Emma Lazarus

Why this Chapter exists

The sonnet in the pedestal.

The Statue of Liberty was not built as a monument to immigration. France gave it as a monument to liberty and the American republic. A sonnet helped change its meaning. The poem was written in 1883 for an auction to raise money for the pedestal, faded from view, and was mounted inside that pedestal on a bronze plaque in 1903. The poem calls the statue the Mother of Exiles.

1849–1881

An American poet, rooted before the Revolution.

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City on July 22, 1849, into a wealthy Sephardic family, descended from the Jews of Spain and Portugal whose roots in America reached back before the Revolution. Her ancestors helped found the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, and Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, two of the oldest congregations in the country. She published her first collection of poems at seventeen. Ralph Waldo Emerson, then among the most famous writers in America, read it, wrote to her, and mentored her by mail. Through her twenties she was a rising literary figure. In 1877 she wrote that her religious convictions and “the circumstances of my life have led me somewhat apart from my people.”

She had written on Jewish subjects before: a poem on the Newport synagogue at eighteen, translations of the medieval Spanish Hebrew poets, and a verse drama, The Dance to Death. It told of the Jews of Nordhausen, Germany, condemned to die in 1349 on the false charge that they had caused the plague. Those works looked to the past. The news from Russia in 1881 turned her toward the present.

1881–1883

The pogroms reach New York.

In 1881 and 1882, waves of anti-Jewish violence known as pogroms swept the Russian Empire. They are documented in Unit 3. Refugees began arriving in New York by the thousands. Lazarus visited them at the refuge on Ward’s Island in the East River. She taught English to the new arrivals at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA), volunteered with the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, and helped found the Hebrew Technical Institute to train refugees for work. She also began to write as a Jew.

The work came fast: Songs of a Semite in 1882, and then fifteen public letters, “An Epistle to the Hebrews,” in the American Hebrew from November 1882 to February 1883. She urged assimilated American Jews to support the refugees and warned them of their own vulnerability as Jews, even in the United States. She also argued for a Jewish national home in the land of Israel as a refuge for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, not, she was careful to say, for American Jews like herself. She wrote in the same season as the Odessa physician Leon Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882). That was more than a decade before Der Judenstaat (1896), the pamphlet by Theodor Herzl, founder of political Zionism, that appears later in this Unit. (Jewish Women’s Archive; National Park Service.)

November 2, 1883

Fourteen lines for an auction.

In 1883 the request came. William Maxwell Evarts and the writer Constance Cary Harrison asked her to contribute to an art and literary auction raising money for the pedestal of the colossal statue France had given. Harrison later wrote that Lazarus produced the poem “at my solicitation.” On November 2, 1883 she finished a sonnet called “The New Colossus.” The National Park Service links it to her Sephardic heritage and her work with refugees on Ward’s Island.

A colossus is a giant statue. The ancient world’s most famous was the bronze statue of the sun god Helios at Rhodes. Her sonnet renames the new statue before the country had decided what it was. It sets the new colossus against the old one and calls it Mother of Exiles. The “twin cities” were Manhattan and Brooklyn, in 1883 still two separate cities. In the last six lines, the statue speaks.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”

Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” 1883, as she copied it into her notebook of poems. Beneath it she wrote, “(Written in aid of Bartholdi Pedestal Fund.)” Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was the statue’s sculptor. The notebook is held by the American Jewish Historical Society. The National Park Service prints the same text.

1887–1903

The poet forgotten, the poem installed.

Emma Lazarus died on November 19, 1887, at thirty-eight. The poem was not read at the statue’s dedication and, in the National Park Service’s words, slowly faded from public memory. Around 1901 her friend Georgina Schuyler, a great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, came across the sonnet in a bookshop and began a campaign to have it honored. In 1903, a bronze plaque bearing the poem was placed on the inner wall of the pedestal. Today the original is on display inside the pedestal, and a replica hangs in the Statue of Liberty Museum on the island.

Over the twentieth century, as the statue greeted the immigrant ships documented in the American Jewry Chapter, her sonnet became a standard account of what the statue means. It has been quoted by presidents of both parties and set to music. In the National Park Service’s words, the poem depicts the statue as “a symbol of immigration and opportunity,” symbols now associated with it.

Object Spotlight

A statue renamed by a sonnet.

Two objects belong together here: the statue in New York Harbor and the fourteen lines that tell it what it is. The chain runs from a pogrom in the Russian Empire, to an island refuge in the East River, to an auction manuscript, to the plaque inside the pedestal.

The analytical question

What one writer changed.

One person, after working with the refugees of one wave of pogroms, wrote fourteen lines that helped change how a nation describes its statue. How much can one writer change what a monument means?

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• US History & Civics: the Statue of Liberty, the immigration era, and how a text became national self-description.
• English & Poetry: “The New Colossus” as a sonnet, the Rhodes allusion, and the first-person voice of a monument.
• Jewish History: the 1881 pogroms’ American echo, and proto-Zionist thought before Herzl.
• Women’s History: a nineteenth-century woman whose words outlived her own fame.
• Historical Thinking: tracing a cultural artifact’s chain of custody, from event to text to monument to memory.

Standards Alignment

• NYS US History & Government: 11.5 (industrialization and urbanization, the immigration era) and NYS Global History 10.2 (the pogrom context).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.9–10.9 (comparing a primary text with its historical context) and RL analysis of the sonnet itself.

Further Teaching Resources

• National Park Service, “The New Colossus”, the poem and the plaque at the statue itself.
• NPS, “Emma Lazarus”, the biography as the monument’s keepers tell it.
• Jewish Women’s Archive, the scholarly encyclopedia entry.