Emma Lazarus: Overlooked at the Statue of Liberty, But Hardly Forgotten

The 19th-century writer and social activist, a Jewish resident of New York, penned what became a legendary poem symbolizing America’s embrace of immigrants. She was born 176 years ago this month.

Hillel Kuttler | 22.07.25

A portrait of Emma Lazarus and a postcard featuring Jewish immigrants arriving in New York, early 20th century, the National Library of Israel collections

At a museum a few hundred yards from the Statue of Liberty on a June afternoon, visitor after visitor approached the portion of a glass case displaying two large plaques. On one plaque was engraved “The New Colossus,” a poem by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) that is indelibly associated with the iconic statue long a symbol of immigration to the United States. The other plaque featured a bas relief of Lazarus, a Manhattan native and a Jew.

The New Colossus Shutterbug Fotos — Image: Shutterburg Fotos

Almost no visitors snapping pictures at the spot noticed, let alone read, the two plaques of subdued bronze, instead honing in on a colorful item perched between them: a papier-mache mask depicting the statue’s face in red, white and blue and covered with scores of flags representing some of the countries from whence came millions of people filling ships entering New York Harbor during a great wave of immigration running from the 1880s to the 1950s.

The objects reflected a stark irony: Lazarus and her iconic poetry, which inspired countless newcomers to the United States long after her death, were being upstaged by the 21st century creation of an artist, George Dukov, himself an immigrant from Bulgaria.

“An ardent patriot and poet, she wrote the immortal sonnet, ‘The New Colossus,’ which is inscribed on the plaque in the Statue of Liberty,” states the text beside the bas relief dedicated in 1977 by the Emma Lazarus Commemorative Committee.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” reads the poem’s best-known line.

990027806070205171 — Emma Lazarus, from the Abraham Schwadron Portrait Collection at the National Library of Israel

Raj Konaseema, who was visiting New York this day, stopped to examine the plaques. A native of India, Konaseema moved in 2017 to Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.

Konaseema “saw the lady’s face and wanted to know if there’s any relationship between the statue and [her],” he said of the plaque.

Outside, on a walkway facing the front of the statue, Richard Hinsliff was reading an explanatory poster about Lazarus on the sweltering afternoon.

Hinsliff, who immigrated from Leeds, England, in 2003 and lives just north of Manhattan, knew about the poem but not of its representing freedom for millions of immigrants.

“I think the symbolism of the statue is more important than the statue itself: of America being the symbol of freedom,” said Hinsliff, who’d come to the site with his U.S.-born wife and daughters and his mother, visiting from England. “It’s fantastic symbolism.”

997012802271505171 — A Rosh Hashanah greeting card featuring an image of a family of Jewish immigrants arriving in New York, published circa 1910-1919. The Greeting Cards Collection at the NLI is available digitally thanks to the collaborative effort of the Ministry of Heritage and the National Library of Israel.

Plenty of Americans and foreigners know that the Statue of Liberty was a gift to the people of the United States from the people of France. It was sculpted from copper by French artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and shipped to the U.S., where it was dedicated in 1886 on Bedloe’s Island (now Liberty Island), located between the states of New York and New Jersey. It had remained in storage until funds were raised for constructing a granite pedestal on which the massive statue would be mounted.

That’s where Lazarus came in. She’d written plays, poems and a novel, was a translator of literary works and advocated for East European Jews who then were resettling en masse in the United States. She penned “The New Colossus” for auctions in 1883-84 of items, mostly art, held in Brooklyn and Manhattan to benefit the pedestal fund. Lazarus died of an illness in 1887 at age 38. Her worsening condition likely prevented her from attending the statue’s dedication ceremony. In 1903, following the lobbying of Lazarus’s friend, Georgina Schuyler, a plaque of “The New Colossus” was made and affixed to an inner wall of the pedestal’s entrance. It remains on display today inside the pedestal close to its original placement. (The plaque in the aforementioned glass case is an exact replica.)

This review of “a little book of poems written by Miss Emma Lazarus, a young Jewess of this city”, appeared in the June 16, 1871, issue of *The Israelite*. From the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

Approximately 4.5 million people visit the Statue of Liberty annually. If the tourists on this June day are representative, Lazarus is all but ignored. Standing later that day outside the brownstone on Manhattan’s West 10th Street where Lazarus lived with her family and likely penned most of her works, I saw no passersby reading the blue historical marker that acknowledges Lazarus’s residency there. When Matt Housch, who works for the Statue of Liberty historical site as a U.S. National Parks Service archivist, gave tours as a park ranger, people rarely asked about the poem and who wrote it, he said.

“There was not very much interest from the general public,” he said. Housch admitted that he knew little about either Lazarus or the poem prior to taking the job — only the famous line about the hopeful, hapless immigrants.

Melanie Meyers memorized “The New Colossus” in school. “I feel that everyone knows the poem,” said Meyers, the deputy director of the American Jewish Historical Society, whose holdings include several Lazarus items. “I’m not sure everyone knows who wrote it. I certainly don’t think she’s forgotten, but perhaps she’s not as widely known as she should be.”

