Emma Lazarus: The Sephardic Jewess who branded America as Land of the Free

History professor Henry Abramson describes how "America's poet", Jewish writer and activist Emma Lazarus, formulized the idea of the Land of the Free, and how she made America's most significant landmark, the Statue of Liberty, a beacon to signal Jewish exiles.

Emma Lazarus was an important forerunner of the Zionist movement. She argued for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine thirteen years before the term Zionist was in wide circulation. Until that would be realized, Lazarus dedicated her life and work advocating for Jewish refugees, arguing for free and just America to be the place where the Jewish exiles would be ingathered.

THE NEW COLOSSUS / EMMA LAZARUS ✡︎

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.

See full lecture:
https://youtu.be/yOADcKX3FaQ