We are sponsoring a national poetry contest along those lines.” We encourage students to write about the issues important to them and to write original poetry about the Statue of Liberty. “Students learn about Emma Lazarus’ short life-she died in 1887 at the age of 38-and how she came to find her voice. There’s also a school curriculum in which students “can study the relationship between the Statue of Liberty and Emma’s poem,” said Polland. There’s a blank folio on a table, on which Lazarus’ story is projected. The Emma Lazarus Project takes AJHS archival material associated with the Jewish American poet to create an exhibition that recreates the sitting room in her brownstone. Lazarus’s importance in American Jewish history has recently been highlighted in an eponymous three-year initiative of AJHS. Immigration is what binds the Jewish community to this country. “This appealed to Emma, and three days later she came back with ‘The New Colossus.’ The poem means a lot to Americans and to American Jews, who strongly identify with their immigrant ancestors. “Constance Cary Harrison told Emma, ‘Think of all the immigrants who will see the Statue of Liberty as their boats come into the harbor,’” Polland said.
Lazarus initially resisted writing the poem “on command.” But the friend who made the request, Constance Cary Harrison, persuaded Lazarus to write it in honor of the immigrants she was helping. Her extended family was among the early leaders at Congregation Shearith Israel-the Spanish Portuguese synagogue in New York-and the first Jewish congregation in the United States.Īccording to Polland, Lazarus wrote the poem as part of a fundraising effort for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. A fifth-generation American, she began publishing poems as a teenager and eventually became part of a circle of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James. Lazarus was born in New York City in 1849 to a well-established Sephardic Jewish family. It was part of the American Jewish experience.” “The prime function and mission of many of those Jewish organizations was to help immigrants. “AJHS houses all sorts of documents for Jewish organizations and important families and individuals,” Polland said. The AJHS archives include Lazarus’s handwritten copy of the iconic poem. In an interview with JewishBoston, Polland described Lazarus’s poem as “a beacon for all immigrants.” The government official was defending a new rule that bars legal immigrants who are receiving benefits such as food stamps and Medicaid from becoming permanent residents.Ĭuccinelli’s rephrasing of Lazarus’ stanza, which is part of her longer poem “ The New Colossus,” prompted Annie Polland, executive director of the American Jewish Historical Society (AJHS) in New York, to refute Cuccinelli’s interpretation. Cuccinelli’s extemporaneous rewrite happened during a recent interview with NPR.
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