SOURCE: Kessner, Carole S. “Matrilineal Dissent: The Rhetoric of Zeal in Emma Lazarus, Marie Syrkin, and Cynthia Ozick.” In Women of the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing, edited by Ruth R. Baskin, pp. 197-215. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994.

In the following excerpt, Kessner focuses on the development of Lazarus's Jewish consciousness as reflected in her writing.

… Emma Lazarus's early years did not suggest that she would become a prototype for the modern Jewish woman writer, nor that she would become a Jewish nationalist in her poetry, a proto-Zionist in her aspirations, nor a socialist sympathizer in her politics,¹ nor assertive in her self-confidence as a woman. She was born on July 22, 1849, to Moses Lazarus, a wealthy sugar industrialist of Sephardic background, and his wife, Esther Nathan Lazarus, who was of Ashkenazic background. Both sides of the family had been in America since the Revolution. The Lazarus...