Schwab: Moses Seixas, her great uncle, is the one who writes the letter to Washington. “To bigotry no sanction.” That’s her family line.
Yael: So she was a Nepo baby.
Schwab: Yes, she’s absolutely a Nepo baby.
Yael: Unpacked. This is Jewish History Nerds, the podcast where we nerd out on awesome stories in Jewish history. I’m Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And I’m Jonathan Schwab. We’ve spent the last couple of episodes on the American Revolution, but Jewish life in America didn’t stop when the Revolutionary War ended. We’re going to skip ahead a little bit for this week’s story, but if you’ve been enjoying this series, please rate and write a review wherever you get your podcasts.
Yael: Some of the most interesting topics we’ve covered have come from audience suggestions, and we would love to hear yours. Schwab, what is on the docket?
Schwab: Our topic today, the person we’ll be talking about, is one that has come up a couple of times as a suggestion, someone we’ve been thinking about for a while. We’re going to be discussing a woman named Emma Lazarus, whom you may have heard of. I think most people who’ve heard of her have one very specific association.
Yael: Definitely. She wrote the poem The New Colossus, which is engraved, or on a plaque, I guess, at the base of the Statue of Liberty.
Schwab: And do you know any part of it?
Yael: I do, I do. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” I don’t know anything after that. It’s like after 3.14159, I’m done with pi. But we are connected on social media, the two of us, and I don’t know if you saw, in honor of July 4th I posted a picture of myself as a child dressed up as the Statue of Liberty for Purim, which is a real shout out to my mother. I was holding a book that said July 4, 1776, which is what the Statue of Liberty holds. But around my neck she hung a piece of construction paper that said “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.” I was like, Mom, you really went all out. And I did win the costume contest that year, by the way.
Schwab: What an amazing foreshadowing of this topic and what we’re going to talk about today. I do want to start by reading the poem in its entirety, and then we’ll have a chance to unpack it later, because those lines are very famous, but there’s a lot more of the poem that most people do not recognize or know. It’s called The New Colossus, written in 1883.
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 world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “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!”
Yael: Okay, so clearly she had a lady with a torch in mind. I had forgotten “the wretched refuse.”
Schwab: Wretched refuse. That’s a line that sometimes gets overlooked.
Yael: Because, you know, obviously immigration is a very hot political topic right now.
Schwab: It’s not a nice way of talking about immigrants.
Yael: It’s not. But at the same time, we often talk about, or certain people in our government often talk about, how we want to bring in the best and the brightest. But it seems like this symbol of liberty and immigration in our country, and it’s interesting that liberty and immigration are tied together, very clearly wants to be a safe harbor for the wretched. We’re supposed to be a port in the storm for people who are looking for a better life. And that is very much not the way the immigrant discussion goes these days.
Schwab: The Mother of Exiles. This is Emma Lazarus’s view of what this statue should be. Again, I think people remember that last line and associate it strongly with her, but it was not a simple path. So indulge me for a moment. I have been thinking a lot about Emma Lazarus and her connection and comparison to Alexander Hamilton. If one were to make a Hamilton style musical about Emma Lazarus’s life, here’s my pitch for the opening lines. “How does a wealthy Sephardic daughter, born to Jews and riches, brought up by generations of New Yorkers, never tired or homeless or afraid, grow up to be the voice of a statue’s silent lips? Emma Nathan Lazarus. Her name was Emma Nathan Lazarus.”
Yael: How did you do that?
Schwab: Oh my god, I spent so much time on those four lines. Thank you. There’s a lot still to do on the entire musical.
Yael: Lin-Manuel is listening.
Schwab: Wow, thank you. Her name is not actually Emma Nathan Lazarus, which is one difficult part. Nathan is her mother’s maiden name, and she does sometimes use pseudonyms.
Yael: Okay, so you took a little creative license. But it’s okay, because Hamilton takes a little bit of creative license too. That was really impressive. Good for you.
Schwab: Thank you. So let’s talk about the conundrum that is Emma Lazarus, because I think when people hear that there was this Jewish poet who wrote this poem about immigration that’s at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the image a lot of people have is that she was a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, that this was part of her life. Not her story at all.
Yael: She was rich.
Schwab: She was born to great wealth. I mean, you know this, because we talked about it in a previous episode.
