Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the nine eleven terrorist attacks, So we actually had a really hard time figuring out which episode to release today. As a classic, the attack itself is far more recent than what we cover on the show, and everything that we considered that seemed tangentially related just felt kind of off. But it also felt wrong not to mention the anniversary at all. So we've decided to just go in another direction, and today's episode is on Emma Lazarus. This originally came out July, and along with the other work that we discussed in the episode, she wrote the New Colossus to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. There is a bronze plaque with the text of that poem inside the pedestal. Today, Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. UH, And today we're going to talk about Emma Lazarus, who became one of the United States first successful Jewish American writers moving in the New York literary scene in the late eighteen hundreds, and she also wrote one of the most famous poems of all time. Even if you don't know her name or the title of that poem, odds are that at least you know some lines of that work. Heads up for our listeners who are maybe sharing this episode with younger history buffs, we are going to have a discussion at the end about one of her poems that is definitely erotic and calls into questions some theories about her sexuality. The poem in particular is adult content. I would say, yeah, I read it this morning and then I needed to take a walk. So we're gonna jump right in to the life of Emma Lazarus. She was born on July to second of eighteen forty nine, and her parents, Moses and Esther Lazarus, had seven children. She was born right in the middle. She was their fourth. They lived in New York City, and Emma's family, which had Portuguese Jewish roots, was pretty wealthy. The family business was a sugar refinery and they had done extremely well for themselves. The family had been in New York since before the Revolutionary War, so that money that had been passed down through the family was rooted originally in a sugar trade that was directly tied to slavery, and the success that Moses acquired through the family business put him in high society circles that consisted primarily of white Christians, and he made something of a conscious effort to play down the family's Sephardic Jewish background as part of their assimilation into that social circle. He was moving towards more of a secular Judaism himself. But this whole situation really always gave Emma a sense of otherness. Even though she had friends, she just always felt apart kind of everyone. Her early life was split between homes in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. She studied with private tutors and received a really wide ranging education. She learned to speak French, Italian, and German, and these multi lingual skills really served her well in her career. Her translations were as popular as the poetry and prose that she was writing, and she was translating uh poetry from foreign languages from a very early age. In in eighteen sixty six, her poetry was published for the first time in a volume titled Poems and Translations, written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and this book was financed not by a publishing house but by her father, Moses, who was incredibly supportive of her work as a writer. But in eighteen sixty seven a publishing house printed a second edition of the book, which gave it a much wider distribution. Soon, Emma Lazarus was a name that was circulating in literary circles, and her poetry was getting the attention of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson. He became her mentor after the two of them were introduced by mutual friends. When Emma published a book of poetry called Ad Medicine Other Poems in eighteen seventy one, the title poem was dedicated to Emerson. That relationship between Emerson, who was sixty five when he met eighteen year old Lazarus, wasn't always a smooth one. Initially, Emerson had seemed even a little flirtatious in his letters with the young poet, and while he praised her work generally, he gave very few specific notes. And then he also cooled in his affinity for her and kind of withdrew. This is something that if you look at Emerson's life, this was a pattern of him with younger poets that he chose to mentor he would kind of lavish praise on them and then kind of back off of it. And then when she asked him to recommend a poem of hers to his editor I believe it was at the Atlantic for publication, he instead leveled some pretty harsh criticism at the work and told her that she had a tendency to indulge in quote feeble word words. The two of them had a deeper falling out when Emerson edited the anthology Parnassis. This is a collection of his favorite poems, and he left Emma's work out of it entirely. She wrote him a really angry letter about this light and he never wrote her back about it. Eventually the two of them did see each other again. Was a couple of years later, after Emerson had retired. Lazarus visited him and conquered Massachusetts in eighteen seventy six at his invitation. YEA, so they seem to have smoothed it over at least a little, but we don't really know that they ever got to the point of friendship they had once shared. Lazarus published more than fifty original poems in her lifetime, as well as volumes of translations. In eighteen seventy one, she published her second book of poetry that Tracy mentioned earlier, which was Admetus and Other Poems and in it our translations of poems by Gerta and Heinrich Heine as well as original works by Lazarus, and her poem how Long, conveys the sense that Lazarus longs for literary tradition that makes sense of her own life as an American writer, and not one that's defined by the European tradition. The final stanza of that work reads, the echo faints and fails. It suiteth not upon this Western plane our voice or spirit. We should stir again the wilderness and make the plane resound unto a yet unheard of strain. Another poem in Admetus is in the Jewish Synagogue at Newport, which is a take on Longfellows the Jewish Cemetery at Newport. This poem touches on the many moments that take place and a synagogue, so there's worship and weddings and funerals, and it's her first poetic effort at really trying to capture Jewish life. In eighteen seventy four, she published a novel, A Lead, An Episode in Gerta's Life. This is the only novel that she ever wrote, and it is based on Guerta's own autobiographical accounts of his life experiences. It tells the story of a young Gerta falling in love with a woman in the country, an ultimate lead leaving her for his work. In eighteen seventy six, she wrote a play in