From a column published in the December 9, 1887 issue of *The American Hebrew*, the Historical Jewish Press Collection at the National Library of Israel

Housch explained that the plaque in the 1960s was relocated a few feet within the pedestal to become part of a museum of immigration. In recent decades, it’s dwelt nearly alone after the other items were moved to nearby Ellis Island.

That’s where a ferry took me after Liberty Island. I entered the main building into the room where arrivals’ baggage was stored while people underwent inspection and processing. Those steps occurred upstairs in the registry room, better known as The Great Hall. My late Grandma Rozzie had written me a letter in which she speculated on what her father Morris Eisen, then single and still named Moshe, felt upon landing in the United States in the early years of the 20th century. He’d surreptitiously left Lodz, unwilling to be conscripted, perhaps for a lifetime, into the Polish army. Morris, she wrote, had experienced an uncomfortable journey in steerage, but surely, upon reaching Ellis Island, all was subsumed by his excitement at starting a new life in a free land.

997003456390405171 — From the Joseph and Margit Hoffman Judaica Postcard Collection, the Folklore Research Center, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Strolling in the massive, near-empty hall, I imagined the thousands of fellow immigrants jostling with him on line awaiting questioning by U.S. authorities. I thought of the din of conversation and interrogation in scores of languages, the newcomers’ fatigue and confusion mingled with hope and excitement. I wondered whether he could have foreseen then his decades of hard labor in the silk mills of Paterson, New Jersey, his meeting and marrying fellow immigrant Fannie Frishman, raising their daughter, losing two infant sons to disease and living in an apartment on Summer Street to which their granddaughter, my mother, would go after school for cookies and hugs — and, at the end of Morris’s earthly stay, whether he felt the struggle had been worth it. Just two weeks before my encounter with the Great Hall’s ghosts, I’d driven with my cousin Effy Unterman to our great-grandparents’ graves near Paterson and pondered some of the same questions. We snapped pictures of Morris’s and Fannie’s tombstones.

Morris had landed at Ellis Island not tired, but certainly poor. He and the others on the ship constituted Lazarus’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free. He may have later learned of the poet, or not. Moments before reaching Ellis Island, he must have gazed wondrously toward the eminent statue, the “mighty woman with a torch,” in Lazarus’s words, who beckoned to newcomers to set down their bags and imbibe liberty beyond the new country’s “golden door.”

997003482280405171 — The Railroad Ticket Room at Ellis Island, from the Joseph and Margit Hoffman Judaica Postcard Collection, the Folklore Research Center, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The statue often goes by the nickname “Lady Liberty,” but I’m entranced by the moniker Lazarus bestowed on it: “Mother of Exiles.” It broadcasts an almost-godlike gravitas and authority, a welcome to America’s newcomers. More than a welcome — an official pat on the back to encourage the exiles-turned-arrivals, no matter the frayed state of their clothing or boldly accented English, and get them on their way in the new land.

990045615170205171 — The Statue of Liberty, “The New Colossus”, in 1976. From the Dan Hadani Archive, the Pritzker Family National Photography Collection at the National Library of Israel

Views vociferously differed then, and diverge still, in Americans’ debate over immigration and the securing of borders, but I’ll always be grateful that “The New Colossus,” standing amidst a wide harbor where two rivers and an ocean converge, extended Lazarus’s, and the country’s, “world-wide welcome” to Morris and my other ancestors, who saw the statue’s outline against the sky as they left exile.

Writer-editor Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.

When Abraham Lincoln Intervened on Behalf of American Jews

U.S. General Ulysses S. Grant ordered the eviction of Jews in southern areas he controlled during the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln reversed the edict of the man he later appointed the Union Army’s commander. Grant went on to become president.

Hillel Kuttler | 10.04.25

American Jewry Jewish Communities Newspapers

Abraham Lincoln: The Man (Standing Lincoln) - sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (MET, 2012.14a, b)

One hundred sixty years ago, on the morning of April 15, 1865, Abraham Lincoln died in Washington, D.C., from a single bullet to the head shot by John Wilkes Booth the night before.

The assassination of America’s 16th president climaxed the four-year Civil War between the United States and 11 of its southern slaveholding states, known as the Confederate States of America. Lincoln was determined to preserve the country as a single entity, even through war. Over 600,000 soldiers on both sides are estimated to have been killed in the Civil War.

Letters — Jews from across the United States expressed their profound sadness following the assassination of President Lincoln. From a notice in the September 1, 1865 edition of ⁨⁨*The Occident and American Jewish Advocate*⁩, the Historical Jewish Press collection at the National Library of Israel

Just five days before Lincoln was shot, the war ended with the Confederacy’s surrender to the Union.

The lieutenant general who commanded the Union to victory and accepted the surrender of his counterpart, General Robert E. Lee, at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, was Ulysses S. Grant. Three years later, Grant was elected U.S. president, and in 1876, a year before leaving office, he attended the dedication of a synagogue five blocks from the theater where Lincoln was murdered.

Grant had been the source of a difficult episode in Lincoln’s presidency — and it involved Jewish Americans.