Yael: Her grandfather was involved in the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue at the time of the Revolution. The chazan, who was the leader of that synagogue at the time, snuck from Philadelphia to New York, to British occupied New York, under threat of arrest, to officiate Samuel Lazarus’s wedding. And Samuel is Emma’s grandfather.
Schwab: Yeah, exactly. So she is on one side a fourth generation American, and on the other side a fifth generation American, which, I don’t know about you, I don’t know very many Jewish Americans who are fifth generation. I am not. I don’t know very many Jewish Americans who’ve been here for that many generations.
Yael: I’m astounded when people tell me that their families came here in the 1880s, in that big wave of Jewish immigration. The fact that by that time she was already a fifth generation American is pretty astounding.
Schwab: Yes, most of her family was here before 1776. Old school Sephardic, Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been here already for more than a century by the time she’s born in 1849. And again, they’re all marrying each other. There’s a lot of marrying cousins and things like that. But her great grandmother, Grace Seixas Nathan, is a Jewish American poet born in 1752. Like you mentioned, Gershom Mendes Seixas was a chazan at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue. Moses Seixas, her great uncle, is the one who writes the letter to Washington, the Newport letter. “To bigotry no sanction.” That’s her family line. They’re the people involved in that.
Yael: So she was a Nepo baby.
Schwab: Yes, she’s absolutely a Nepo baby. She’s born in 1849, so she’s growing up in a Civil War era and post Civil War era New York. And she is obviously a literary prodigy from a very young age. This wasn’t just one poem that she wrote. She is fantastically talented.
Yael: We love women who are literary prodigies at a young age on this show.
Schwab: Unfortunately, and this is a real thing, she is a Jewish literary prodigy who tragically dies much too young. We need to tell one of these stories with a happy ending.
Yael: So don’t let your daughters write, people.
Schwab: Well, her father definitely lets his daughters write. There are, I think, nine children in the family. It’s either nine or seven, I don’t remember, but it’s one boy and a whole bunch of girls. And their father, Moses Lazarus, who is a descendant of several different important families, is a very wealthy sugar refiner, which is a very important business. It’s also a business that made the Civil War not a simple affair for him, because it relies a lot on crops coming from the South.
Yael: And, presumably, slave labor.
Schwab: Yeah. He’s not owning slaves, he’s not involved in slavery, but he is refining sugar. Where are you getting raw sugar from? But they do manage to pivot, and they stay wealthy after the war. She’s wealthy her entire life. She has never known a hard day’s work.
Yael: She’s not tempest tossed.
Schwab: She is not tempest tossed, right? Everybody she knows has always lived in New York and summered in Newport.
Yael: We’re so mean to them now. I know I’m the one who invoked the epithet of the Nepo baby, but we used to call them scions of dynasty, and now we call them Nepo babies. She is born into esteem. She’s born into staff.
Schwab: What’s very interesting, as we’ll get to, is that she’s born into this stature and could have so easily not made this a major part of her life’s work. It’s fascinating that she did care so much about immigration, care so much about helping those less fortunate, because she could have not done any of that.
Yael: Did this cause a rift with her family?
Schwab: Okay, so let’s give a little more family background. The short answer is no, but her family is very fascinating. They come from a long line of crypto Jews, Jews who converted to Christianity in Spain, or in Portugal in their case, kept some Jewish practices in secret, eventually emigrated to the Americas, and returned to open, and much more traditional, Jewish ritual practice. By the time Emma is born, not just her but her entire family is moving away from traditional Jewish practice and becoming what we would now call, although they did not have this term at the time, secular Jews. They identified strongly as Jews, but they didn’t go to synagogue all that often, and they stopped keeping kosher. They definitely kept kosher earlier, either before she was born or when she was very young, but they stopped at a certain point. They have some rituals they keep to, but they’re not very present or involved in the synagogue. And a lot of that Jewish ritual practice gets replaced by a very, very deep involvement in American culture. Moses Lazarus wants his children to be part of the emerging American cultural scene. His daughters are not formally educated. There’s not a lot of schooling, but they’re very well versed in American literature and letters. They’re all trained as poets, and they’re all decent poets, but Emma is the star. She’s the middle child, and it’s clear from a young age that she has an amazing talent. She reads voraciously and writes a ton. Her first book of poetry is published when she is seventeen, by her father, which is the Nepo baby element. It’s easy to get your book published when your father is very rich and funds the publishing of it. But it is reviewed very positively, especially in light of how young she is.