verse called The Spagnoletto. In This work, which is a five act tragedy, was published privately. She published a number of poems in the second half of the eighteen seventies in the early eighteen eighties, mostly in the periodicals Lippincott's Century and The New York Times. In eighteen eighty one, she published a full book of translations of Heinrich Kinna's works, titled Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heina. That same year, she published an essay titled American Literature in defense of the work of writers in the United States as just as valid as the writing of their European predecessors and counterparts. Having studied literature, I think that was an argument people were still making and are still making. A hundred years later, certainly, Yeah, it was something that it was another part of that sense of otherness that she kind of always felt that. She was like, I feel like we're doing great work over here, but everyone is like, oh no, really, the seat of culture and literature is clearly still Europe, which I imagine is really frustrating for writers that are are doing really good work. Um Emma Lazarus was increasingly devoted to activism against anti Semitism in her twenties and thirties. She became a vocal advocate for New York's Jewish refugee population, and she spoke out against the anti Semitism that was rampant in Eastern Europe, writing both essays and poetry on the subject. In two she published a collection titled Songs of a Semite that Danced to Death and Other Poems. And publishing this work, Lazarus became a really controversial figure. There was the obvious issue of anti Semitism to deal with, but in proclaiming her Jewishness so clearly it ran really counter to the ideology of people like her father, who wanted to retain their cultural identity in a more private way to try to avoid causing conflict. In addition to Songs of a Semi, Lazarus became a regular contributor to the Journal's American Hebrew uh and the Century, in which she published several essays from April eighteen eighty two to February eight three. The essays was the Earl of Beaconsfield, a Representative Jew, Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism, and the Jewish Problem all examined the issue of Jews in society, who she wrote, were faded to forever be antagonized by those around them, and it was in reaction to the prejudice against Jews that she witnessed that she started to promote the pre Zionist idea that a Jewish state needed to be established in Palestine. This was before Zionism was really coined and pushed by other people. In a moment, we'll talk about some of the other advocacy that Emma Lazarus engaged in, but we're going to pause first for a brief sponsor break. Emma's activism was confined just to her writing, though, as a way to help Jewish refugees build a better life in the US, she helped found the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York, and there immigrants could receive vocational training to help ensure some sort of financial stability in their new lives. In eighteen eighty two, she worked hands on at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, teaching English and assisting with lessons that would help immigrants merge with American society. That year and estimated two thousand Russian Jewish immigrants were arriving in New York. Every month, she visited the homes of immigrants on Wards Island, and she was somewhat horrified at the conditions there. The island had been made into an overflow camp for refugees, as other facilities in Brooklyn could just no longer take any more people they were completely full. On March eight two, a piece that appears to have been written by Lazarus appeared in the New York Times, although it ran uncredited, and the article casts a sympathetic eye on the people at Ward's Island. How many of them were people of high esteem in their homeland who, in seeking refuge, we're going to start their new lives completely penniless. And it goes on to challenge and disassemble a lot of the stereotypes that Russian Jewish immigrants endured in New York, and it's stressed that they wished only to breathe the air of freedom. Lazarus spent some time in the mid eighteen eighties traveling abroad after she published Songs of a Semite. She visited both England and France, and it was during her first trip there in eighteen eighty three that she met and befriended Robert Browning, William Morris, and Henry James, among others. Yeah, because she was uh already really well known in literary circles in the US, and she was from a wealthy family, one she could afford to travel, and too, she had pretty easy introductions to a lot of society people throughout Europe, so she made a lot of very high profile friends. And that same year she also wrote a letter to her friend and publisher Philip Cowan referencing an article that she had recently read that had a decidedly anti Semitic tone. She wrote quote to refer to the Sun article, it seems to me so coarse and vulgar that it deserves no reply from any self respecting Jew. It represents the habitual light in which we are regarded as a race by the Christians, but it happens to be couched in somewhat more offensive terms than usual. I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us. And yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people, I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects. The particular article ought, in my opinion, to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch. In late three she penned the poem that would become her most famous, The New Colossus. The New Colossus is a sonnet, and you might not know it by name, but you almost certainly know at least a couple of lines from it. We're going to get to the poem itself and just the moment. The New Losses was actually written for charity. Lazarus wrote it so it can be auctioned off to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. While France was giving the US the statue as a gift, it was up to the States to pay for a base that would support the massive monument, and this was something of an issue of contention. Coming up with the money to pay for a pedestal was a challenge, and there was a very real sentiment against the entire affair based on the idea that the whole thing was making the US look bad. I'm gonna say it's not completely unheard of for there to be a gift like this that costs the recipient money, especially when it's a giant statue. Despite the negative opinion of a gift that also required significant expense on the part of the recipient just to receive the gift, the New York literary community rallied to try to raise funds for the base. The Art Loan Fund, Exhibition and Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty was mounted and this was an auction of art and literature created especially for the occasion, and it was managed by the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus had been asked to participate by William Maxwell Everts, who was chairman of the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty and the writer Constance Carrie Harrison, and Lazarus was reluctant initially She was not accustomed to doing commissions, and she didn't write if she didn't feel moved to do so, so this idea of writing on command was not really in her wheelhouse normally. As she approached this poem, Lazarus imagined how the statue might regard the old World, and her work and advocating for the immigrant community really informed the voice that she gave the statue, who she considered the Mother of Exiles. She wrote the New Colossus on November two three, and it's pretty short, so we're going to read it in its entirety. