{"id":148,"date":"2025-08-17T16:33:48","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T16:33:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/?page_id=148"},"modified":"2025-11-03T14:32:38","modified_gmt":"2025-11-03T14:32:38","slug":"emma-lazarus-the-new-colossus-1883","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/fys-pinsker\/texts\/emma-lazarus-the-new-colossus-1883\/","title":{"rendered":"Emma Lazarus, \u201cThe New Colossus\u201d (1883)"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTRODUCTION<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Lazarus\"<\/a>
Emma Lazarus (Poetry Foundation)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)<\/a> was born into a large and wealthy Jewish family in Manhattan in the 1840s.\u00a0 Some of her ancestors had escaped from religious persecution in Portugal to Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam (later New York) as early as the seventeenth century.\u00a0 Others immigrated to the United States from German provinces in the eighteenth century.\u00a0 But by the time of the American Civil War, Lazarus was well educated and surrounded by social power and influence.\u00a0 Her father helped publish her earliest poetry, while she was still a teenager.\u00a0 The famous public intellectual and transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson later became one of her mentors and influences.\u00a0 But by her early thirties, Lazarus also developed a notable commitment to social justice, especially for Jewish refugees and immigrants.\u00a0 Originally asked to write a poem to help raise funds for the pedestal of the new Statue of Liberty (a gift from France honoring the abolition of slavery and dedicated in 1886), Lazarus decided to produce a sonnet (14-line poem) extolling America not just as a free land but also as a beacon for exiles.\u00a0 This 1883 poem, \u201cThe New Colossus,\u201d then became popular and was later engraved on a bronze plaque inside the Lady Liberty\u2019s pedestal in 1903.<\/p>\n

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