nd greatest Jewish
American poet. As a girl she had cared little for the history and
traditions of her people; her verses were about the gods of Greece and
Rome and the legends of the Middle Ages. Then, when the dreadful
persecution of our people in Russia in 1881 drove many of them to our
shores, she was called upon to assist in caring for some of the
homeless wanderers and, like a loving mother, she gathered them to her
heart.

Something new and beautiful awoke in her soul and she gave her
strength and energy in caring for these exiles of her own blood. When
she wrote now it was of her people. She read our long and wonderful
history and immortalized the heroism of our martyrs in such poems as
her tragedy, "The Dance to Death." She wrote shorter verses, too, and
there are few Jewish boys and girls who have not recited or at least
heard her stirring Chanukkah recitations, "The Feast of Lights," and
"The Banner of the Jew." Her poems had always been very beautiful,
winning the praises of such a high critic as Ralph Waldo Emerson, but
now they glowed with a new beauty, her love and new found kinship with
her race.

It was her passionate love for America and her knowledge of all that
our country means to the Jew, both the native-born and the persecuted
wanderer from other lands, that made her see in the Statue of Liberty
more than a mere mass of sculptured stone. Instead she saw a gracious,
loving woman guarding the gates of the New World, not like the ancient
giant figure striding the harbor at Rhodes, a haughty menace to the
nations, but a symbol of welcome and freedom and justice to all
mankind. So she wrote her verses, to be inscribed later at the
statue's base, telling as only a great poet could what America means
to her children.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land,
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome: her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"