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our sea washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand glows worldwide. Welcome her mild eyes command the air bridged harbor that twins cities frame keep ancient lands. Your storied pomp, cries she with silent lips. Give me You're tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door, so that brazen giant that she mentions in the first line is a reference to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which was a statue built somewhere between two ninety two and two a d. B. C. E. To commemorate a military conquest, and Lazarus characterizes the new monument in contrast as a welcoming presence rather than a conquering one. The poem was read at the auction on in December, but not at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in eighteen eighty six. Later, the New Colossus was published in the New York Times and in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, but it quickly faded from public consciousness. And we are actually about to talk about the end of Emma Lazarus's short life, but we're going to take a quick break before we do to hear from one of the fantastic sponsors that keep our show going. In March eighteen eighty five, Emma's father, Moses Lazarus, died, and in April she set sail for Europe once again. This trip was a very long one. She kept traveling right into eighteen eighty seven. She started with visits to Yorkshire and London before moving on to the Netherlands, France, and Italy, but by the end of the year she was not feeling well. She continued her travels in eighteen eighty six despite feeling ill. First she went back to England and then Holland in Paris, and she'd been planning another visit to Italy, but ended up staying in Paris into seven because she just couldn't travel anymore. She stayed in Paris for six months before returning to New York in July, and that time she had developed a facial paralysis. She had lost her hearing in one year. Her eyesight had declined to the point that she could barely see. Her younger sister Annie had been with her in Europe and took care of her as she convalesced and took dictations so that Emma could keep up her correspondence. Lazarus never got to witness her poems rise to fame. She died on November nineteenth of eighteen eighty seven, and while her illness was never properly diagnosed. It is likely, based on the evidence UH and based on what people have gathered, that she probably died from Hodgkin lymphoma. She was only thirty eight. The funeral was held at her home in New York, and then she was buried in Cypress Hills in Brooklyn. The December issue of American Hebrew was a memorial to M. L. Hazarus. It was more than twenty pages longer than normal to accommodate all the poems and other various tributes that writers had sent for inclusion. The New Colossus went largely unmentioned in obituaries and writings about her after her death, aside from a tribute written by Constance Carrie Harrison. Yeah, that was the writer who had asked her specifically to please write that poem. In the year after Emma died, her cousins set up the Emma Lazarus Club for Working Girls, and there young women immigrants could learn marketable skills such as sewing or clerical practices, but they could also study literature if they wanted to. This charitable effort troubled her immediate family, though they had never been entirely comfortable with Emma's activism. After her death, they had shifted the narrative of her life a little bit, playing down her controversial Zionist views. As you recalled from the beginning of the episode, her father had consciously worked to blend in with New York society and really played down the family's Jewish heritage. The family refused to allow any of Emma's pro Jewish poetry to be reprinted after her death. When her sisters Josephine and Annie published the two volumes that the Poems of Emma Lazarus in, Josephine wrote a biographical sketch of Emma. Yeah, that sketch got reprinted in a lot of places, and that's really kind of where her life story got a little bit um shifted around, where it wasn't quite an accurate portrayal of her anymore, but more like a very niceified version that left out any of her controversial views. In nineteen o one, though, the New Colossus was rediscovered by Georgina Skyler, who was a friend of Emma's, and Skylar had found the poem in a book that she happened upon in a bookshop, and she was inspired to resurrect her friend's work, and through Skylar's efforts. In nineteen o three, the new colossus was inscribed on a plaque, and that plaque was hung inside the museum in the Statue of Liberty's Pedestal, where it remains to this day. The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs was formed in nineteen forty four by the Women's Division of the Jewish People's Paternal Order of the International Workers Order for the i w O. It was founded as a wartime relief group combating racism and fostering positivity in Jewish identity. From its founding until its dissolution in nine the group had at times been labeled as subversive and radical, and it did have ties to communism. It also went through various re ords, but it was always focused on women's issues. The group didn't only advocate for Jewish women's causes, though that was its primary focus. The Emma Lazarus Federation joined forces with the Black Women's Group SO Journals for Truth and Justice during the fifties and sixties, and it also pressured the US government to ratify the nineteen forty eight Genocide Convention. At its highest level of activity, the Mma Lazarus Federation had one hundred clubs within it, with membership totaling between four thousand and five thousand women. In subways. Lazar Us has become more enigmatic since her death. Questions related to her spinster lifestyle arose in the second half of the twentieth century when a signet