“Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me” - A Queer Jewish Woman Writes The Most Famous Poem In American Literature

This was not the world Emma Lazarus grew up in, but this was the world her Jewish identity moved her to embrace.

You don't recognize the title "The New Colossus." You probably haven't heard of Emma Lazarus. But by God!, you've heard these lines -- and more than once!

“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!”

Odds are you didn't know that Emma Lazarus, almost forgotten now, was a famous poet in her day, an anomaly in the 19th century world of letters for being not only female but Jewish. And it was because she was Jewish that she was persuaded, somewhat against her will ("I don't work for hire") to compose a sonnet in 1883 as donation to an auction conducted by the "Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty." Bartholdi's statue had been completed in France for some time, but the deal was that the United States should pay for her pedestal, and New Yorkers were laggard in their response.

From her biography, you would not have predicted that Emma Lazarus would become a vocal advocate for the Eastern European Jewish refugees who flooded into the country after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. *Those* Jews -- Yiddish-speaking, impoverished, medieval in clothes, appearance, and attitude -- impressed themselves as the template for Jews in America -- much to the dismay of the older, way more assimilated populations of German Jews who arrived in the 1840s and Sephardic Jews whose presence predated the Republic itself.

Born in 1849, Emma grew up in a life of privilege as part of a wealthy Sephardic Jewish family, a bona fide member of American Jewish nobility. (Her father, Moses Lazarus, reaped part of his fortune as a sugar refiner, which entangled his wealth in the institution of Caribbean slavery, but let us only make note of that and move on.) Emma grew up with little awareness or understanding of her heritage and successfully integrated into Christian society.

Though she was personally spared from explicit discrimination, Emma was regularly referred to as “the Jewess” by her Christian friends. As she later wrote in a letter to a friend, “I am perfectly conscious that… contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us.” During the 1870s, Emma made her reputation as a writer on European themes with only occasional forays into condemnations of Christian antisemitism.

The Russian pogroms unleashed by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II lit the match that inflamed Emma's Jewish identity. Eastern European Jews fled to America. Month after month, over 2,000 arrived at the New York processing facility for immigrants . They were penniless, desperate, homeless. Before long, Castle Garden was over capacity, and New York City officials opened an old hospital building on Ward Island to house them.

Emma visited Ward Island and exposed their desperate living conditions. She volunteered for the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society and taught English. She donated money. She set up job training and education for the refugees. She raised money, both at home and in Europe. She criticized American Jews for not doing enough to support the refugees. And she was instrumental in the founding of the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York.

On the literary front, she trumpeted her new-found ethnic identity by naming her 1882 collection of poetry, Songs of a Semite. So when, the following year, she was asked to donate a poem to aid the erection of "Lady Liberty," she wrote instead a sonnet to "the Mother of Exiles." That was not what the creators of the new colossus that was to stand at the entrance of New York harbor had in mind. Auguste Bartholdi had intended his work to inspire the ideal of liberty — a beacon shining out around the world. Emma's poem transformed the flame of liberty into a torch of welcome. "I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

This was not the work of a day -- nor even a decade. The Statue of Liberty was unveiled in 1886; Emma died of Hodgkins Lymphoma, age 38, the year after. At the behest of a group of friends and civic leaders, a bronze plaque of "The New Colossus" was placed on the pedestal in 1903. In time the sonnet effected a complete shift of the statue's meaning in the American narrative. It glorified us as a nation of immigrants, a nation who welcomed immigrants.

The fact that this literary miracle was brought about by "a Jewess" whose advocacy of her tempest-tost people trumped her class and privilege is inconvenient in these xenophobic times, but no attempt at erasure or historical revision can entirely snuff out the Statue's light.

O! and as for the "queer," that is the subject of another day.

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