Emma Lazarus: Professional Exile

Abstract: “Emma Lazarus: Professional Exile” foregrounds a theme in Lazarus’s poetry that has been hiding in plain sight: galut , or exile. Such a focus is most explicit in her memorial and occasional poems. These poems commemorate Jewish exile for a late nineteenth-century US public sphere where a marked antisemitic environment prodded Jews to adopt a position of social ambivalence. By memorializing a shared Jewish exile, Lazarus realized two ends. First, she reenvisioned the very Jewish identity that an assimilated American Jewry could no longer see. Second, her poetry pushed American Jews to muster a more combative response to antisemitism in US society and abroad. Lazarus’s efforts signaled her status as a poetic professional, one whose public recognition could compel, more broadly, action from the US Jewish community. From her professional platform, Lazarus urged other American Jews to develop a professionalism of their own, one that calls on Jews to do the “work” of creating community for both themselves and for newly arrived eastern European coreligionists. Through poems such as “In Exile,” which commemorates exilic community, Lazarus attempts to equip Americanized Jewish audiences with a new identity that asserts its belonging in late nineteenth-century US society.