that she wrote titled Assurance was published for the first time. The signet begins, last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss still floated on my lips. The poem describes a dream of a romantic forest interlude. I would go so far as to say an erotic forest interlude that concludes with the woman referenced in the first line whispering quote and didst thou dream this could be buried, this could be asleep? And love bethrall to death? Nay, WHAT'SO seem? Have faith, dear heart, this is the thing that is. The sonnet has naturally fueled speculation about Emma Lazarus's sexual identity. She had included it in an anthology of her own work that she was preparing just before she died. She understood that she was not going to survive, and she was really focused on her poetry surviving. But this poem was undated, which was unusual for her work. She had to have known it would be a little bit controversial, but this poem, like her activism, was omitted from the work by her sister's author, Esther Shore, in her two thousand six biography of Emma Lazarus, discussed this poem and made a case that it can be interpreted as much about and simply embracing one's own sexuality as anything else. She said quote she wrote the poem as a dream vision and left it undated, not to elude us, but to redirect us. What the poem exposes is her unconscious and it tells us that she met it, if not a female lover face to face, and the sonnet the lover's enigmatic assurance is that this is the thing that is means in another ediom, this is the real thing, but it's also a thing that is real beyond denial or repression. Assurance. Is not a poem about choosing a lover. It is about being chosen by desire. It is a love poem, yes, but also a poem of vocation about being called by eros to a vital sexual life. That is, of course one interpretation. That's the thing about poetry. Other people can interpret different ways. I had a definite interpretation when I read it. That is not something we could really repeat in the podcast. All right, then? Uh. There has been plenty of speculation also about a possible romance at one point between Emma Lazarus and Charles Decay, who was the brother of her best friend, Helena Decay, and the two Emma and Charles were very close for years, but it appears that whatever their connection was, it fell apart when Emma learned something scandalous about Charles, although what that thing was is unknown, But what we do know is that Charles, a poet in his own right, after finding out that she had discovered something, wrote a rather scathing kind of comedy poem to his brother in law, mocking Emma over the whole thing. So whether there was any true romantic affection between the two of them remains a mystery. I read some accounts that suggested that Helena always thought Emma had a thing for Charles, but that Charles never really cared about her. But then other people in their social circle mentioned that Charles was really quite fond of her. We don't know. It's all hearsay at this point, but if there had been any real romantic affection between them, that incident put an end to it. She definitely flirted with men in her life, and she also seemed fascinated by the idea of the so called Boston marriage of two women living together as a couple. But we really don't know anything specific about her personal inclinations or her relationships. It's all speculation. Yeah. Even her letters between her and Charles Decay are nowhere to be found. There's like one and it's pretty boring. So we just don't know. But what is a parent is that while she had a very wide circle of friends and may have had romantic feelings for various people or not, her work, both as a writer and an activist, was always the thing that took precedent and was more important to her than anything else. There's a coda to this, which is I didn't want to say it at the top because it kind of gives away some of the story. But here's why I selected this topic for an episode. I was on Twitter recently, you know where truth always lives. But there was an argument going on about current events, and someone referenced the New Colossus, and some other person replied to them why should we care what some French guy wrote on a statue they sent us, And I thought, well, we gotta let people know that a woman actually wrote it, she was from the United States, just to help pare down the misinformation that may be floating in the world. That is why we selected m. Lazaria. She's also just an interesting figure. We have a lot of stories about activists in various different ways. Hers was a unique style in that she really did seem to want to use her privilege to get the word out, but at the same time she still maintained a very cushy life for herself. So a lot of other poets that we have talked about have been poets who today have had more of a lasting fame in terms of how their work is regarded, whereas I think a lot of people like she's She's not as much of a household name and a lot of circles as say Walt Whitman. No, not at all, um, And you know that people are definitely familiar with at least those few lines from the New Classes, but not necessarily her other work, a lot of which is really lovely. Yeah, I I will confess I was reading some various criticism of it, and she does not get treated terribly, uh delightfully by modern critics. I think even in her own time, some of her word choices were a little stilted and kind of like people either found them dry or a little bit removed. It was like, one critic that I wrote was talking about how she wanted to talk about a lot of different parts of the human experience, but because she really didn't have that wide of a personal experience. You know, she traveled twice, but even so, she spent like six months of those travels in a room basically and on her balcony because she was ill. So she kind of is talking about all of this stuff almost from a remove, and she was like, you can feel the distance between what she's trying to talk about and what it actually is. And also when she talks about other cultures that she never really experienced, there's always that weird kind of distance. But it's worth checking out. Yeah, people made a similar criticism about Phyllis Sweetly, feeling like she was too removed from the work that she was talking about. Yeah, so it's fascating stuff. I uh, I always love a little bit of history involving lady writers. Especially people that don't maybe get their due. Yeah, pay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History podcast at i heart radio dot com. Our old how stuff works email at us no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History. And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google Podcasts, the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday, everybody. Uh. