor discusses at length. Lazarus visited Emerson in Concord twice near the end of his life and became friends with his daughter Ellen. Lazarus was a highly connected woman with friends, male and female, among the most culturally and politically influential people in the United States. Lazarus made impressive contributions to poetry besides "The New Colossus" and wrote influential essays and reviews as well. Her best work, such as "The New Colossus" deals with her vision of America and with the place of Judaism in the United States. In fact her work tends to fuse together these two subects. As Schor suggests, Emma Lazarus became the first of what would become a long series of Jewish-American writers who would try to express what they deemed to be the ideals of Judaism in secular and literary rather than in traditionally religious terms. Schor argues that Lazarus's work shows an interpenetration of American and Jewish ideals, with America providing freedom, liberty, and economic and cultural opportunity, while Jewish ideals expanded upon concepts of social justice and ethics within the American framework. Schor argues that there was a Jewish undercurrent to Lazarus's works fro