Yael: Does she have a theme? Does she have a niche?
Schwab: Her niche, especially early on, is decidedly not Jewish identity or Judaism. She writes about it occasionally, but she very much does not want to be pigeonholed as a Jewish poet. She sees herself as part of an American tradition of poetry, and she gets involved in arguing about what that is exactly. What defines American literature, at a time when it’s trying to define itself? In a number of ways, she aligns with the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who she then writes to, sending him some of her poems, wanting to take on this role as the inheritor of the literary tradition of Emerson. She has a lot of chutzpah.
Yael: I used to confuse her and Emma Goldman, because they were both outspoken Jewish women in New York in the 1800s.
Schwab: They both have the same first name, but their backgrounds could not be more different. Emma Goldman comes from Russia and from nothing, and Emma Lazarus is born with a silver spoon in her mouth, or honestly several silver spoons in her mouth, in New York, and has access to everything.
Yael: So does she become part of Emerson’s transcendentalist circle?
Schwab: So, the chutzpah thing. She basically says to Emerson, I’m going to be part of this now. And he responds pretty positively. He notes that she’s a striver. There is a lot of casual antisemitism that she faces, because, and this is important, as she publishes some of her poetry early on, it’s not looked at as the words of a Jewish poet. Not because it wasn’t clear that she was Jewish, but because most of her readers, American Christian readers, had never read anything written by a Jew. They kind of look straight past the fact that she’s Jewish, because they don’t know anything about Jewish writers.
Yael: It wouldn’t dawn on them that she would be Jewish, presumably.
Schwab: I think even if they know, they don’t know what Jews write about. Most Americans at this point, outside of New York City, still have never met a Jew. In the Jewish community that she’s born into in New York in 1849, I think there were around sixteen thousand Jews living in New York City at that time. There are sixteen thousand Jews living in my zip code.
Yael: On your block, yeah.
Schwab: So she asserts herself to Emerson, and Emerson seems very taken with her, at least at the start. He writes back to her and says, I recognize your talent and your potential, and I should like to be your professor, but you are required to attend every session for the term. Basically, if you want me to be your mentor, you need to listen to everything I have to say. And then, and we have copies of a lot of this correspondence, he sends her a ton of reading. She doesn’t go to school, and she certainly doesn’t go to college, but he is sending her, and she’s very young, not even twenty, I think, when this starts, assignments like: read act three of Measure for Measure and understand how it relates to this passage in Dante, better in the original. He’s assigning her all sorts of things, and she completes all of these assignments. It seems like she’s often understanding what it is that he’s pointing her to, but at points the things he’s indicating seem very obscure and very hard to understand. And she’s sending him copies of her poems, and his praise of her and her poetry is pretty effusive. He’s really saying not just, this is an excellent poem, but, you are part of this very important American movement, and you’re a big part of what’s going on.
Yael: Was she a contemporary of Walt Whitman?
Schwab: Yeah. Walt Whitman, as you probably know, wrote a poem after the assassination of Lincoln.
Yael: O Captain! My Captain!
Schwab: Emma Lazarus also wrote a poem after the assassination of Lincoln. She actually wrote two poems after the assassination of Lincoln, when she’s very young. One of them is about John Wilkes Booth running away, and one is from the perspective of John Wilkes Booth’s bereaved mother. And I think it speaks to how she finds interesting ways of approaching topics. If everybody else is looking at something one way, she takes a contrarian view. Well, no one’s thinking about John Wilkes Booth’s mother. How must she have felt to hear that her son did this, and that now he’s going to be buried in an unmarked grave? What an interesting take on the whole thing.
Yael: Sympathetic.
Schwab: Sympathetic to his mother. And I don’t want to mislead or confuse anyone for a second. She’s not supportive of Lincoln’s assassination. She writes many times throughout her life about how horrible an event that was, and brings it up later in connection to another very tragic event. Then, in 1874, and I still have trouble understanding the chutzpah she has here. So Emma Lazarus is born in 1849. She’s 25 years old, and she’s been corresponding with Emerson for a bit. Emerson publishes an anthology called Parnassus, an anthology of the greatest works and authors of the Western literary tradition. She gets a copy of it, looks through it, and writes a letter to Emerson, furious that she has not been included in it. He didn’t include himself in it. He didn’t include Whitman. He didn’t include Edgar Allan Poe.
Yael: That is some self confidence.