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the nine eleven terrorist attacks, So we actually had a really hard time figuring out which episode to release today. As a classic, the attack itself is far more recent than what we cover on the show, and everything that we considered that seemed tangentially related just felt kind of off. But it also felt wrong not to mention the anniversary at all. So we've decided to just go in another direction, and today's episode is on Emma Lazarus. This originally came out July, and along with the other work that we discussed in the episode, she wrote the New Colossus to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. There is a bronze plaque with the text of that poem inside the pedestal. Today, Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. UH, And today we're going to talk about Emma Lazarus, who became one of the United States first successful Jewish American writers moving in the New York literary scene in the late eighteen hundreds, and she also wrote one of the most famous poems of all time. Even if you don't know her name or the title of that poem, odds are that at least you know some lines of that work. Heads up for our listeners who are maybe sharing this episode with younger history buffs, we are going to have a discussion at the end about one of her poems that is definitely erotic and calls into questions some theories about her sexuality. The poem in particular is adult content. I would say, yeah, I read it this morning and then I needed to take a walk. So we're gonna jump right in to the life of Emma Lazarus. She was born on July to second of eighteen forty nine, and her parents, Moses and Esther Lazarus, had seven children. She was born right in the middle. She was their fourth. They lived in New York City, and Emma's family, which had Portuguese Jewish roots, was pretty wealthy. The family business was a sugar refinery and they had done extremely well for themselves. The family had been in New York since before the Revolutionary War, so that money that had been passed down through the family was rooted originally in a sugar trade that was directly tied to slavery, and the success that Moses acquired through the family business put him in high society circles that consisted primarily of white Christians, and he made something of a conscious effort to play down the family's Sephardic Jewish background as part of their assimilation into that social circle. He was moving towards more of a secular Judaism himself. But this whole situation really always gave Emma a sense of otherness. Even though she had friends, she just always felt apart kind of everyone. Her early life was split between homes in New York City and Newport, Rhode Island. She studied with private tutors and received a really wide ranging education. She learned to speak French, Italian, and German, and these multi lingual skills really served her well in her career. Her translations were as popular as the poetry and prose that she was writing, and she was translating uh poetry from foreign languages from a very early age. In in eighteen sixty six, her poetry was published for the first time in a volume titled Poems and Translations, written between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, and this book was financed not by a publishing house but by her father, Moses, who was incredibly supportive of her work as a writer. But in eighteen sixty seven a publishing house printed a second edition of the book, which gave it a much wider distribution. Soon, Emma Lazarus was a name that was circulating in literary circles, and her poetry was getting the attention of people like Ralph Waldo Emerson. He became her mentor after the two of them were introduced by mutual friends. When Emma published a book of poetry called Ad Medicine Other Poems in eighteen seventy one, the title poem was dedicated to Emerson. That relationship between Emerson, who was sixty five when he met eighteen year old Lazarus, wasn't always a smooth one. Initially, Emerson had seemed even a little flirtatious in his letters with the young poet, and while he praised her work generally, he gave very few specific notes. And then he also cooled in his affinity for her and kind of withdrew. This is something that if you look at Emerson's life, this was a pattern of him with younger poets that he chose to mentor he would kind of lavish praise on them and then kind of back off of it. And then when she asked him to recommend a poem of hers to his editor I believe it was at the Atlantic for publication, he instead leveled some pretty harsh criticism at the work and told her that she had a tendency to indulge in quote feeble word words. The two of them had a deeper falling out when Emerson edited the anthology Parnassis. This is a collection of his favorite poems, and he left Emma's work out of it entirely. She wrote him a really angry letter about this light and he never wrote her back about it. Eventually the two of them did see each other again. Was a couple of years later, after Emerson had retired. Lazarus visited him and conquered Massachusetts in eighteen seventy six at his invitation. YEA, so they seem to have smoothed it over at least a little, but we don't really know that they ever got to the point of friendship they had once shared. Lazarus published more than fifty original poems in her lifetime, as well as volumes of translations. In eighteen seventy one, she published her second book of poetry that Tracy mentioned earlier, which was Admetus and Other Poems and in it our translations of poems by Gerta and Heinrich Heine as well as original works by Lazarus, and her poem how Long, conveys the sense that Lazarus longs for literary tradition that makes sense of her own life as an American writer, and not one that's defined by the European tradition. The final stanza of that work reads, the echo faints and fails. It suiteth not upon this Western plane our voice or spirit. We should stir again the wilderness and make the plane resound unto a yet unheard of strain. Another poem in Admetus is in the Jewish Synagogue at Newport, which is a take on Longfellows the Jewish Cemetery at Newport. This poem touches on the many moments that take place and a synagogue, so there's worship and weddings and funerals, and it's her first poetic effort at really trying to capture Jewish life. In eighteen seventy four, she published a novel, A Lead, An Episode in Gerta's Life. This is the only novel that she ever wrote, and it is based on Guerta's own autobiographical accounts of his life experiences. It tells the story of a young Gerta falling in love with a woman in the country, an ultimate lead leaving her for his work. In eighteen seventy six, she wrote