Emma Lazarus

Emma Lazarus was an American author of poetry, prose, and translations, as well as an activist for Jewish and Georgist causes. She is remembered for writing the sonnet "The New Colossus", which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty, in 1883. Its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque, installed in 1903, on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. The last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin as the song "Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which was based on the sculpting of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World). The latter part of the sonnet was also set by Lee Hoiby in his song "The Lady of the Harbor" written in 1985 as part of his song cycle "Three Women".

Emma Lazarus was born in New York City, July 22, 1849, into a large Sephardic Jewish family. She was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. One of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side was from Germany; the rest of her Lazarus and Nathan ancestors were originally from Portugal and they were resident in New York long before the American Revolution, they were among the original twenty-three Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam after they had fled from their settlement in Recife, Brazil in an attempt to flee from the Inquisition.[11][8] Lazarus's great-great-grandmother on her mother's side, Grace Seixas Nathan (born in New York in 1752) was also a poet.[12] Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Her siblings included sisters Josephine, Sarah, Mary, Agnes and Annie, and a brother, Frank.

Privately educated by tutors from an early age, she studied American and British literature as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. She was attracted in youth to poetry, writing her first lyrics when eleven years old.

Lazarus returned to New York City seriously ill after she completed her second trip to Europe, and she died two months later, on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma. She never married. Lazarus was buried in Beth Olam Cemetery in Cypress Hills, Queens. The Poems of Emma Lazarus (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1889) was published after her death, comprising most of her poetic work from previous collections, periodical publications, and some of the literary heritage which her executors deemed appropriate to preserve for posterity. Her papers are kept by the American Jewish Historical Society, Center for Jewish History, and her letters are collected at Columbia University.

A stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus's poem, "The New Colossus", was issued by Antigua and Barbuda in 1985. In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month Honoree by the National Women's History Project. Lazarus was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included on a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition about Lazarus in 2012.