(Image source: R. Jay Magill, Jr./The American Interest)

Emma Lazarus is best known as the author of “The New Colossus,” a sonnet celebrating immigration inscribed inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.

The New Colossus

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!”

Lazarus was Jewish, and the “poor…huddled masses yearning to breathe free” were, for her, Jewish refugees from Russia and Eastern Europe who were fleeing pogroms, violent and mass murderous attacks on Jewish communities. But the poem is written in such an open-handed, open-hearted way that it remains relevant to any group of people fleeing persecution and seeking a better life; her name is not “Mother of Jewish Exiles” but, “Mother of Exiles”—all of them. The “imprisoned lightning” strikes for everyone. As a result, advocates for immigrants and democracy still cite the “The New Colossus” as a rebuke to the anti-immigrant bigotry of MAGA, and as a call for America to accept and celebrate Mexicans, Central Americans, Asians, Muslims, and more.

Lazarus’ Jewish identity inspired her to see, and speak in favor of, immigrants of all backgrounds. Nonetheless, that “lamp beside the golden door” also had its blind spots. Lazarus’ experience as a fairly affluent white Jewish person in the United States led her to a nationalist vision that made it difficult for her to see, or think about, Black victims of U.S. racism, indigenous Americans, the future plight of displaced Palestinian Arabs, or other persecution that wasn’t easily analogized to Jewish suffering. Her work is, then, a shining example of the way diaspora communities can serve as a basis for solidarity with oppressed people, and a less shining example of the limits of that solidarity.

The New Colossus Vs. The New Bigotry

Lazarus was born in 1849 in New York to a well-to-do, secular Jewish family of mixed Portuguese and German background. Educated by private tutors, she studied numerous languages and was a precocious poet. She published her first book, Poems and Translations, in 1867, when she was only 18.

Lazarus’ early poems are steeped in classical allusion and Victorian sentiment; they feel dated for modern readers. But her writing gained force, clarity, and depth as she began to explore Jewish influences and themes. She published a celebrated collection of translations of the poems of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine in 1881.

That same year, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated, and Lazarus closely followed news of the subsequent pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe. She met with Jewish refugees at the Ward Island immigration center and began to address antisemitism and antisemitic violence directly in her poetry, essays, and other writings. Her 1882 verse play, The Dance to Death, is about an antisemitic massacre in medieval Germany, in which Jews are blamed for the plague, and where even a romance between a Gentile prince and a Jewish woman couldn’t save the community. The Christian fanatics in her play use genocidal language that chillingly anticipates the Nazis, as they fantasize about a mass murder of Jewish men, women, and children:

All the contaminating vermin purged
With one clean, searching blast of wholesome fire.

Lazarus knew antisemitism wasn’t a long past sentiment; the U.S. in the 1880s was descending into a particularly intense period of bigotry and hatred. Following the brief racial idealism of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, the country rushed to return to white supremacy. The white South disenfranchised Black voters and enshrined apartheid and Jim Crow, complete with a vicious reign of white supremacist terror and lynching. And the entire nation embraced an orgy of anti-immigrant fervor. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 established draconian restrictions on immigration from China and created a model for racist, ethnicity-based exclusions in U.S. immigration law that reverberate to this day.

This surge of racism affected American Jews and Jewish immigrants, as well as Black and Chinese people. High profile American pundits and commenters blamed Jewish people for the pogroms and argued that they were dangerous refuse who should not be allowed into the United States.

In 1881, Russian-American author Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin called Jewish people “a loathsome and really dangerous element” and said that public attacks on them were justified “because their ways are crooked, their manner abject.” An 1888 antisemitic tract by Telemachus Thomas Timayenis is even more explicit, denouncing Jewish people as “a race merciless and cruel as hell,” and insisting that “one sentiment should animate the American people, and this should find expression in the one curt but emphatic cry, ‘The Jew must go!’”

Lazarus responded to Ragozin in The Century, excoriating her for downplaying what actually took place in Russia’s pogroms: “Murder, rape, arson, one hundred thousand families reduced to homeless beggary, and the destruction of eighty million dollars’ worth of property…” In Lazarus’ conclusion, she quotes New York politician and statesman William M. Evarts: “It is not that it is the oppression of Jews by Russians—it is that it is the oppression of men and women by men and women: and we are men and women!”

Evarts and Lazarus appeal to general humanitarian principles to protest Jewish suffering; they call on Americans to denounce the pogroms not out of sympathy for Jewish people particularly, but out of solidarity with anyone who suffers. At the same time, by denouncing prejudice against Jews, they implicitly denounce all prejudice against anyone.

(An anti-Jewish pogrom in Russia circa 1880. Photo source/courtesy: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research)

Evarts was also the spark for Lazarus’ greatest and most lasting statement of humanist principles. He was the head of the committee in charge of fundraising to build a pedestal for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Liberty Enlightening the World, later known as the Statue of Liberty, and he asked Lazarus to write a poem to boost promotion.

Lazarus was initially reluctant to take on the project, and she had never seen the statue. Eventually she agreed, and wrote what became “The New Colossus.” The manuscript was sold at auction, and the poem quickly became famous itself. In fact, the poet James Russell Lowell said he liked the poem better than the monument. “Your sonnet,” he says, “gives its subject a raison d’être which it wanted before quite as much as it wants a pedestal.”

That raison d’être is a vision of liberty as refuge—for Jewish people, assuredly, but also for all who are persecuted and all who seek asylum. “The New Colossus” is a hymn to what Lazarus referred to in another essay as “the double cosmopolitanism of the American and the Jew”—a polity and a country defined by its sympathy for, and welcome for, the persecuted and the refugee. In Lazarus’ poem, American-Jewish identity provides a blueprint for multi-ethnic democracy. She engraved that blueprint, and that identity, on America’s most famous symbol of liberty.

