1/31/2024 0 Comments Emma lazarus biography![]() ![]() ![]() Lazarus had long called for an independent Jewish state. Bendahan and Doncel says Lazarus was a trailblazing Zionist, years before journalist Theodor Herzl wrote The Jewish State (1896), considered one of the most important texts of modern Zionism. ![]() She wrote about homes with no running water, and the lack of schools for their children. Her commitment to the Jewish people intensified when she saw the deplorable conditions and treatment of Russian immigrants. The original 1883 manuscript of “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus. I am a poet, not a journalist,” she once said at a time when much of the press meekly answered to political and economic interests. Lazarus often struggled with her publishers. “Religious intolerance and racial antipathy are giving rise to an equally bitter and dangerous social hostility,” she wrote. Later on that year, she published a collection of poems, Songs of a Semite.ĭoncel describes the poems in Songs of a Semite as “highly intellectual and dense, almost like essays,” with themes like the discrimination and persecution of Jews in Europe. However, in that same issue was an anti-Semitic piece by a Russian journalist, who called Jews “disgusting parasites.” Lazarus was so outraged that “from that moment on, she decided never to hide her Jewish identity,” said Israel Doncel, the Centro Sefarad-Israel’s director of communications. In 1882, Lazarus contributed an article to The Century, one of the most widely circulated magazines in the US at the time. Two years later, she tried her hand at playwriting and published The Spagnoletto. In 1874, Lazrus published her only novel, Alide: An Episode of Goethe’s Life. It was praised in a New York Times review as “remarkable,” especially because it had been written by such a young lady during the three years prior to its publication. Lazarus was a precocious writer and published her first book, Poems and Translations (1866), at the age of 17. “The Spanish noon is a blaze of azure fire, and the dusty pilgrims crawl like an endless serpent along treeless plains… They leave behind, the grape, the olive, and the fig… the garden-cities of Andalusia and Aragon…” Authors Israel Doncel and Esther Bendahan at the Centro Sefarad-Israel in Madrid. Bendahan, who is the director of culture for Madrid’s Centro Sefarad-Israel, an organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of Sephardic culture, describes Lazarus as someone “who is part of Spanish history and a progenitor of contemporary Sephardic literature, even though she wrote in another language and place.” As an example, Bendahan cites Lazarus’ poem, The Exodus (August 3, 1942), about the Jewish expulsion from the Iberian peninsula by the Catholic Monarchs: She also translated the writings of medieval Jewish philosophers into contemporary English, including works by Maimonides. She learned French, Italian and German, and later translated the verses of German poet, Heinrich Heine. Lazarus and her six siblings all had private tutors, and Emma soon displayed a gift for languages. She was born in 1849 into one of the elite families of New York, descendants of the first 23 Jews who arrived in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1654, the settlement that would later become New York. ![]() It presents translations of the original English-language texts by Lawrence Schimel, and emphasizes the social consciousness and activism of Lazarus. Now her work has been published for the first time in Spanish, in a book that presents a selection of her poems and articles, along with a brief biography.Įmma Lazarus a los pies de la libertad (or Emma Lazarus at the Feet of Freedom), was written by Esther Bendahan and Israel Doncel, and published by Editorial Huso. Its author was a Jewish woman, a feminist from a family with Sephardic roots (Jews who trace their lineage to the Iberian peninsula). The sonnet that wasn’t penned by a founding father, a famous writer or any pivotal figure of the late 19th century. These verses from “The New Colossus” are inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor, a welcoming message for those who came to a country forged by immigration more than a century ago. People who have been forced to leave their native countries in search of better lives. These words could be about everyone who has been uprooted by all the conflicts of the past, present and future. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, “Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she Writer and journalist Emma Lazarus, in an undated photo. ![]()
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