Winner of the National Jewish Book Award The definitive biography of the poet whose sonnet "The New Colossus" appears on the base of the Statue of Liberty, welcoming immigrants to their new home. Emma Lazarus’s most famous poem gave a voice to the Statue of Liberty, but her remarkable life has remained a mystery until now. She was a woman so far ahead of her time that we are still scrambling to catch up with her–-a feminist, a Zionist, and an internationally famous Jewish American writer before these categories even existed. Drawing upon a cache of personal letters undiscovered until the 1980s, Esther Schor brings this vital woman to life in all her complexity. Born into a wealthy Sephardic family in 1849, Lazarus published her first volume of verse at seventeen and gained entrée into New York’s elite literary circles. Although she once referred to her family as “outlaw” Jews, she felt a deep attachment to Jewish history and peoplehood. Her compassion for the downtrodden Jews of Eastern Europe–-refugees whose lives had little in common with her own–-helped redefine the meaning of America itself. In this groundbreaking biography, Schor argues persuasively for Lazarus’s place in history as a poet, an activist, and a prophet of the world we all inhabit today–a world that she helped to invent. Jewish Encounters Series Writing with great enthusiasm, Schor confirms that the author of "The New Colossus," the sonnet ensconced in the base of the Statue of Liberty, was no one-hit wonder. Until the 1930s, "The Banner of the Jew," a rallying song for establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was her best-known composition. Lazarus (1849-87) was also controversially famous for the prose "Epistle to the Hebrews," expounding her ideas about Jewish identity as well as Palestine. Spurred by the crisis of the pogroms following Czar Alexander II's 1881 assassination, Lazarus set aside the gentility of her wealthy upbringing to advocate for the thousands of Jews whose flight for life left them destitute in New York. Her encounters with shtetl refugees and her trust in American freedom confirmed her belief that Judaism should be secular and universal, committed to justice, freedom, and revolution. She anticipated Zionism and, as a radical who didn't embrace socialism, much of non-Marxist Jewish politics. Moreover, Schor argues with engrossing persuasiveness, she "invented the role of the American Jewish writer." Ray Olson Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved “Emma Lazarus’s ‘passionate, ardent life’ is laid out sumptuously in Esther Schor’s evocative biography. It is unlikely that, for a general audience, it will be surpassed any time in the near future.” —Commentary   “A sympathetic and balanced life of Emma Lazarus.” —The New York Times Book Review   “How welcome Lazarus would be in the company of today’s poets. How fine to have a writer of Schor’s quality restore this courageous and important poet to her rightful place.” —The New York Sun “Schor brings to life the complicated, passionate woman who left us our proudest national image. A work of great empathy an meticulous historical research.” –Kevin Baker, author of Paradise Alley “In this luminous, enthralling biography, Schor recovers one of the outstanding women of nineteenth-century letters, who while inventing her life as an American Jewish writer discovered a larger poetic mission for the entire nation.” -Sean Wilentz, author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln “Schor, herself a poet of authentic distinction, has composed a very moving and highly useful biographical critique of Emma Lazarus, a permanent poet in American and in Jewish tradition.” –Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon “It is a rare book indeed that so skillfully melds biography, literary analysis, and cultural history. In describing Emma Lazarus and her circle, Schor tells the story of American Jewry in the nineteenth century, paints a portrait of literary New York in one of its heydays, explicates many beautiful and long-neglected poems, and instills in us a canny affection for a subject who is forceful and sometimes overbearing but also brilliant and compassionate. Schor’s prose is as lyrical and rich in images as the poetry she describes in this intimate, often touching volume.” –Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon Esther Schor, a poet and professor of English at Princeton University, is the author of Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems , My Last JDate, and  Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria.  Her essays and reviews have appeared in  The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic, and the  Forward. She lives in New Jersey. PROLOGUE Emma Lazarus and the Three Anne Franks   Not long ago, on a humid May morning, I visited my daughter’s fourth-gr