Shebrew in the City
Shebrew in the City is a podcast exploring all things Jewish. Combining interviews and informational episodes, join Nicole Kelly as she discusses her journey with motherhood, spirituality, and everything from Hanukkah to the Holocaust. Giving a voice to modern Jews and spreading love and joy, whether you're Jewish, Jew-ish, or not anything resembling Jewish at all, there's something here for everyone.
Shebrew in the City
"Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor" - The Life of Emma Lazarus
Peek behind the curtain of history as our Producer, Patrick, rejoins us and gets to lean into his New York City tour guide roots, as he joins me in painting a vivid portrait of Emma Lazarus, the illustrious American author whose words on the Statue of Liberty have become a national treasure. Our conversation travels through the corridors of her life, from her New York roots and Sephardic Jewish heritage to her poignant poetry that speaks volumes about America's soul. We promise you'll leave this episode with a newfound appreciation for Lazarus's influence on our nation's narrative, especially in the realm of immigration discourse.
Step into the world of 19th-century artistic salons and witness the birth of celebrity culture among poets and intellectuals of the age. We'll explore how Lazarus's literary prowess was nurtured in such a vibrant environment, leading to her engagement with social issues and activism that still echo today.
Finally, we draw captivating parallels between historical events and their reinterpretation in modern media. From the emotional impact of immigrants laying eyes on Lady Liberty for the first time, to the transformation of the iconic words in the Wolfenstein video game series, we traverse not just the life of Emma Lazarus but also the shifting sands of symbolism she helped shape. So, join us for this tapestry of tales and take a step back in time to appreciate the enduring spirit that these icons represent.
TopDogTours is your walking tour company. Available in New York, Philly, Boston, & Toronto!
Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.
Visiting a city maybe for the second time, and don't want to visit the same tourist traps? Check out Top Dog Tours. We have lots of different options for walking tours of neighborhoods and attractions that everybody will love. We are in Boston, Philadelphia, Toronto and New York City. You can visit us at topdogtours. com and check us out on social media for offers and discounts.
VO:One of the strongest and most basic desires of people is freedom Freedom of speech, freedom to have a voice in one's government and freedom to worship God as one chooses. From our very beginnings, this country has offered these freedoms to millions who came to her shores, and perhaps there is no greater symbol of what this nation stands for, no brighter light, than the torch of liberty held high by that wonderful lady in New York Harbor. On her side is a poem by Emma Lazarus. From her beacon hand glows worldwide. Welcome Her mild eyes. Command the air-bridged harbor that twins cities frame. Keep ancient lands, your story alive.
Nicole Kelly:Hi, I'm Nicole Kelly and this is Shebrew in the City, and tonight I am joined by my husband and producer, Patrick Kelly. So I started school this week, so it's been an interesting transition scheduling-wise, so we thought maybe we'd do something that would be kind of an easy topic. So originally we talked about maybe-.
Patrick Kelly:Hello, Hello! ell, easy, for us Easy for us.
Nicole Kelly:Originally, we talked about maybe doing an episode on Ellis Island and I was like, well, I'd also like to talk a little bit about Emma Lazarus, and after doing a little bit of research, I think this might just turn into an Emma Lazarus episode.
VO:So we'll have to see how it goes, we'll figure it out, we'll figure it out.
Nicole Kelly:So, patrick, as a New York City tour guide who has spent almost a decade going to the snatch of liberty, what do you know about Emma Lazarus?
Patrick Kelly:Well, I mean, I probably know more than the average person, but generally what we talk about, emma is most famous for a poem she wrote called the New Colossus. If anybody out there ever watches the news and they are talking about American immigration in any sort of way and it really doesn't matter what side of the aisle the conversation is being had on I guarantee the most famous line of that poem will be brought up in that conversation on the news, which is give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, we're going to talk a little bit about specifically one incident a couple of years ago that I know you're probably thinking of right now, yeah, so that quote just tends to be used a lot in our media.
Patrick Kelly:I know a bit about how the poem was conceived, I know a bit about how it was popularized a little later after the death of Emma, and I know a little bit about her life and her family prior to writing the poem. But yeah, I don't know if I know too many super specific things about Emma Lazarus other than what she's most famous for.
Nicole Kelly:Well, obviously none of that is incorrect. But I think that I kind of maybe done a little more research on this, because there was a period of a year where all I did was read books about Ellis Island and they would obviously talk about the poem and Emma Lazarus a little bit. But even just in my research that I did this evening I've learned some new things. So just to kind of we'll obviously talk about stuff that we already know, because not everybody listening will know, and some stuff that might be new to us. Cool, so Maheris was an American author of poetry, prose and translations. Now I don't know the difference between poetry and prose Prose, do you?
Patrick Kelly:Prose is basically conversational. It's not structured in the way a poem would be structured either rhyming or not. So natural speaking. It's more natural speaking Authors tend to be write in prose.
Patrick Kelly:It's a very old school term books where poets tend to write with a sense of structure or a sense of limiting. I've heard poetry described as the you know like in cooking, where you put something in like a pot and you boil it down and you continuously reduce it and reduce it and reduce it to its most intense flavor, most intense substance. Right, poetry is kind of like that for the English language, where it's you're putting it in a structure and then you're reducing the language there so it has the biggest impact of the smallest amount of space.
Nicole Kelly:Interesting that's how I've heard it. I've never heard it explained that way, but that makes sense. Yeah, so, as you said, she is remembered probably most for writing the sonnet, which is a type of poem, the New Colossus, which was inspired by the Statue of Liberty in the year 1883. So we'll talk about this a little bit later, but the poem came before the Statue of Liberty was constructed.
Patrick Kelly:That is right. The statue officially opened on October 28th 1886.
Nicole Kelly:Mm-hmm which is the day we had our first doctor's appointment, when we found out we were pregnant with our daughter.
Patrick Kelly:Oh.
Nicole Kelly:It was very auspicious.
Patrick Kelly:I'm shocked, her name's not Emma.
Nicole Kelly:I like the name, emma, so she was born in New York City on July 22nd 1849. She was not an immigrant. I've actually heard other tour guides refer to her as an immigrant, which is not at all the case.
