Emma Lazarus

Lazarus came from an old, wealthy and thoroughly assimilated Sephardic family in New York, published her first poems at seventeen, and corresponded with Emerson. What changed her was 1881: the pogroms in the Russian Empire sent thousands of destitute Jewish refugees to Ward's Island, and she went to meet them, taught English there, and began writing about a people she had been raised to think of at a comfortable distance. She learned Hebrew, translated medieval Jewish poets, and argued in print for a Jewish homeland fifteen years before Herzl.

In 1883 she was asked to write something to help raise money for the pedestal of a French statue arriving in the harbour. She refused at first, then produced The New Colossus, which turns a monument to republican friendship into something else entirely: not a warrior but a mother of exiles, holding a lamp beside a golden door, asking for the tired and the poor. She died of cancer at thirty-eight. The sonnet was almost forgotten; a friend campaigned for years, and in 1903 it was cast on a bronze plaque and fixed inside the pedestal.