Schwab: Yes. And she writes this very long letter, not just about how angry she is. She goes back through all of the previous letters and quotes every time that he complimented her, and says, now this means nothing to me, because you have not included me in this work. Which smacks to me very much of the Hamilton and Burr exchange, where Hamilton, unprompted, writes, here’s a list of every snub from our entire lives together.
Yael: This might be so sexist, but did she have a crush on him? Was she feeling romantically spurned by him? Because then it kind of makes sense.
Schwab: I don’t think so.
Yael: Okay. This wasn’t an Ansaldo Ceba and Sara Copia Sullam situation, sleeping with his letters under her pillow.
Schwab: Neither of them was sleeping with a picture of the other. I really don’t think so. We will come back to it a little bit, but you’ve accidentally hit on another interesting part of this story, which is that she never marries. She never has any romantic relationships that we know of, and there are a lot of theories swirling around that.
Yael: None of them are that she was pining over Emerson.
Schwab: If she was pining over anybody, I really don’t think she was pining over Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their letters are sometimes a little bit flirtatious, but flirtatious in the sense that they’re each admiring the other’s poetics. There’s no mention at any point, in any of the surviving texts we have, of any suitors, despite the fact that she is wealthy, well to do, an heiress.
Yael: A socialite, presumably.
Schwab: A socialite. And a whole bunch of her sisters never marry. She’s not the only one. There is this idea that wealthy daughters sometimes mature into a perpetual daughterhood. They live with their father their entire lives, and he delights in being surrounded by these women who brought so much culture and light into the home. So there’s really no mention of any romantic interest or suitors. People theorize that she was perhaps not interested in men. The basis for that: she does have a lot of very close female friendships. She has a whole bunch of connections to women who were living together in what was called at the time a Boston marriage, women who were somewhat openly living together. She seems to know a lot of them, and writes a lot about them and their relationships. And she has one poem that is not included in some collections, but that she definitely wanted included when she indicated which things should be published, although she didn’t date it, which is interesting. It’s a somewhat erotic poem that takes place in a dream and is about a relationship with a woman. So it’s possible she wanted to publish it from a man’s perspective or something, but I think that poem really is the main thing people go off of. That, paired with the fact that we don’t see a lot of interest in romantic relationships with men, is where the theory comes from.
Yael: But it’s not a major theme in her work, and it’s not something that really matters one way or another.
Schwab: Yeah, she didn’t write about love all that much. She’s not a love poet. The Emerson relationship is important, though, which is why we’re spending a little time on it. They do kind of reconcile, and she finally agrees to actually come up to Concord, to his house. I think they had maybe met once or twice briefly in person before that, but otherwise, he’s her professor and it’s been a correspondence course. They have not gotten together. But she comes to visit him. He is older at this point, and he is dealing with the beginning stages of what we would now recognize as Alzheimer’s disease, so he’s not always fully there. His schedule is pretty tightly controlled by his wife and his daughter. But she comes up to visit, she’s hosted at his house, and she totally bulldozes over all of the rules that have been set up. He’s supposed to go to sleep on time, and she keeps him up for several hours. He’s supposed to take a carriage ride in the morning, and she plants herself by the back door so that when he goes out for the carriage ride, she has to go with him. And he says that he very much enjoys the time with her. I think she wanted to soak up every minute she could possibly get, and she wasn’t going to allow it to be just a brief audience. She wanted to really talk with him, which he does seem to greatly appreciate and enjoy. She also grows closer with Emerson’s daughter, Ellen Emerson, who is the sort of gatekeeper, and who is also very fascinated by her. Ellen writes to one of her friends and essentially says, this is so fascinating to me. The Emersons are lapsed Christians themselves, but they’re very taken with this lapsed Jew who is struggling to find the words for what she is. The word Emma uses to describe herself and her family: “My family and I are outlaws.” Which is so fun, because again, there wasn’t a term yet for not assimilated, not acculturated, not secular Jews. We’re outlaws. We recognize there’s a law and we violate it. We’re not synagogue goers.
Yael: We’re non observant.
Schwab: Right, but she isn’t saying non observant.
Yael: I like the outlaws.