Ulysses S Grant As Brigadier General, 1861 — Ulysses S. Grant as a Brigadier General in the Union army, 1861

That occurred in late 1862, when Grant, then holding the rank of major general, led Union forces fighting the Confederate army in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Wanting to limit black marketeering by unauthorized suppliers, especially in the cotton trade, Grant issued a military order on November 9 that prohibited such merchants from venturing into parts of the Deep South. The order singled out one group, those Grant called “the Israelites,” stating that “Jews and other unprincipled traders” were violating the Treasury Department’s wartime restrictions. A month later, Grant issued two more orders targeting Jews. On December 8, his General Order No. 2 called for cotton speculators, whom he specified as being “Jews and other Vagrants,” to leave his military district, known as the Department of the Tennessee, encompassing parts of the states of Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. And on December 17, he issued General Order No. 11, which went much further: “Jews as a class” would be “required to leave” the district.

Jewish Americans sent telegrams to the White House to protest Grant’s order. Some traveled to Washington to lobby Lincoln directly. The president reportedly told them that he was opposed to an entire “class or nationality condemned on account of a few sinners.”

In early January 1863, Lincoln cancelled the eviction orders. There’s no evidence that Lincoln knew about Grant’s decree beforehand or that he communicated with him about the matter afterward, said Jonathan Sarna, author and co-author, respectively, of the books When Grant Expelled the Jews (2012) and Lincoln and the Jews (2015).

Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, near Boston, said that he wrote the Grant book because the subject “is of great importance, and relates to the place of Jews in American society.”

As to his work on Lincoln, about whom thousands of books have been written (at least 450 of them being in NLI’s collection), Sarna said, “I am deeply interested in people who support and admire Jews when those around them do not.”

He added in an e-mail: “In Lincoln’s lifetime, Jews grew from a tiny community (perhaps 3,000) when he was born to a major community of 150,000 by the Civil War. Some might have been frightened or alienated by so many Jewish newcomers; Lincoln was not and included them.”

Lincolngrant — President Lincoln forced General Grant to revoke the antisemitic order. From theJune 1, 1865 edition of *The Occident and American Jewish Advocate*, the Historical Jewish Press collection at the National Library of Israel

Grant’s order formed the backdrop for Family Secrets, a novel published in 2016 by Barry Spielman, an American immigrant to Israel who works in hi-tech.

The main character’s ancestor lived through the edict, dramatizing the inconsistency of the north’s having “had this image of [being] holier than thou, going to war to free the slaves,” while then “kicking Jews as a class out of a region that came under their control just like the best of the antisemitic edicts in history,” said Spielman, who for decades has researched the Civil War.

A round-number anniversary (160) provides a fine opportunity to ponder a historical event like Lincoln’s assassination, and an extra-round number offers an extra-fine opportunity. So it was that in July 2013 I wrote a feature story for the N.Y. Times on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, a turning point in the Civil War because the Union repulsed a Confederate attack in Pennsylvania.

On the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination, I attended a night-time gathering on Washington’s 10th Street, N.W., which was closed to traffic for the occasion of a reenactment of the chaotic scene there in 1865. Costumed actors portrayed the roles of military and medical officials delivering updates on Lincoln’s condition to a concerned throng. Like the 500 or so others in attendance at the free event, I imagined what the mood was like a century and a half earlier on the spot where I stood, about midway between Ford’s Theater, where Booth shot Lincoln, and the brownstone house directly across the street to which the unconscious Lincoln was carried to be treated.

That’s when I noticed a famous American walking from the theater to the parking garage next door. It was Colin Powell, by then retired. He was with his wife Alma. The Powells were dressed to the nines, likely having just attended a performance in the infamous building, which remains a theater to this day.

Powell, a general, had served as the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. I recalled the only previous time I’d seen Powell in person. It was at a conference of a Jewish organization. Powell spoke of having grown up in New York City with so many Jewish immigrants for neighbors that he spoke Yiddish. He mentioned doing favors for them as a Shabbos goy: a non-Jewish person performing basic tasks on Shabbat that Jews are prohibited by religious law from doing, such as turning light switches on and off.

Sir Moses Montefiore, while working to “break the fetters” of his fellow Jews around the world, took inspiration from Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves in the United States. From the February 16, 1866 edition of *The Hebrew Leader*, the Historical Jewish Press collection at the National Library of Israel

Powell’s long-ago predecessor as the U.S.’s top uniformed soldier, Grant, denied that he’d knowingly issued the three orders or that he held animosity toward Jews. As president, he atoned for those actions by appointing many Jews to positions in his administrations.

History’s timing is unknowable but spurs curiosity. Consider a reversal of roles: Powell, a black American, commanding Union troops and reporting to Lincoln; Grant, serving in Powell’s era of unprecedented accomplishment and integration for both black Americans and Jewish Americans.

Jews “throughout the nation” were asked to contribute to the funding of a “National Lincoln Monument”. From the October 4, 1865 edition of *The Hebrew Leader*, the Historical Jewish Press collection at the National Library of Israel

As to Lincoln, his legacy in reversing Grant’s edict is this, Sarna said: It “reassured [Jews] about America. Immigrants continued to arrive.”

Editor-writer Hillel Kuttler can be reached at hk@HillelTheScribeCommunications.com.