Patrick Kelly:She was not an immigrant, nor was she really from immigrants. No, no, no, not at all. I'm gonna talk about that.
Nicole Kelly:So she was the fourth of seven children of Moses Lazarus, who was a wealthy Jewish merchant and sugar refiner, and Esther Nathan. So Emma was not an immigrant, she was a native born New Yorker, and one of the things I always find very ironic is when we're down at the Statue of Liberty talking about how polluted the harbor is. A lot of that was from sugar refining in the 1800s.
Patrick Kelly:Oh yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So it makes me think that maybe her father had a refinery down at the harbor, which I think is just very ironic.
Patrick Kelly:That a lot of them are still. You can see the old dominant building, yeah, dominant factory they just remodeled it over Brooklyn.
Nicole Kelly:Is it doing like condos or something?
Patrick Kelly:No, it's like the top floor is an event space. I think the bottom floors are office space but not turning into condos.
Nicole Kelly:How unique for New York. I don't believe it's condos.
Patrick Kelly:I mean fact. Check me on that. But. I know the top floor is an event space.
VO:I saw the video about it.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, a lot of people don't know New York was, or New Amsterdam was, founded partially as a sugar refining colony. The idea was they would bring in sugar from the Caribbean up to New York because it was a more direct launching place to go to Europe, and they would refine what was Guinea rum here, which then Guinea rum was sold in Europe and then Africa for either European goods or for African slaves. That would then be brought over to the Caribbean to then continue the triangle trade. Right, but basically the two big trades of New Amsterdam and later New York were sugar refining and fur trapping. That's kind of what the city was founded under.
Nicole Kelly:And there's a reason, there's a connection to this, because on her great-, one of her great-grandfathers on the Lazarus side, so her father's family was from Germany, but the rest of her ancestors, both on the Lazarus and nascent side, were originally from Portugal, so they were Sephardic and they were among the original 23 Portuguese Jews who arrived in New Amsterdam. So these Jews fled Brazil in an attempt to flee the Inquisition. So they basically left Spain, they went down to Brazil and then they ended up here in New Amsterdam. So they were originally 23 Jews who settled in what was in New Amsterdam.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, these are, I think, officially the first Jews in America.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, and the Dutch governor at the time, Peter Stuyvesant, was super anti-Semitic and a lot of these Jews had to basically petition to the Netherlands to basically exist and be people who could vote and be business owners and things like that.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, stuyvesant wanted to kick them out and not allow them to own land and not allow them to do business. Luckily, the Dutch, which was more of a unlike the British or French, was a little more of capitalist driven.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, they were much more money driven than religious driven culture.
Patrick Kelly:So they just saw them as kind of businessmen living there and because there was rights to religion within the Netherlands at the time, they basically told Stuyvesant our colonies should be run the same way. So he kind of got kiboshed on his anti-Semitic tropes and wanting to kick out the Jews.
Nicole Kelly:Fun fact, emma Lazarus was related through her mother to Benjamin Cardozo, who was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was the second Jewish justice, the first Sephardic one. The first was Louis Brandeis, who was an Oscar-nausei Jew. And I kind of delved into Cardozo a little bit, just to kind of down the rabbit hole. So he served on the Supreme Court from 1932 until he died in 1938. And this is super fun. He was part of a liberal block of justices known as the Three Musketeers.
Nicole Kelly:I wish we named part of our Supreme Court justices, like in groups, like that instead of just being like the liberal and the conservatives.
Patrick Kelly:The five to four yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So this was him, brandeis, and a man named Harlan Stone, and you know what their opponents were called, what the Four Horsemen. And then there were like two people that were just like we're going to free float. But, I'd rather be a Three Musketeer than a Four Horseman.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, definitely, I mean the imagery of that.
Nicole Kelly:That it's just very, very different. So I think it's cool that the first two Jewish Supreme Court justices were pals and worked together, you know, to work on making you know setting law precedent, which I think is really cool, and I think maybe we could do an episode on the Jewish Supreme Court justices might be interesting at some point.
Patrick Kelly:I mean, there's been a handful.
Nicole Kelly:There have been eight, probably the most famous being RBG and, of course, brandeis and Ben. I know I knew of Benjamin Cardozo before this, but apparently there have been eight. It might be a fun thing to do. You know an episode on oh and Elena Kagan's Jewish. I did not know that. That is fun. We love that. Oh and.
VO:Breyer is.
Nicole Kelly:Jewish, so there are two Jews. There were three Jews serving on the Supreme Court at the same time. Wow. That's very exciting. That's like literally a third of the Supreme Court justices I know. All the other ones are Catholics, so so you know, I think for a group of people that has 15 million people worldwide, three of the nine Supreme Court justices in America is a pretty good number.
Patrick Kelly:That's a lot.
Nicole Kelly:I'm actually legitimately shocked by that.
Patrick Kelly:Well, I mean to become a Supreme Court justice. I guess you don't technically have to be a lawyer and you don't technically have to have been a Practice law or we're not saving anybody's name.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah right.
Patrick Kelly:But um you know, if you look at the historically, law is something that people have got to do something that, yeah, jews tend to gravitate toward medicine law. You know these kind of jobs.
Nicole Kelly:That makes me kind of kind of proud. So she had a big family. She had five sisters Josephine, sarah, mary, as we know, which is a traditional Jewish name Agnes and Annie and a brother, frank. So she is a big family. Uh, her sister Josephine was apparently a celebrated essayist, book critic, transcendentalist and Zionist, and the only thing I really know about transcendentalism is that Louisa May Alcott's father was a transcendentalist. And I know this because of the 1990s little women movie.
Nicole Kelly:So do they feature it, have a way of moving, because when I'm a writer is talking to professor bear because he's like a philosopher and you know there's a lot of German philosophers and if I remember correctly, she talks about her father, you know, being a transcendentalist, and I don't know what that means. I feel like I've looked it up in the past and I can't remember. Okay, for those of you who don't know, I feel like I haven't talked about this. Yes, I am obsessed with a novel little women. There was a good period of time where I'd read it, like once a year, and I actually, the pinnacle of my musical theater career, I got to play Joe in the musical, which was a dream role, and Patrick actually got to pay professor bear opposite me.