Schwab: In addition to being an outlaw from Jewish ritual, most of her social circle is not really other Jews. She really becomes part of these American literary circles. She becomes very close with a couple, the Gilders, Helena and Richard. Richard is a publisher of The Century, which is the most important literary magazine at the time. And one of the really interesting sources, just as an aside: we have a lot of her collected poetry, but we didn’t have a lot of her letters until the Gilders’ granddaughter, I think, happened to pull out a box of her grandmother Helena Gilder’s correspondence with Emma Lazarus. That was in, I want to say, the 1970s or 1980s, and a writer named Bette Roth Young then collected all of it, and it tells us so much about Emma Lazarus. If I didn’t mention it before, which I don’t think I have, the main source I’m using for this is Esther Schor’s biography, Emma Lazarus. Esther Schor is herself a poet in addition to being a biographer, and she takes great care in this book to tell so much of the story of Emma Lazarus’s life without centering it on The New Colossus or the Statue of Liberty. There’s a lot more to who she was than just this poem, and having read the book, I’m fairly convinced of that. I think it’s a good way of approaching her.
Yael: Does she, quote unquote, graduate from Emerson’s tutelage at some point and move on?
Schwab: She branches out in terms of different types of reading and writing. I think she doesn’t want to hold herself just to the transcendentalist school. Esther Schor, the biographer, says this is kind of a running theme: she’s not a great institutionalist. She works best when she’s able to put herself in opposition to an existing system, whether it’s Jewish ritual practice, as an outlaw, or as a poet responding to the transcendentalists. She very much wants to have her own voice and row her own way.
Yael: Writing about John Wilkes Booth’s mother instead of writing about Abraham Lincoln.
Schwab: Yeah, at a very young age, doing the unexpected and contrarian thing. And she’s writing just a crazy number of poems. She’s writing so much. Again, thinking of Hamilton, she is writing like she is running out of time. She translates the poetry of Heinrich Heine, who she is, I would say, obsessed with in a literary way. She translates nearly all of his work into English.
Yael: She speaks German?
Schwab: She speaks and reads a number of languages, none of them Hebrew, but German, Spanish, Italian, and English, obviously. She also writes a counter biography of the German writer Goethe, who wrote about his own life, including this young woman he had an affair with at a very young age and then betrayed and left. Later, and this is Goethe’s telling, he comes back, and, according to him, she was fine. I think her name is Friederike Brion. But Emma Lazarus writes a counter biography from the woman’s point of view: no, this guy ruined my life and got away with it.
Yael: Telling. There are spurned lover vibes.
Schwab: Yeah. I think she’s very fascinated by the idea, but it’s hard to tell who her Goethe is.
Yael: Who did the spurning?
Schwab: Right. And we’re going to talk in a little bit about how she then takes a distinctly Jewish turn, but it doesn’t come out of nowhere. She had been writing about Jewish topics. They had appeared in her poems beforehand. She wrote a beautiful poem on seeing the Newport synagogue, and maybe we’ll add links to a couple of these poems in the show notes, because they’re really nice to read, but we don’t have time to get into all of them. It’s a really beautiful image, although she’s pretty clear that she sees the synagogue as a relic of the past, with echoes of prayers that she sees as not relevant or no longer being performed, and the light of the eternal flame is spent. But at the same time, she feels it’s important to visit the synagogue and write about it.
Yael: What’s really interesting is that so many of the Jews from the time her ancestors arrived assimilated or intermarried. The fact that her family married Jewish for so many generations, into these very important, established Jewish families, and that they’re now turning away from ritual, is interesting to me, because obviously there is something about Jewish perpetuity that’s important to them.
Schwab: Especially because theirs is a family whose ancestors were crypto Jews. They kept Judaism in secret, sacrificed so much, risked so much to do that, brought it to the new world, and kept doing it. And hers is really kind of the last generation of that. Most of her sisters never marry. One of her sisters converts to Christianity and intermarries. Her brother, I think, is the only one who marries Jewish and raises his kids with a Jewish identity. And I think you’re hitting on the question of what exactly this turn is. You’re right. For generations, they only married their cousins, or their cousins’ cousins, because those were the only other Jews in America. So what causes that to stop here, in their family’s case? Meanwhile, she gets involved in these back and forth essay exchanges about the idea of American literature, at a moment when there are British writers who assail it and say there is no such thing as American literature, that it’s just imported British literature with no theme of its own. She’s very offended by that and writes these scathing responses, pointing, in an interesting way, to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman, and Bret Harte, who’s a half Jewish writer, people, some of whom I had never heard of. Looking at the list of writers and where they’re from, she’s very ahead of her time in understanding that American literature is not just, if you’re familiar with the term, the dead white guys. She sees a lot of different people as contributing to American literature. She doesn’t mention herself in that particular essay, but I assume that’s part of it too. Look, American literature includes a lot of different people. Which, subtext: British literature does not.
