SOURCE: Friedman, Saul S. “Emma Lazarus: American Poet and Zionist.” In Women in History, Literature, and the Arts: A Festschrift for Hildegard Schnuttgen in Honor of Her Thirty Years of Outstanding Service at Youngstown State University, edited by Lorrayne Y. Baird-Lange and Thomas A. Copeland, pp. 220-46. Youngstown: Youngstown State University Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Friedman examines Lazarus as a proponent of human rights and a significant precursor of Zionism.

Born in New York City on July 22, 1849, Emma Lazarus merits a place of honor among the transcendentalist poets of the nineteenth century.¹ She was an intimate of America's intellectual elite—William James, Ellergy Channing, Henry Ward Beecher, William Cullen Bryant, Louisa May Alcott—a devotee of Thoreau and Emerson.² In dedicating one of her longer epics to Emerson (whom she called “the font of wisdom and goodness”), she wrote, “To how many thousand youthful hearts has not...