Patrick Kelly:I did, yeah, it was at a small theater in California.
Nicole Kelly:Yes, it was. Where was that? Was that in Riverside?
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, it was in Riverside, I think, yeah, yeah, I try to figure exactly what city that would have been.
Nicole Kelly:Um, I just know it was a really really long drive from where my parents live in the San Fernando Valley.
Patrick Kelly:It was like two hours. It was like two, a good two and a half, sometimes three, yeah, but the thing is is like I'm just, you know, going off topic here.
Nicole Kelly:We got involved with this theater company because Patrick taught children's theater with the director of this company and if it wasn't for him doing that, we wouldn't have the dog that is now sitting at my feet because, um, patrick was going to teach a children's theater class and I drove him because I had the day off and I was like, okay, I'll keep you company, and there was a there's a cross the street with the pound, where, yeah, where the school was with the past and there was like this long line and they were having some sort of event and I was like I'm going to go check it out.
Nicole Kelly:And then I came back and I was like I got a dog.
Patrick Kelly:And I thought she was joking.
Nicole Kelly:I was not joking, she was $20. She was the best investment of $20 have ever made.
Patrick Kelly:Best $20. She's a great dog. We love Winnie we do love Winnie.
Nicole Kelly:So getting back on topic, because that was so off topic. So, as was normal for wealthy women of the time, she was privately educated by tutors and she studied American and British literature as well as German, french and Italian. So people back then spoke a lot of languages. They were very fancy.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I think it's one thing I always talk about when I'm at Ellis Island is everybody's always shocked how multilingual people of that generation late 1800s early 20th century.
Nicole Kelly:Like the average interpreter, Ellis Island spoke five languages.
Patrick Kelly:I think it's four or five. The famous thing is Fearlow LaGuardia spoke eight languages fluently as a translator on the island, later a lawyer on the island. That's a lot of languages, it is. It's more common than not that most people back then would have spoke more than just one.
Nicole Kelly:Well, there was no tick tock, there was no Netflix. There was a lot of free time.
Patrick Kelly:Well, it makes you think founding fathers were all extremely prolific like, not only in the writing, but in their education and their reading. And you know I think, if you have nothing else to do, you're going to teach yourself how to write two languages with both of your hands.
Nicole Kelly:That was you. At the same time Grant, though that was Grant. Grant and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson too, because you will see that Grant could write in English with one hand and Latin and the other at the same time, which is bonkers.
Patrick Kelly:Supposedly Jefferson could write English and Greek in both hands at the same time Crazy.
Nicole Kelly:I people had way too much time back then. I mean I, but I guess it was like you were in a, you had way too much time, but it was limited time, yeah.
Patrick Kelly:He also invented that device, which I don't think works very well, but it's a contraption that connects to your writing hand, so then you can write a letter with with your hand, and then the contraption writes the same letter, the same letter at the same time as you. I've heard it doesn't work very well because the pen doesn't have the same sort of pressure as a regular hand pen does.
Nicole Kelly:But you know how I feel about Thomas Jefferson in general. Yeah, it's not.
Patrick Kelly:It's not positive, you know when you have nothing else to do. You're coming up with inventions and you're teaching yourself how to do stuff all the time, I think.
Nicole Kelly:That makes sense. Yeah, so she was attracted to poetry in her youth and apparently wrote her first lyrics when she was 11 years old. So she's starting to write poetry at a very young age. The first inspirations for her writing were the American Civil War. So you know she's, she's in her. If she was born in 49, she's 11.
Patrick Kelly:She's 11. Oh, 11. When the Civil War starts, the height of the Civil War.
Nicole Kelly:So she's, you know, a pre, a preteen when the Civil War starts, so this is obviously something that you know. She's maybe getting involved with adult conversations.
Patrick Kelly:She's also living in Greenwich Village, yes, which was the heart of kind of American Bohemian culture at the time. So she's being surrounded.
Nicole Kelly:She's being surrounded by people who are artists and writers and creative types, but that's also where a lot of the wealthy people lived at the time too.
Patrick Kelly:Of course, yeah, but they were attracted to that neighborhood because of the artists.
Nicole Kelly:So so she. Her first collection is called Poems and Translations and it's verses written between the ages of 14 and 17. And it, with the debut or, was published in 1867. And it was commended by William Cullum Bryant, who is a is a famous newspaper writer and editor and abolitionist, and there was a statue of him in Bryant Park which is named after him.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, he was the editor of the New York Evening Post, which is the predecessor to what we call today the New York Post which is it's trash A. It's trash. It's a tabloid paper owned by Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, but back in the 1800s, when it was under William Cullum Bryant- it was a legitimate newspaper.
Patrick Kelly:It was not just a legitimate newspaper. It was considered the premier American paper. There were a lot of especially intellectuals and writers within Europe, specifically England, who would write things praising the efficacy of the New York Evening Post and what a great and grand newspaper it was, so, so this was a good accolade to have such a man of letters commending your book you wrote when you're 14.
Nicole Kelly:I think that's pretty cool. So some of these translations I guess included Alexander Dumas and Victor Hugo. It was super popular in the 1800s and prior to do these personal translations of things, which is weird. I don't know. It just be like I'm just going to translate this book for fun.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah Again, there's no, there's no internet. There's no internet, there's there's a lot of stuff to do no TV, no video games. There's not a lot of stuff to do, yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So she follows it up in 1871 with Admentus and other poems. So the title poem was dedicated to my friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. So she's already like we were talking about involving yourself with a lot of these writers and great thinkers of the time. Salons were very popular then, so you're not familiar with the idea of a salon.
Nicole Kelly:It was not, it's not like where you go to get your nails or your hair done. So, basically, especially wealthy women, because you know, as a woman, you, you were wealthy, you didn't have a job, so you, you planned events and it was very popular for people to hold these parties, basically, or get togethers where they'd have writers, really famous people at the time, like August Bartoli who designed and built the Statue of Liberty, and they'd read things. There's a stop on our ghost tour where I point out a house where Edgar Allen Poe read the Raven and the Telltale Heart first allowed it allowed for the first time in public, at a salon.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, salons were just a popular way. It was also the kind of beginnings of the integration of artists being celebrity and the wealthy society. So this is the first time that these two groups are being kind of mixed together.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, artists used to be dirty writers and actors and musicians. They were not good, they were dirty. You know, actually, you know who one of the first, you know who one of the first actors was who made it fancy to be an actor.