a play in verse called The Spagnoletto. In This work, which is a five act tragedy, was published privately. She published a number of poems in the second half of the eighteen seventies in the early eighteen eighties, mostly in the periodicals Lippincott's Century and The New York Times. In eighteen eighty one, she published a full book of translations of Heinrich Kinna's works, titled Poems and Ballads of Heinrich Heina. That same year, she published an essay titled American Literature in defense of the work of writers in the United States as just as valid as the writing of their European predecessors and counterparts. Having studied literature, I think that was an argument people were still making and are still making. A hundred years later, certainly, Yeah, it was something that it was another part of that sense of otherness that she kind of always felt that. She was like, I feel like we're doing great work over here, but everyone is like, oh no, really, the seat of culture and literature is clearly still Europe, which I imagine is really frustrating for writers that are are doing really good work. Um Emma Lazarus was increasingly devoted to activism against anti Semitism in her twenties and thirties. She became a vocal advocate for New York's Jewish refugee population, and she spoke out against the anti Semitism that was rampant in Eastern Europe, writing both essays and poetry on the subject. In two she published a collection titled Songs of a Semite that Danced to Death and Other Poems. And publishing this work, Lazarus became a really controversial figure. There was the obvious issue of anti Semitism to deal with, but in proclaiming her Jewishness so clearly it ran really counter to the ideology of people like her father, who wanted to retain their cultural identity in a more private way to try to avoid causing conflict. In addition to Songs of a Semi, Lazarus became a regular contributor to the Journal's American Hebrew uh and the Century, in which she published several essays from April eighteen eighty two to February eight three. The essays was the Earl of Beaconsfield, a Representative Jew, Russian Christianity versus Modern Judaism, and the Jewish Problem all examined the issue of Jews in society, who she wrote, were faded to forever be antagonized by those around them, and it was in reaction to the prejudice against Jews that she witnessed that she started to promote the pre Zionist idea that a Jewish state needed to be established in Palestine. This was before Zionism was really coined and pushed by other people. In a moment, we'll talk about some of the other advocacy that Emma Lazarus engaged in, but we're going to pause first for a brief sponsor break. Emma's activism was confined just to her writing, though, as a way to help Jewish refugees build a better life in the US, she helped found the Hebrew Technical Institute of New York, and there immigrants could receive vocational training to help ensure some sort of financial stability in their new lives. In eighteen eighty two, she worked hands on at the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, teaching English and assisting with lessons that would help immigrants merge with American society. That year and estimated two thousand Russian Jewish immigrants were arriving in New York. Every month, she visited the homes of immigrants on Wards Island, and she was somewhat horrified at the conditions there. The island had been made into an overflow camp for refugees, as other facilities in Brooklyn could just no longer take any more people they were completely full. On March eight two, a piece that appears to have been written by Lazarus appeared in the New York Times, although it ran uncredited, and the article casts a sympathetic eye on the people at Ward's Island. How many of them were people of high esteem in their homeland who, in seeking refuge, we're going to start their new lives completely penniless. And it goes on to challenge and disassemble a lot of the stereotypes that Russian Jewish immigrants endured in New York, and it's stressed that they wished only to breathe the air of freedom. Lazarus spent some time in the mid eighteen eighties traveling abroad after she published Songs of a Semite. She visited both England and France, and it was during her first trip there in eighteen eighty three that she met and befriended Robert Browning, William Morris, and Henry James, among others. Yeah, because she was uh already really well known in literary circles in the US, and she was from a wealthy family, one she could afford to travel, and too, she had pretty easy introductions to a lot of society people throughout Europe, so she made a lot of very high profile friends. And that same year she also wrote a letter to her friend and publisher Philip Cowan referencing an article that she had recently read that had a decidedly anti Semitic tone. She wrote quote to refer to the Sun article, it seems to me so coarse and vulgar that it deserves no reply from any self respecting Jew. It represents the habitual light in which we are regarded as a race by the Christians, but it happens to be couched in somewhat more offensive terms than usual. I am perfectly conscious that this contempt and hatred underlies the general tone of the community towards us. And yet when I even remotely hint at the fact that we are not a favorite people, I am accused of stirring up strife and setting barriers between the two sects. The particular article ought, in my opinion, to be treated with absolute contempt. It is too vile to touch. In late three she penned the poem that would become her most famous, The New Colossus. The New Colossus is a sonnet, and you might not know it by name, but you almost certainly know at least a couple of lines from it. We're going to get to the poem itself and just the moment. The New Losses was actually written for charity. Lazarus wrote it so it can be auctioned off to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. While France was giving the US the statue as a gift, it was up to the States to pay for a base that would support the massive monument, and this was something of an issue of contention. Coming up with the money to pay for a pedestal was a challenge, and there was a very real sentiment against the entire affair based on the idea that the whole thing was making the US look bad. I'm gonna say it's not completely unheard of for there to be a gift like this that costs the recipient money, especially when it's a giant statue. Despite the negative opinion of a gift that also required significant expense on the part of the recipient just to receive the gift, the New York literary community rallied to try to raise funds for the base. The Art Loan Fund, Exhibition and Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty was mounted and this was an auction of art and literature created especially for the occasion, and it was managed by the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty. Emma Lazarus had been asked to participate by William Maxwell Everts, who was chairman of the American Committee for the Statue of Liberty and the writer Constance Carrie Harrison, and Lazarus was reluctant initially She was not accustomed to doing commissions, and she didn't write if she didn't feel moved to do so, so this idea of writing on command was not really in her wheelhouse normally. As she approached this poem, Lazarus imagined how the statue might regard the old World, and her work and advocating for the immigrant community really informed the voice that she gave the statue, who she considered the Mother of Exiles. She wrote the New Colossus on November two three, and it's pretty short, so we're going to read it in its entirety. Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land. Here at our sea washed sunset gates shall stand a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon hand glows worldwide. Welcome her mild eyes command the air bridged harbor that twins cities frame keep ancient lands. Your storied pomp, cries she with silent lips. Give me You're tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these the homeless tempest tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door, so that brazen giant that she mentions in the first line is a reference to the ancient Colossus of Rhodes, which was a statue built somewhere between two ninety two and two a d. B. C. E. To commemorate a military conquest, and Lazarus characterizes the new monument in contrast as a welcoming presence rather than a conquering one. The poem was read at the auction on in December, but not at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty in eighteen eighty six. Later, the New Colossus was published in the New York Times and in Joseph Pulitzer's New York World, but it quickly faded from public consciousness. And we are actually about to talk about the end of Emma Lazarus's short life, but we're going to take a quick break before we do to hear from one of the fantastic sponsors that keep our show going. In March eighteen eighty five, Emma's father, Moses Lazarus, died, and in April she set sail for Europe once again. This trip was a very long one. She kept traveling right into eighteen eighty seven. She started with visits to Yorkshire and London before moving on to the Netherlands, France, and Italy, but by the end of the year she was not feeling well. She continued her travels in eighteen eighty six despite feeling ill. First she went back to England and then Holland in Paris, and she'd been planning another visit to Italy, but ended up staying in Paris into seven because she just couldn't travel anymore. She stayed in Paris for six months before returning to New York in July, and that time she had developed a facial paralysis. She had lost her hearing in one year. Her eyesight had declined to the point that she could barely see. Her younger sister Annie had been with her in Europe and took care of her as she convalesced and took dictations so that Emma could keep up her correspondence. Lazarus never got to witness her poems rise to fame. She died on November nineteenth of eighteen eighty seven, and while her illness was never properly diagnosed. It is likely, based on the evidence UH and based on what people have gathered, that she probably died from Hodgkin lymphoma. She was only thirty eight. The funeral was held at her home in New York, and then she was buried in Cypress Hills in Brooklyn. The December issue of American Hebrew was a memorial to M. L. Hazarus. It was more than twenty pages longer than normal to accommodate all the poems and other various tributes that writers had sent for inclusion. The New Colossus went largely unmentioned in obituaries and writings about her after her death, aside from a tribute written by Constance Carrie Harrison. Yeah, that was the writer who had asked her specifically to please write that poem. In the year after Emma died, her cousins set up the Emma Lazarus Club for Working Girls, and there young women immigrants could learn marketable skills such as sewing or clerical practices, but they could also study literature if they wanted to. This charitable effort troubled her immediate family, though they had never been entirely comfortable with Emma's activism. After her death, they had shifted the narrative of her life a little bit, playing down her controversial Zionist views. As you recalled from the beginning of the episode, her father had consciously worked to blend in with New York society and really played down the family's Jewish heritage. The family refused to allow any of Emma's pro Jewish poetry to be reprinted after her death. When her sisters Josephine and Annie published the two volumes that the Poems of Emma Lazarus in, Josephine wrote a biographical sketch of Emma. Yeah, that sketch got reprinted in a lot of places, and that's really kind of where her life story got a little bit um shifted around, where it wasn't quite an accurate portrayal of her anymore, but more like a very niceified version that left out any of her controversial views. In nineteen o one, though, the New Colossus was rediscovered by Georgina Skyler, who was a friend of Emma's, and Skylar had found the poem in a book that she happened upon in a bookshop, and she was inspired to resurrect her friend's work, and through Skylar's efforts. In nineteen o three, the new colossus was inscribed on a plaque, and that plaque was hung inside the museum in the Statue of Liberty's Pedestal, where it remains to this day. The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs was formed in nineteen forty four by the Women's Division of the Jewish People's Paternal Order of the International Workers Order for the i w O. It was founded as a wartime relief group combating racism and fostering positivity in Jewish identity. From its founding until its dissolution in nine the group had at times been labeled as subversive and radical, and it did have ties to communism. It also went through various re ords, but it was always focused on women's issues. The group didn't only advocate for Jewish women's causes, though that was its primary focus. The Emma Lazarus Federation joined forces with the Black Women's Group SO Journals for Truth and Justice during the fifties and sixties, and it also pressured the US government to ratify the nineteen forty eight Genocide Convention. At its highest level of activity, the Mma Lazarus Federation had one hundred clubs within it, with membership totaling between four thousand and five thousand women. In subways. Lazar Us has