SOURCE: Young, Bette Roth. “Emma Lazarus and Her Jewish Problem.” American Jewish History 84, no. 4 (December 1996): 291-313.

In the following essay, Young discusses Lazarus's literary response to anti-Semitism and her proposed solution to the problem of Diaspora Jews in An Epistle to the Hebrews.

“The truth is that every Jew has to crack for himself this nut of his peculiar position in a non-Jewish country.”

Emma Lazarus

Less than a month after Emma Lazarus died, one of her editors, Joseph Gilder, memorialized her in an issue of The Critic, his widely read journal of literature and the arts. He wrote that the children of Moses Lazarus “had Christians for playmates and schoolmates and most of Emma's friends were Christian. … She died, as she lived, as much a Christian as a Jewess—perhaps it would be better to say neither one or the other.”¹

This curious interest in Emma's religious...