Yael: I have the Oxford Anthology of American Literature right behind me. I’m just curious to see if she’s in it.
Schwab: I would assume that she’s in that, but I assume it’s probably just The New Colossus and not any of her other poems.
Yael: Sorry, it’s the Norton Anthology, not the Oxford Anthology.
Schwab: In her late twenties, there are a couple of antisemitic incidents that seem to awaken something in her, or create more of a focus for her. The first is in the late 1870s, so she’s almost thirty at the time. It’s the whole Hilton Seligman affair.
Yael: Is this the guy who gets kicked out of a hotel? The Grand Union Hotel?
Schwab: Yeah. Whoa. Where did this come up for you? Is this a story you just know?
Yael: I’ve heard about it in the past. He tries to go upstate to a hotel and he gets kicked out.
Schwab: He gets kicked out. They say, we don’t serve Jews here. And then the proprietor of the hotel, Hilton, doesn’t back down. He defends the policy very openly. And in defending it, Hilton says, it’s not an antisemitism thing. Families like the Hendrickses or the Nathans would be welcome at our hotels. It’s just these Hebrews, and by that he means recent German Jewish immigrants, who are not welcome. But Hendricks and Nathan… Emma Lazarus’s own mother is a Nathan. He’s saying acculturated Sephardic Jews would be welcome to stay in a Hilton.
Yael: Right.
Schwab: The right kind of Jew. So Emma Lazarus is the right kind of Jew, and it’s so interesting that she then gets very upset by this and speaks out strongly against it. Because she’s not the one being excluded. She has been able to be part of the important literary circles.
Yael: She’s never been excluded from anything that we know of.
Schwab: Maybe some things are a little bit harder. Again, she faces a genteel, subtle antisemitism. People sometimes comment on how she looks. People say she really represents the best of her race, which is, ooh, yikes. Or they attribute her striving to her being Jewish. But nobody says, I don’t want to read your work because you’re a Jewess. She really is not blocked from much.
Yael: Emerson doesn’t care.
Schwab: He’s very fascinated by her. She stays in his home.
Yael: She would be very upset, by the way, that she’s not in here.
Schwab: Woof. Okay. That is a whiff by the Norton Anthology. Surprising. She will write a very angry letter. So, in the late 1870s, she starts writing more and more poems speaking out against antisemitism, including historical antisemitism. And she uses a lot of fascinating imagery. She is very interested in suffering Christ imagery, Jesus being tortured and killed and crucified. And very often, not in an obscure way, very directly and unsubtly, she has a poem about Rashi in Prague, and other poems where Jews are being persecuted, and it’s very clear what she’s saying: the Romans torturing Jesus is Christians torturing Jews. And a little bit, she’s saying, look at the hypocrisy of what you’re doing. You glorify a person who was tortured, and yet now you are doing the same things to Jews.
Yael: This country was founded on an ideal.
Schwab: To be clear, she’s talking about antisemitism in Europe. She’s not really talking about antisemitism in America. She’s talking about persecutions and libels and pogroms in Europe. And that’s where we’ll leave the story for this week. Emma Lazarus, a wealthy insider, is starting to see herself as part of a much bigger Jewish story. Next week, this story explodes. Pogroms in Russia, Jewish refugees in New York. Emma has to decide what she’s going to do about it, what stance she’s going to take, and who she’ll become. And that’s when we’ll get to the poem, the Statue of Liberty, The New Colossus, and how a few lines she almost refused to write become the voice and symbol of American immigration. “Give me your tired, your poor…” You know the rest. Or you think you do. That’s next week on Jewish History Nerds. Thanks for listening to Jewish History Nerds, brought to you by Unpacked, an OpenDor Media brand.
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Yael: Most importantly, be in touch. Write to us at nerds@unpacked.media. We really love to hear from you. Jewish History Nerds is hosted by me, Yael Steiner.
Schwab: And by me, Jonathan Schwab. Our education lead is Dr. Henry Abramson, and our editors are Rob Perra and Ari Schlacht.
Yael: We’re produced by Jenny Falcon. Thanks for listening.