become more enigmatic since her death. Questions related to her spinster lifestyle arose in the second half of the twentieth century when a signet that she wrote titled Assurance was published for the first time. The signet begins, last night I slept, and when I woke her kiss still floated on my lips. The poem describes a dream of a romantic forest interlude. I would go so far as to say an erotic forest interlude that concludes with the woman referenced in the first line whispering quote and didst thou dream this could be buried, this could be asleep? And love bethrall to death? Nay, WHAT'SO seem? Have faith, dear heart, this is the thing that is. The sonnet has naturally fueled speculation about Emma Lazarus's sexual identity. She had included it in an anthology of her own work that she was preparing just before she died. She understood that she was not going to survive, and she was really focused on her poetry surviving. But this poem was undated, which was unusual for her work. She had to have known it would be a little bit controversial, but this poem, like her activism, was omitted from the work by her sister's author, Esther Shore, in her two thousand six biography of Emma Lazarus, discussed this poem and made a case that it can be interpreted as much about and simply embracing one's own sexuality as anything else. She said quote she wrote the poem as a dream vision and left it undated, not to elude us, but to redirect us. What the poem exposes is her unconscious and it tells us that she met it, if not a female lover face to face, and the sonnet the lover's enigmatic assurance is that this is the thing that is means in another ediom, this is the real thing, but it's also a thing that is real beyond denial or repression. Assurance. Is not a poem about choosing a lover. It is about being chosen by desire. It is a love poem, yes, but also a poem of vocation about being called by eros to a vital sexual life. That is, of course one interpretation. That's the thing about poetry. Other people can interpret different ways. I had a definite interpretation when I read it. That is not something we could really repeat in the podcast. All right, then? Uh. There has been plenty of speculation also about a possible romance at one point between Emma Lazarus and Charles Decay, who was the brother of her best friend, Helena Decay, and the two Emma and Charles were very close for years, but it appears that whatever their connection was, it fell apart when Emma learned something scandalous about Charles, although what that thing was is unknown, But what we do know is that Charles, a poet in his own right, after finding out that she had discovered something, wrote a rather scathing kind of comedy poem to his brother in law, mocking Emma over the whole thing. So whether there was any true romantic affection between the two of them remains a mystery. I read some accounts that suggested that Helena always thought Emma had a thing for Charles, but that Charles never really cared about her. But then other people in their social circle mentioned that Charles was really quite fond of her. We don't know. It's all hearsay at this point, but if there had been any real romantic affection between them, that incident put an end to it. She definitely flirted with men in her life, and she also seemed fascinated by the idea of the so called Boston marriage of two women living together as a couple. But we really don't know anything specific about her personal inclinations or her relationships. It's all speculation. Yeah. Even her letters between her and Charles Decay are nowhere to be found. There's like one and it's pretty boring. So we just don't know. But what is a parent is that while she had a very wide circle of friends and may have had romantic feelings for various people or not, her work, both as a writer and an activist, was always the thing that took precedent and was more important to her than anything else. There's a coda to this, which is I didn't want to say it at the top because it kind of gives away some of the story. But here's why I selected this topic for an episode. I was on Twitter recently, you know where truth always lives. But there was an argument going on about current events, and someone referenced the New Colossus, and some other person replied to them why should we care what some French guy wrote on a statue they sent us, And I thought, well, we gotta let people know that a woman actually wrote it, she was from the United States, just to help pare down the misinformation that may be floating in the world. That is why we selected m. Lazaria. She's also just an interesting figure. We have a lot of stories about activists in various different ways. Hers was a unique style in that she really did seem to want to use her privilege to get the word out, but at the same time she still maintained a very cushy life for herself. So a lot of other poets that we have talked about have been poets who today have had more of a lasting fame in terms of how their work is regarded, whereas I think a lot of people like she's She's not as much of a household name and a lot of circles as say Walt Whitman. No, not at all, um, And you know that people are definitely familiar with at least those few lines from the New Classes, but not necessarily her other work, a lot of which is really lovely. Yeah, I I will confess I was reading some various criticism of it, and she does not get treated terribly, uh delightfully by modern critics. I think even in her own time, some of her word choices were a little stilted and kind of like people either found them dry or a little bit removed. It was like, one critic that I wrote was talking about how she wanted to talk about a lot of different parts of the human experience, but because she really didn't have that wide of a personal experience. You know, she traveled twice, but even so, she spent like six months of those travels in a room basically and on her balcony because she was ill. So she kind of is talking about all of this stuff almost from a remove, and she was like, you can feel the distance between what she's trying to talk about and what it actually is. And also when she talks about other cultures that she never really experienced, there's always that weird kind of distance. But it's worth checking out. Yeah, people made a similar criticism about Phyllis Sweetly, feeling like she was too removed from the work that she was talking about. Yeah, so it's fascating stuff. I uh, I always love a little bit of history involving lady writers. Especially people that don't maybe get their due. Yeah, pay so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook U r L or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. 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