Karen Alkalay-Gut (קרן אלקלעי-גוט), born in London, Britain in 1945, is a poet, professor, and editor who lives in Israel and writes in English. She moved with her family to Rochester, New York in 1948. Alkalay-Gut graduated from the University of Rochester, with a BA with honors, and an MA in English literature in 1967. From 1967 to 1970 she taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo before returning to complete her doctorate. In 1972 she immigrated to Israel. She taught at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev from 1972 to 1976. In 1977, Alkalay-Gut began working at Tel Aviv University, where she continues to teach.
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Contributed by:
Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Karen Alkalay-Gut (translation), Rachel Kirsch Holtman (translation), Emma Lazarus
This is the poem, “The New Colossus” (1883) by Emma Lazarus. Lazarus famously penned her sonnet in response to the waves of Russian-Jewish refugees seeking refuge in the Unites States of America as a result of murderous Russian pogroms following the assassination of Tsar Alexander Ⅱ in 1881. At a time when she was also translating classical Jewish poetry, her identification and revisioning of the Statue of Liberty as “the Mother of Exiles,” points to the familiar rabbinic Jewish identification of the Shekhinah (the Divine Presence, in its feminine aspect) with the light of the Jewish people in their Diaspora.
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