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.