Patrick Kelly:Well, was Edwin Booth? Was Edwin Booth?
Nicole Kelly:He was one of the first actors who was considered not trash or prostitute.
Patrick Kelly:I mean, yeah, as far as class goes, you know, actors weren't really seen much higher than prostitutes or people who would work in menial jobs, but with somebody like Edwin Booth, you know, who was a refined classical Shakespearean actor, he starts to hold not just salons but he creates the society club, like the players club, which starts to intermingle. Society and artists and all these people into one space where they you know it's not necessarily the artists are looking for quote-unquote patrons, which is more what I think the salons were doing.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, I mean I talk about this again on the ghost tour. It's very historical, this ghost tour, that back in the day, you know, rich people used to become patrons of artists. They basically pay for their lives and when they became famous they kind of take credit for this. They don't do this anymore, unfortunately. It's more like a sugar daddy situation, I think, as opposed to somebody, just you know, paying for you to live while you write the great American novel.
Patrick Kelly:But I mean, I would be more inclined to be a sugar daddy to somebody who's like creating creating art, yeah, instead of just looking with you, I mean. I mean, yeah, I feel like that's at least a little more productive.
Nicole Kelly:How progressive of you. Patrick, I mean yeah, I feel like you know it's like you're a stage, george, johnny, but they have to be. You know, martha, martha Graham, you know like.
Nicole Kelly:I'll be your stage, george, johnny, if you're Martha Graham. Exactly. So I was growing up in this, you know, and coming of age in this time where art and theater and Poetry are kind of at the pinnacle of New York City. So over the next decade a lot of her poems are being published in something I've never heard of called Lippincott's monthly monthly magazine and something I have heard of called Scribner's, which was a very famous monthly magazine as well. So I've heard of one having heard of the other. So at this time, you know, decades past she's, she's in her like late 20s. At this point she's getting Recognition abroad. In April of 1882 she publishes in the Century magazine. The article was the Earl of Beckinsfield, a Representative Jew. So who she's talking about is a man named Benjamin. Just really. Have you heard of Benjamin? Just really?
Patrick Kelly:I have not.
Nicole Kelly:So Benjamin just really was a British Prime Minister. Okay, he was one of Queen Victoria's Prime Ministers. There is a big chapter about him in that giant book I read a couple years ago about Queen Victoria. Okay and from what I know about him, having not read Emma Lazarus's article, I think no, he was not a representative Jew.
Nicole Kelly:I mean, I can't imagine somebody who holds a position like that in Britain, especially in that era, is like a devout, not in any capacity and I think, like he was born of Jewish parents but then like lie I just looked this up that he was kind of lie. He'd lie about his origins to make himself sound fancy, but he was not religious. He would not, you know, I think, be a good representation of a Jewish person. So I am sure Emma agreed with me on that. Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So she wrote a novel and two plays in five acts, one of which was called the Dance of Death, which is a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of the Jews of Nordhausen during the Black Death. So she's already, like, written an article about Judaism. She's now written a play, and it's really during this time that she starts to become interested in her Jewish roots, because from what I've read, they you know they were Jews in the 1850s and 60s. So they're like what we probably call orthodox they're keeping kosher, they're observing the holidays, but they were not members of a synagogue.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, they're also Sephardic.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, they're Sephardic, but but there would have been a Sephardic synagogue at this time, because the oldest synagogue in New York is a Sephardic synagogue, sheer of Israel right. So they just weren't members of Sheer of Israel, I guess.
Patrick Kelly:Well, and we don't know how you know, they might have been culturally very Jewish, we don't know how.
Nicole Kelly:observant as far as like yeah, but whatever, it is like orthodox ish.
Patrick Kelly:But there's well, and I'm sure, if you are orthodox ish in the middle.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, it's very different. Yeah.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, you're basically Minerally religious.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, I don't even know what that means.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:I think that that the term orthodox is very fluid throughout time, so Lazarus was, so she's a friend. I didn't. I didn't know even what this meant until I started looking up. She was a friend at a my of American political economist, henry George, and she was deeply involved in the georgist, the georgist economic reforms and became active in what was the single tax movement for land value tax, which I think means that regardless of the land value, you paid a single tax.
Patrick Kelly:Make sense.
Nicole Kelly:So this is not something I was familiar with which is kind of interesting. But you know like when you look at her Wikipedia page, it's like she was a Jewish activist and a georgist, so this was clearly like a very big part of her, of her life.
Patrick Kelly:She's living at the height of the gilded age in America. You know there was no income tax at the time. Most of these extremely wealthy People be at the Vanderbilt's, the Rockefellers, the tilled. In all these guys we're making money Untaxed.
Nicole Kelly:I can't imagine what that would have been like, because I don't make that kind of money and I'm always like where's my money going? You know, she again at this time becomes interested in her Jewish ancestry, as she had heard about the pogroms in Russia that followed the assassination of Zahra Alexander II in 1881.
Nicole Kelly:So it's really ironic like side note about the assassination of Zahra Alexander is, to my knowledge he was very like pro-Jewish, so it's very ironic that he gets killed and they start passing all these terrible laws against Jews because he was assassinated as a result of this anti-Semitic violence and the poor standard of living in Russia in general. So we start seeing thousands of destitute Ashkenazi Jews coming from Russia, from an area called the Pale of Settlement in New York and this is where my family comes from and this is, I think, at least on my dad's side when they started coming. It's a little more murky with his family as opposed to my mom's family, who seemed to have come kind of in the early 20th century. So she starts working with these Russian refugees and contact with these people leads her to study the Torah, which in general is kind of not something women are doing in the 1800s. Yeah, not regularly. There's that whole movie.
Nicole Kelly:I mean this was in Russia, but there's that whole movie with Barbara Streisand. You may have watched where well that was the Talmud. I think Was that the Talmud she was studying.
Patrick Kelly:She was studying. Well, she was going to a Yeshiva.
Nicole Kelly:So she would have been studying everything.
Patrick Kelly:So probably Talmud, but also she was probably also studying the Torah and other things.
Nicole Kelly:So in addition to studying Torah which would have been kind of a no-no, I think, for women at this time she's studying Hebrew language, judaism in general and Jewish history. While her early stuff really has no Jewish themes, she writes something in 1882 called the Songs of a Semeit, which is considered the earliest volume of Jewish American poetry. So Emma is a trailblazer in that, which I think is kind of cool. So she begins to advocate for these Jewish immigrants. She gets really, really involved with working with them. She helps establish the Hebrew Technical Institute here in New York and what that does is it provides vocational training to these destitute immigrants who are coming as a way to self-support, and this is something that continues to be very popular.
Nicole Kelly:Well, through the early 20th centuries with the settlement houses you know there's still settlement houses in the Lower East Side Like today. What they do is they'll help people with their immigration paperwork and learn English and things like that. But they were super involved at the time. So it seems like this Hebrew Technical Institute was kind of an early version of that. She also volunteered for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the HIAAS, which also exists today, and the HIAAS was very important at Ellis Island, which I talk about on the tour sometimes, because you know, as you know, you had to have someone you knew in America. So if you don't know, you had to have. We call this a sponsor today. But basically you had to have somebody you knew in the United States, a name and an address.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, you had to have somebody who basically knew you. Typically that was a family member or somebody possibly from your village that you knew came to America years prior. There was probably some sort of correspondence you had with that person, either through letters letting them know that you were on your way, and then basically you would put their name and their address on the paperwork, as you would basically get onto the boat and then eventually be processed through a place like Ellis Island, though I get a lot of guests who constantly ask me well how did they know if you were going to that place and, to be honest, the amount of manpower it would have taken to follow up, with a lot of these jeepo.
Patrick Kelly:Even today, we don't have that kind of manpower.
Nicole Kelly:Well, I think you'd call this a sponsor today and there's a lot more involved with the process. But like, let's say what happened you're going through Ellis Island and you're magically the first person in your village or you don't know anybody. The HIAAS would act as kind of that voucher for you and this was really created. This was created in 1881 as a response specifically for these Russian Jews escaping the Pale of Settlement, and they do exist today. Like I said, in the 70s the US government actually asked them to help with Vietnamese immigrants who were coming over because of the.
Nicole Kelly:Vietnam War. You can do really cool things with them, like write letters to refugees or, if you are a lawyer, you could donate your time. But Emma Lazarus was working with these people and again further kind of integrating herself with these Russian immigrants and learning about their stories.
Patrick Kelly:Well, and again, she is a wealthy woman of the 19th century, so a lot of what they did was charity work. Was charity work and you know her gig.
Nicole Kelly:Basically, her side gig was helping out aid organizations, specifically Jewish organizations, and she actually started her own in 1883, called the Society for the Improvement and Colonization of Eastern European Jews. Now, I'm not a fan of that word colonization, but that's what it was called.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I think she probably meant the relocation.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, but colonization has as we know a very negative connotation.
Patrick Kelly:I don't know. I think that's a term that even within our lifetime, has become more divisive.
Nicole Kelly:I just feel like, especially now, because it's being used as basically a racial slur against Jews, I think it's a little ironic that it was included.
Patrick Kelly:Well, I mean there are a lot of things that get used in one way and then get twisted by, you know, modern interpretation decades later. I don't know. One of my favorite video games of all time is a Sid Meyers game that came out back in like the 80s called colonization. Basically it's kind of like civilization as a video game, but instead you play as either the British or the French or the Dutch or the Spanish and you basically build your little new colony in the new world. It goes through the game and stuff. It's an old, old school eight-bit computer graphic game but it's a lot of fun. I was addicted to it as a kid.
Nicole Kelly:Around this time. She's also writing a lot of just Jewish stuff. She's translating Hebrew poets of medieval Spain. She wrote articles some of them under her name, some of them not under her name on Jewish subjects with a Jewish press, and several of her translations from medieval Hebrew writers found a place in the ritual of American synagogues.
Nicole Kelly:So, they're actually using her translations as part of services, which I think is really cool, especially considering for most of her life she was not a member of a synagogue. Her most notable series of articles was titled An Epistle to the Hebrews, which was basically just a letter to the Hebrews, to the Jews, so she's talking about Jewish problems of the day. She's urging technical and Jewish education for Jews, which is, I think, super important and one of the reasons I think Jews who did come through Ellis Island were able to get themselves out of poverty within a generation or two.
Nicole Kelly:So obviously a lot of people followed this advice and she's starting to become a Zionist at this point she's talking about Jews being an independent nationality and the repartition of Palestine, which is what they used to call what we now call Israel. So she's becoming a Zionist and, for those of you who are curious, the literal definition of a Zionist is somebody who thinks that the Jewish people should have their own state, and that's what that meant at this point.
Patrick Kelly:So yeah, and be self. What's the word Self sustaining?
Nicole Kelly:self, self governing, self governing. You should have like a self governing state, and it should be Israel.
Patrick Kelly:So that is sustainable.
Nicole Kelly:Yes.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So she's doing an article writing at this point. The only poems that she wrote during this period were called Songs of a Semi, the dance to death and other poems which the dance to death sounds very dramatic, and she dedicated this in memory to her friend George Elliott. Okay.
Nicole Kelly:Emma also was a world traveler. She went to Europe twice, the first time in 1883. And then again for two years from 1885 to 1887. I love the people back in the day used to go to Europe for like she died in 1887., yeah, so I'm going to get to that in a second. But I, you know, so I love the people in the 1800s used to just go to Europe for years. So you know Teddy Roosevelt's family when they were moving out of that house.
Nicole Kelly:Next to Gramercy Tavern they were building a new house. So what do you do when you're building a new house? You go on a world tour. Yeah, you just go travel and I wish we had done this on your long honeymoons, like if you read Age of Innocence. A big part of the story is them going over to Europe on this extended honeymoon. So you know it would be not abnormal.
Patrick Kelly:for someone to go. I mean, what else are you going to travel the world? I mean, it's true, it's true.
Nicole Kelly:Well, men used to do this also when they graduated college. They go on their like grand tours and kind of sew their wild oats and do God knows what, for years and years in Europe, and I wish it was more commonplace to take two year trips to Europe. That would be fun. It would be fun, but I don't know what we do with the dogs.
Patrick Kelly:I wish the world was a little. You know you could do that. You could extract yourself for and actually travel and go to places without.
Nicole Kelly:I think the closest thing we did is we went when we went to Europe for 21 days and I feel like that's the longest vacation I'll probably ever take.
Patrick Kelly:I hope we can take a longer vacation. I would say I got a little itchy toward the end of that trip To the end.
Nicole Kelly:And remember, at that last, when we went to Nishvindan, we met those Australians that were starting at the top of Germany and then just working their way down until they got to the bottom of Italy.
Patrick Kelly:Australians travel for like they go on like five week vacations Because they get five week vacations. Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:Because they get that time.
Patrick Kelly:And not only do they get it, it also takes so long to get from Australia to anywhere else in the world that you'd want to see but their vacation rolls over.
Nicole Kelly:So let's say you have five weeks this year and you don't use them. They roll over to next year. And when I had a guest tell me that once I wanted to punch them in the face. And I was like you just leave your work for 10 weeks.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:And we are allowed, legally allowed, to do that.
Patrick Kelly:Must be nice.
Nicole Kelly:So she goes to Europe for a long time like I wish I could, and she is meeting painters, she is introduced to William Morris, she meets with Henry James or Robert Browning, tom X Huxley, she is meeting with kind of the preeminent European minds at the time. Her last book was a collection. It was called Poems in Pros, in 1887. Her complete poems with a memoir appeared in 1888, after she died. So her last trip to Europe, she starts to become very, very sick, and this would have been 1887. So she comes back to New York and she gets very, very sick and she dies two months later, in November. They think now she had Hodgkin's lymphoma, so she had cancer.
Patrick Kelly:I knew she had cancer. I'm always a little if like, I guess.
Nicole Kelly:When they try to diagnose people who died over 100 years ago.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah Well, I'm just murky in general on what type of cancer it was, Like I've always read it might have been uterine cancer. It might have been pancreatic cancer. It might have been Hodgkin's lymphoma. Makes sense.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, A lot of what I've read, it indicates Hodgkin's lymphoma. So she was 38 years old, so she is literally like about my age, but it accomplished a lot in her short life. She never married. Don't put this in, but I have this fan fiction theory that she was a lesbian. Like we're going to write like fan fiction about Emma Lazarus.
Patrick Kelly:Like why can't we put that in?
Nicole Kelly:I don't know. Is it offensive?
Patrick Kelly:No, I mean for a woman of that age. In that era two would never have been married and never have been at least publicly courted. So she never married.
Nicole Kelly:I have this theory because there's really no proof of her having ever been courted or been any sort of relationship that she might have been a lesbian. Maybe that's just kind of how I like to think of Emma, as being like groundbreaking in all capacities.
Patrick Kelly:And again, girl from Greenwich Village living her best life doing the arts, doing kind of avant-garde things for the era that makes sense.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, the poems of Emma Lazarus was published after her death. It compiled most of her poetic work from previous collections, publications from like magazines and things like that.
Patrick Kelly:I believe it's her sisters that put that together right, yeah, so it is.
Nicole Kelly:So what's really upsetting about this and we're going to talk about the new Colossus in a second is she had talked about how she, if she ever had her works published. She wanted that to be in the front because she was most proud of it and it was on like page 300 something. So her sisters were clearly like no, we're just going to do what we want, and that kind of always upset me.
Patrick Kelly:Well, it might have not been the sisters, it could have been the editor, I don't know.
Nicole Kelly:But if somebody's like I want this in the front of my book and it doesn't end up in the front of your book. It's kind of sad. It's not even mentioned in her obituary either.
Patrick Kelly:No, it was not a, it was a blip of her, otherwise you know, prolific life.
Nicole Kelly:Her papers are at the American Jewish Historical Society and the Center for Jewish History, which is here in New York, and her letters are at Columbia University. So now let's get to kind of the main thing that Emma Lazarus is known for, which is the poem the New Colossus. I'm going to spare you, me, reading the New Colossus, and we're going to cut in with somebody who would probably do a more moving rendition of this.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, let's try to find, I'll find somebody interesting.
VO:The New Colossus by Emma Lazarus. 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 worldwide. 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-tossed, to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
Nicole Kelly:So to kind of talk about Emma's legacy, a stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus' poem was issued by Antigua and Barbuda in 1985. In 1992, she was named as a Women's History Month honoree by the National Women's History Project. She was honored by the office of the Manhattanboro President in 2008 and her home on West 10th Street was included on the map of women's rights historic sites. And if you are a ghost tour fan, we actually visit Emma Lazarus' house on the ghost tour.
Patrick Kelly:We do.
Nicole Kelly:She apparently still hangs out there. So if you'd like to see that, you can go to topdogtourscom and book a ghost tour and she also lives next door to one of the most haunted places.
Patrick Kelly:Two doors, two doors down, two doors down from a infamous murder house.
Nicole Kelly:So the fun on that tour is unabound. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame, which seems kind of late to me. I don't know.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I mean there are a lot of women.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, there are a lot of women, basically 50% of the population, mostly yes. So this is one of the quotes that I found that kind of really stood out to me. So her biographer I'm sorry so biographer Esther Shore praised Lazarus' lasting contribution. She says the irony is that the statue goes on speaking even when the tide turns against immigration, even against immigrants themselves as they adjust to their American lives. And you can't think of the statue without hearing the words Emma Lazarus gave her. So I just got chills reading that, because we could do a whole another episode on the Statue of Liberty. You come take our tour, learn about the Statue of Liberty. But it wasn't really built having to do with immigration, but it has been associated with that for so long because of Emma Lazarus.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, emma is really the one that gave the statue the symbolism for immigrants. The statue is literally titled Liberty and Lightning the World and is meant as a physical manifestation of the friendship between the French and the American people, to the point where neither the French government nor the American government actually paid for any of the construction of the Statue of Liberty. There's also a really cool section next to the Statue of Liberty of these little mini statue.
Nicole Kelly:I love those mini statues. That's where I talk about Emma Lazarus when we're on tours.
Patrick Kelly:And there all of the statues are supposed to represent a different person. That kind of gave something to the statue.
Nicole Kelly:You know what I say? This is like my little spiel and I tell all the guys this is Bartol Laboulet, whose idea. It was. Bartoli who built her. He made her stand up. Pylotsu, who fundraised the money for the pedestal, but we have not talked about this person yet. This is Emma Lazarus.
Patrick Kelly:Ironically, that little statue of Emma is one of the only female statues of an actual historical figure in New York City.
Nicole Kelly:There's a lot of statues of females. There's one of Joan of Arc that's like that way towards West End. There's the newer ones of the suffragettes in Central Park, which I actually still have not seen which I'd be interested in seeing, but there aren't a lot of real women because there's like Alice in Wonderland.
Patrick Kelly:Well, they're either mythical characters or they're feelings, like the Statue of Liberty. Even though she's a woman is the embodiment of a feeling and it's very popular.
Nicole Kelly:The idea of a woman representing freedom and liberty is like a 2000 year old idea.
Patrick Kelly:And victory, and all of these concepts are usually female depictions, right yeah, at least within European art. It'd be kind of aggressive if it was a male statue.
Nicole Kelly:I mean there was a male statue I'll talk about in a moment who I always feel like. When I show that picture to people, they laugh.
Patrick Kelly:I think it's kind of neat. You get all of these little statuettes showcasing what these people have done, and everybody in that lineup are people that actually did something for the construction of the statue.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah.
Patrick Kelly:Emma's the only one that gave the statue a point of view and a feeling.
Nicole Kelly:And, as I like to point out, by the time Emma had come back to New York, she was actually too sick to come out and see the statue when it was completed, so it was built while she was in Europe. But she was so sick when she got back she was too ill to come out and make the trip out to what was then Bedelow's Island, so she never saw the Statue of Liberty in person.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah.
Nicole Kelly:Which is the sad irony that she's you know.
Patrick Kelly:I wonder if she saw it from like the boat leaving New York to go to Europe. Maybe she went past it, no because she left in 1885. Well, yeah, but she had to have come back.
Nicole Kelly:I don't know, I don't know.
Patrick Kelly:Maybe she saw it on the way back, I don't know.
Nicole Kelly:I don't know, but as far as she never got to visit it, right, you know what I mean. She never got to see it, and I think it's just so interesting that someone who is so associated with the statue and its story never actually got to set foot on the island. So now let's talk about what Emma is mainly known for. So she wrote a very famous poem called the New Colossus, and this was written as part of a donation for an auction to an art and literary works conducted by the Art Loan Fund exhibition in aid of the Bartoli Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty, which is a mouthful and a terrible name for a non-profit.
Nicole Kelly:So this was to raise money for the pedestal. Yeah, the pedestal went through a huge we could talk about this for 15 minutes, I mean yeah we could talk about it forever, but basically, long story short.
Nicole Kelly:The pedestal went through a very dramatic process of being built and American, a Jewish man named Joseph Pilater actually is the one who finished fundraising the money and again, come take our Statue of Liberty tour if you're interested in this. We will talk about this for hours. So what I didn't know is she initially refused to do this. She said I don't want to donate anything, but her friend, constance Kerry Harrison, convinced her that the statue would be of great significance to immigrants sailing into the harbor, because one of the things that I know for a fact is that they wanted this statue to be one of the first things that people coming in from Europe saw. So it's not necessarily immigration, I think it was just people coming in from Europe in general. They weren't necessarily thinking about immigrants, but it's facing France.
Patrick Kelly:Part of the Statue of Liberty's original meaning wasn't just the friendship between the two. It was kind of a little bit of a statement piece for the people and for the leaders back in France.
Nicole Kelly:So the lines of the poem are inscribed on a bronze plaque which was installed in 1903 on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
Patrick Kelly:Yes, and the plaque was donated by Georgiana Skylar.
Nicole Kelly:Who is the grand niece of Alexander Hamilton, and when I first told you that you're like I don't think that's a real thing, a grand niece, but it is a real thing.
Patrick Kelly:I'm sure it's a real thing, it's a real term, but it's not like you're like, I'm the grand niece. Is it grand niece or great niece?
Nicole Kelly:It's grand niece I think is kind of the same thing as great niece. I'm hoping one of my future guests is going to be a genealogist and we can ask them. We can figure out the difference between a grand and a great and a grand and a great and all those sort of things.
Patrick Kelly:A grandparent, a great grandparent.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, we're going to. We'll discuss all those terms yeah.
Patrick Kelly:Maybe it's the gen number of generations I literally have no idea.
Nicole Kelly:So the new classes was the first entry read at the ex the exhibits opening on November 2nd 1883. It remained associated with the exhibit through a published catalog until the exhibit closed after the pedestal was fully funded in August of 1885. But it was forgotten and basically played no role in the opening of the statue in 1886. It was and I didn't know this published in Joseph Pilzer's New York world as well as the New York times.
Patrick Kelly:I did know that it was published in the newspaper, yeah.
Nicole Kelly:So the title of the poem and the first two lines are a reference to the Greek Colossus of Rhodes, which, for those of you that don't know, was the one of the seven ancient wonders of the world it was. I love pictures of this. It was a gigantic sculpture that was near the entrance to the harbor of Rhodes and it straddled the entrance.
Patrick Kelly:That's some artistic interpretation of it.
Nicole Kelly:But every picture I've seen of this is there's just ships going right through this gentleman's legs and it's very funny.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I mean that may or may not have existed.
Nicole Kelly:I'm going to say it did because I wanted to.
Patrick Kelly:So some historians will argue that the Colossus never actually stood, but if it did stand, it probably was only there for about 40 years.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, this was the third century BC. So because sometimes I'll get guests that are like, well, where is it? Like there's like I didn't see it in Greece, and I'm like, well, it's been gone for a little bit of time.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, there was an earthquake, supposedly that got rid of it. And then there's a lot of argument if it ever actually existed. Some people will claim they found what the foundations of the Colossus might have been in the harbor there, but we're not really sure it's kind of the question I'm going to say it existed and that it was a gentleman who was naked, straddling the entrance to the harbor.
