A Jewish Heroine

...No one had chosen Emma Lazarus...

...Yes, she, too, was given Diary of a Young Girl when she was young, and yes, she, too, found in it a hero-Emma Lazarus ine she loved and by Esther Schor admired...

...Ask the same group who Anne Frank was and you'll get a lot more information...

...but far from being assimilated or unaffiliated, Lazarus was, instead, a firebrand for Jewish causes and used her writing talents to withering effect when it came to challenging anti-Semitism...

...It might have been predictable had Lazarus turned out to be more poet than Jew...

...Lazarus also endorsed the idea of a nationalist solution to the Jewish problem: a Jewish state...

...As an early advocate of what would become Zionism, she was ahead of most American Jews, and was criticized for it...

...As Raschi declares in the poem, the Jews are what ye have made If any among them be fawning, false, Insatiable, revengeful, ignorant, mean— And there are many such—ask your own hearts What virtues ye would yield for planted hate, Ribald contempt, forced, menial servitude, Slow centuries of vengeance for a crime Ye never did commit...

...Born in 1849 in New York, to a well-established and wealthy Sephardic family, Emma was the fourth child of Moses and Esther Lazarus, and at least a fourth-generation American Jew...

...As Schor explains, neither her fellow Jews nor a wider Christian audience were receptive to the idea...

...She even invoked some of the imagery that would make her famous years later: "Every American must feel a thrill of pride and gratitude in the thought that his country is the refuge of the oppressed," she wrote in 1882, "the 'home of hope to the whole human race,' and however wretched be the material offered to him from the refuse of other nations, he accepts it with generous hospitality...

...She began a weekly column in the American Hebrew that took up her new "dogma," the need for a new Jewish state in Palestine...

...The Lazaruses were firmly part of the New York Jewish establishment, while their relationship to Judaism was quintessen-tially American: They kept a selection of Jewish edicts, but not all, and among the extended Lazarus family they were less active members of their synagogue, Temple Emanu-El...

...It's an encounter with a passionate, stubborn, jocular Jewish American heroine...

...Schor wants us to "get to know" Emma Lazarus, and with this volume, we can and we should...

...She visited the refugees who fled Russian pogroms on March 26, 1882, the Jewish festival of Purim...

...Her passions for both America and the fate of the Jewish people would be a source of pride and trouble for Lazarus throughout her career...

...The fame and hero worship of Frank, compared with the near complete ignorance of Lazarus, came home to poet Esther Schor at a recent pageant at her daughter's school...

...Among Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, and Malcolm X, Schor found that three different Jewish Abby Wisse Schachter is an editor at the New York Post...

...As Schor makes clear in the prologue of her new biography, this book is a response to those three Anne Franks...

...The students were dressed in costumes for an annual Wax Museum, as Schor recounts, all representing the theme "People Who Made a Difference...

...Emma Lazarus became one of New York's more ardent advocates for saving the Jews...

...With Emma Lazarus, Schor is trying to show us a different Jewish heroine...

...I am bitterly disappointed," she wrote, "in not seeing the slightest prospect of marrying Sir Moses Montefiore—as I had hoped...

...Jews are the way they are because of Christian persecution...

...But she wasn't all polemics...

...In her 1880 poem "Raschi in Prague," she hit a theme she would return to more than once...

...This volume is part of a series called "Jewish Encounters," and that's just what it is...

...Indeed, as Schor proves, Emma Lazarus should finally take her place and be celebrated as one of the great heroines of Jewish history...

...a spinster with a sharp eye for sexual innuendo, unafraid to face her own longings...

...Lazarus also had a terrific sense of humor, as illustrated by a comment written from London, to a friend regarding her still being single at the advanced age of 33...

...But Schor Schocken' 368 pp- $2195 admits that Frank was her heroine for the wrong reasons: "I loved Anne Frank neither for hoping nor dying but for being so shameless, so unlovable...

...A woman of action," Schor writes, "a secular, nationalist Jew...

...As she wrote in an unsigned dispatch for the New York Times, Emma Lazarus by Esther Schor Schocken, 368 pp., $21.95 Never before were the prayer of gratitude and the impulse of joy more genuine, more appropriate and more solemn than on this day of March (Adar) 1882, when after a new exodus, and a new persecution by the seed of Haman, these stalwart young representatives of the oldest civilization in existence met to sing the songs of Zion in a strange land...

...by Abby Wisse Schachter Ask a random sampling of people to identify Emma Lazarus, and chances are you'll hear that she wrote the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty...

...He is approaching his 99th birthday & has not made any advances to me & I fear there is no time to be lost...

...Her greatest Jewish awakening and the reason she championed the cause of immigration—leading her to write "The New Colossus"—was the influx of Russian Jewish exiles in the early 1880s...

...That is, if you get any responses beside blank stares...

...She favored immigration to the United States and encouraged other Americans to embrace her view...

...As Lazarus explained it to Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson, she considered herself a "new world Jew: Progressive, unencumbered by ancient laws and customs, and free to move unabashed in a wider, American world...

...girls had dressed as Anne Frank...