Emma Lazarus, Jewish American Poetics, and the Challenge of Modernity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 23141419 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ranen Omer–Sherman (corresponding author), Ranen Omer-Sherman |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 19 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 170-191 |
| Publication date | 2002-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Legacy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0748-4321 • E-ISSN: 1534-0643 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1353/leg.2003.0033 |
| OpenAlex | W1965535961 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 10 |
Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was a poet who struggled to translate the Jewish experience into the American idiom for the sake of masses of immigrants seeking to negotiate their passage at the border crossing of American culture. Reading her today can teach us a great deal about the degree of imagination required in the journey from the humiliation of dispersion to the joys of Jewish and American nationalisms. I see Lazarus as the harbinger of the modern American ethnic Jew (and perhaps in some ways American ethnic writing as a corpus), one possessed simultaneously of an insider and an outsider sensibility. But "translation" of identity, like that of a text, always entails losses as well as gains, and in claiming one Jewish history she remained a stranger to other ways of seeing the past. This essay examines the contradictions between modern identity and ancient lineage that animate Lazarus's late body of proto-Zionist poetry and polemics.
Aesthetics · American poetry · Art · Identity (music) · Jewish identity · Judaism · Literature · Modernity · Poetics · Poetry · Theology · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Jewish Identity and Society · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.04 |
| Citation span | 2003 - 2003 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |