SOURCE: Wolosky, Shira. “An American-Jewish Typology: Emma Lazarus and the Figure of Christ.” Prooftexts 16, no. 2 (May 1996): 113-25.

In the following essay, Wolosky studies Lazarus's poetic references to Christ as they serve to link her Jewish and American identities.

Emma Lazarus was among the first poets specifically to assert ethnic voice in America, indeed ethnic voice as American. In doing so, Lazarus appeals to a typological rhetoric that, as Sacvan Bercovitch explores, had served from the time of the Puritan landing as a founding ritual of American national identity. Lazarus's rendering of this foundational rhetoric, however, requires a singular restructuring of its basic terms and their distribution, even as she institutes a no less striking reconstruction of her distinctive Jewish commitments. Puritan typology thus becomes a scene of mutual transformation between her American and Jewish identities, one made possible by their convergences but necessary by their disjunctions. This complex...