Birthday quote 22nd July

Emma Lazarus
Emma Lazarus was an American poet; she is best known for "The New Colossus", a sonnet written in 1883; its lines appear inscribed on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty installed in 1903, a decade and a half after Lazarus's death.

Lazarus was born into a large Jewish family, the fourth of seven children. From an early age, she studied American and British literature, as well as several languages, including German, French, and Italian. Her writings attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lazarus wrote her own important poems and edited many adaptations of German poems, notably those of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine. She also wrote a novel and two plays in five acts, The Spagnoletto, a tragic verse drama about the titular figure and The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.

Lazarus became more interested in her Jewish ancestry after reading the George Eliot novel Daniel Deronda, and as she heard of the Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. As a result of this anti-Semitic violence, thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews emigrated from the Russian Pale of Settlement to New York, leading Lazarus to write articles on the subject, as well as the book Songs of a Semite (1882). Lazarus began at this point to advocate on behalf of indigent Jewish refugees. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supporting.

She is best known for the sonnet "The New Colossus"; its lines appear on a bronze plaque in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty placed in 1903. The sonnet was written in 1883 and donated to an auction in order to raise funds to build the pedestal. Lazarus is also known for her sixteen-part cycle poem "Epochs".

She traveled twice to Europe, first in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887. She returned to New York City seriously ill after her second trip and died two months later on November 19, 1887, most likely from Hodgkin's lymphoma.

She was an important forerunner of the Zionist movement and argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland thirteen years before Theodor Herzl began to use the term Zionism. Emma Lazarus was honoured by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March, 2008, and her home on West 10th Street was included in a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was honoured by induction into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Born 22nd July 1849 in New York City, New York, U.S.
Died 19th November 1887 in New York City, New York, U.S.

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