Diaspora Or Colonialism?

“The New Colossus” is a rebuke to antisemites, to bigots, and to a national identity built on hate and exclusion. It frames Jewish diaspora as a force for antiracist liberation.

Lazarus’ Jewish-American vision was not always so inclusive, though. Around the same time she wrote “The New Colossus,” she wrote a less well-known companion piece, titled “1492.”

1492

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,
Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,
The children of the prophets of the Lord,
Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.
Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,
The West refused them, and the East abhorred.
No anchorage the known world could afford,
Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.
Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,
A virgin world where doors of sunset part,
Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!
There falls each ancient barrier that the art
Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear
Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

Spain expelled all Jews in 1492; that was also the year Columbus landed in the Americas. Lazarus uses that “two-faced year” to frame the United States as a land of refuge. She has America speak words of welcome to the persecuted and the lost. “Ho, all who weary, enter here!” In opening to Jewish people, America opens to all, knocking down “each ancient barrier that the art/of race or creed or rank devised.” When antisemitism falls, Lazarus suggests, so does all prejudice.

The problem in “1492,” though, is that it erects barriers of hatred even as it claims to dismantle them. Lazarus has great sympathy for “The children of the prophets of the Lord/Prince, priest, and people spurned by zealot hate.” But she has literally nothing to say about the indigenous people Columbus spurned, hated, or tormented. She presents the Americas as “A virgin world”—the human beings already living in what was to become the United States are pre-exterminated in her poem. They are erased so that European immigrants, and Jews, can walk upon an empty land of new possibilities.

This isn’t the only moment where Lazarus’ Jewish-based universal humanism reveals itself as less than universal. In an 1871 poem called “The South,” she refers blithely to “broad plantations where swart freemen bend/Bronze backs in willing labor”—a glib reference to happy Black plantation workers that willfully ignores the extensive post-Civil War white supremacist violence that targeted Black workers in the region. Black people were facing mob-violence—pogroms—from the KKK. But Lazarus does not draw comparisons, in this poem or in any poem, between the attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe and attacks on Black people in the United States.

Lazarus has trouble seeing injustices that do not directly parallel antisemitic and anti-immigrant bigotries. That’s clear when she discusses (often by omission) indigenous and Black people in the U.S. It’s also clear when she discusses (often by omission) Arab Palestinian people.

Lazarus’ vision of America as a kind of Jewish promised land is mirrored in her vision of Palestine as a Jewish homeland. In her 1883 essay “The Jewish Problem,” Lazarus—like many proto-Zionists at the time—argued for a Jewish return to Palestine. The Jews, she said, “must establish an independent nationality [italics in original].” She cites George Eliot’s Zionist argument from Daniel Deronda, and speaks approvingly of British Christian diplomat Laurence Oliphant’s “scheme for the colonization of Palestine.” She adds, “whenever two Israelites of ordinary intelligence come together, the possibility, nay the probability, of again forming a united nation is seriously discussed.” This was probably exaggerated—many Jews at the time were skeptical of Zionism—but it shows her own commitments. She was among the first American Jews who embraced support of a Jewish state in Palestine.

As in “1492,” where the native people of the Americas occupy no space, Lazarus’ writings about Palestine present the land as an emptiness to be filled by Jewish settlers. She notes that the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire denied Jews the right to colonize the territory. But she does not mention that one of the Sultan’s reasons might have been that people were in fact already living in Palestine, and that therefore the creation of a Jewish “independent nationality” there would have led to (and did in fact lead to) serious conflict.

Jewish-American History

In “The New Colossus,” “1492,” and her other writings, Lazarus “makes America a part of Jewish history,” as Gregory Eiselein writes in his introduction to Lazarus’ Selected Poems and Other Writings. Scholar Shira Wolosky has pointed out that the lamp hoisted in “The New Colossus” is related to Jewish lamps in Lazarus’ other poems, nodding to Hanukkah menorahs and Sabbath candles. Wolosky also points out that in “1492,” Lazarus turns “the discovery of America [into] an event in Jewish history.”

The phrasing there underlines the problem, though. Columbus did not “discover” the Americas; there were people in the Americas long before he landed and began demanding gold and chopping off the hands of people who didn’t give him enough of it. Making America into Jewish history can mean making America an aspirational, Jewish light to the world—a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-racial beacon of democracy and welcome. But giving America a prophetic Jewish identity can also mean blithely forgetting or erasing the history of other victims, especially in cases where Jews are bystanders, or worse, persecutors.

“The New Colossus” is a powerful example of how Jewish-American diaspora identity can lead to a broad commitment to diversity, democracy, and equality for all. Most lights, however, also cast a shadow. The shadow in this case is the poem “1492,” a powerful, disturbing exercise in Jewish-American nationalist mythmaking, which imagines land magically emptied of indigenous people for the convenience and salvation of persecuted Jews.

Which poem—“The New Colossus” or “1492”—is the true expression of Jewish-American diaspora? The answer is clearly, both. Jewish people in America, like Lazarus, have built on their experience of persecution and exile to identify with and fight for all persecuted people and all exiles. And some Jewish people in America have also, like Lazarus, built on their experience of success and empowerment to denigrate and deny the experiences of those who have been less successful in America and elsewhere.

The diaspora, by its nature, is multiple. It can be a light of freedom and equality for all. Or it can be an ethnonationalist fire, scourging those considered less worthy. It’s up to us to choose the better lamp, and the better Lazarus.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He is the author of the poetry collection Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press), and writes about culture, politics, music, and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.