Did You Know Jewish Female Poet, Emma Lazarus, Wrote the Poem on the Statue of Liberty?
National Poetry Month: Jewish American Women Poets
Did you know that the penned poem on the Statue of Liberty was written by Emma Lazarus, A Jewish American Poet?
According to The Poetry Foundation:
Emma Lazarus was born in New York City to a wealthy family and educated by private tutors. She began writing and translating poetry as a teenager and was publishing translations of German poems by the 1860s. Her father privately printed her first work in 1866 and the next year, her first collection, Poems and Translations (1867), appeared from a commercial press.
The book gained the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others. Over the next decade, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, Admetus and Other Poems (1871); the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Life (1874); and a play in verse, The Spagnoletto (1876). Reading George Eliot’s novel Daniel Deronda, with its exploration of Jewish identity, stirred Lazarus to consider her own heritage. In the 1880s, she took up the cause — through both poetry and prose — against the persecution of Jews in Russia, publishing a polemical pamphlet The Century (1882) and Songs of a Semite: The Dance to Death and Other Poems (1882), one of the first…