Patrick Kelly:Which would have been hot because and if you ever played God of War II, that is who you battle in the opening scene is the Colossus of Rhodes. Seriously, yeah, zeus uses his powers to.
Nicole Kelly:Embodied oh geez.
Patrick Kelly:And then he has to battle Kratos throughout the throughout this whole fight sequence and then Kratos like rips it apart. But it's pretty epic.
Nicole Kelly:Well, maybe you'll have to show me, like a YouTube video of somebody playing that that sounds interesting.
Nicole Kelly:So she's contrasting the ancient symbol of grandeur and empire and the line to the brazen giant of Greek fame with the new Colossus which is the Statue of Liberty, and she's the female embodiment commanding maternal strength, where that's why she's calling her mother of exiles. So we're going to continue in a sea wash sunset. The sea I. This is stuff I didn't necessarily know. So the sea wash sunset gates are the mouths of the Hudson and East Rivers, which are to the west of Brooklyn. The imprisoned lightning refers to the electric light of the torch, which was a big novelty back then. So the torch back in the day actually used to light up because the Statue of Liberty was under the light house administration until 1903.
Patrick Kelly:Close. It was actually 1902. And the original torch has glass paneling and you can go. If you go to Liberty Island today, inside of the museum it's on display. You can actually see the original torch. The one that sits there on the statue today was installed in the 1980s and has gold leafing for the flame. But because it was originally part of the lighthouse commission, they thought that these bright, beaming lights would stretch out of the statue.
Nicole Kelly:The bright beaming lights were from light bulbs which were not strong in the 1880s. I always wonder why they didn't use fire, which is or reflective?
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I don't understand why.
Nicole Kelly:I don't know who knows they were probably like the light bulb. It is. It is a new novelty. This is very exciting.
Patrick Kelly:It was exciting, but it looked like it disembodied, had an arm floating in the harbor, so it didn't work out. But you can see it now.
Nicole Kelly:One of my favorite things to do when we fly into JFK is to look out to see the Statue of Liberty. I actually tried to get a picture from the plane but you couldn't see it. So, because I know the harbor very well, I always like to look and see the Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island when we fly into New York. The air bridge harbor, that Twin Cities, that Twin Cities frame, refers to New York harbor between New York and Brooklyn, which at that time were separate cities when the poem was written, because New York didn't consolidate until 1898.
Nicole Kelly:So they would have been literally separate cities at that time, 1898. 1898. Yeah, the huddled masses obviously refers to the large number of immigrants arriving in the US in the 1880s, coming through New York. As we talked about earlier, emma was an advocate for these people, specifically the Russian immigrants, so I did not know this. The plaque is not actually 100% accurate to the poem, so the plaque the plaque which is now inside the Statue of Liberty.
Nicole Kelly:If you go to Liberty Island. The one that's in the museum is a replica, so most of the artifacts in the museum are replicas.
Patrick Kelly:But they don't tell you that, yeah, they don't tell you that they do look very close to the real thing. Most of the actual artifacts that used to sit in the museum all sit in a warehouse in Delaware somewhere, and it's mainly because of Hurricane Sandy. There is a lot of fear that some sort of natural disaster will happen out there again and it'll just destroy all the artifacts.
Nicole Kelly:Which is a valid concern. Yeah, because some of them aren't actually on the list, but the original plaque is still inside the Statue.
Patrick Kelly:It is inside the Statue.
Nicole Kelly:It's inside the pedestal Inside the pedestal. So apparently the line keep ancient lands comma, your storied pump exclamation point. It's missing a comma on the plaque and this is also.
Patrick Kelly:The grammar nerd's out there.
Nicole Kelly:And for you fact, people. The plaque is also described as an engraving. It's actually a casting. So we're getting super, super specific here.
Patrick Kelly:Right.
Nicole Kelly:John T Cunningham wrote that the Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under the torch and the shining face heading towards Ellis Island. However, it was Lazarus' poem that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants.
Patrick Kelly:I mean, I try to imagine what it would be like being on a ship like that coming from Europe. If you've ever seen images of these boats that are horribly overcrowded, people are packed onto these decks looking.
Nicole Kelly:There's no private rooms, there's no toilets, there's no showers. Your food's disgusting. You've spent probably a couple weeks traveling by train and then on a boat.
Patrick Kelly:And you're suddenly your first real witness coming into America, your first, your first, your first experience, yeah, Is seeing this thing that's probably bigger than anything you've ever seen in the world, you know, greeting you as you sail into New York Harbor. I mean that's horribly impactful. I can't think of an image that would have stirred more emotion than that in that moment.
Nicole Kelly:I agree. I mean, I like to joke. You know I've been there literally and this is not an exaggeration hundreds of times, but there are times where you know I am emotional, you know I think about my great grandparents and my great great grandparents escaping literal death in Europe trying to make a better life for themselves, and then seeing this giant welcoming woman. You know, and at this point the poem would have been well known, Right.
Nicole Kelly:So it is very powerful, and I do have people who get very emotional when they go, and I just think it's really lovely that this poem that this woman didn't even want to write has become so closely associated with this that she is now, you know, a symbol that is used for and against immigration. There's some art that they have in the museum, which kind of displays both.
Patrick Kelly:I think one of the ironies of the Statue of Liberty is, even before she was completed, she was used in marketing campaigns as advertisements for everything from bicycles to war bonds, to anything and everything.
Nicole Kelly:It's not anybody's intellectual property. Yeah.
Patrick Kelly:Nobody owns the actual imagery of the Statue of Liberty, so it's something that's free use. Yeah, so it's been used in a lot of different things over the years, some of them positive, some of them negative. A lot of political ads over the years.
Nicole Kelly:So what is the impact in modern day of this? So the last lines of the sonnet were set to music by Irving Berlin, who himself was an immigrant, as the song Give Me You're Tired, give Me You're Poor for the 1949 musical Miss Liberty, which is basically about the creation of the Statue of Liberty. So I have kind of a personal story about this, which I'm sure you remember. So in February of 2018, city Center Encorez did a show called hey, look Me Over, which was like hey, you remember this. I do yeah, it was a federal concert.
Nicole Kelly:It was like a stage. It was a review show of songs from less produced shows.
Patrick Kelly:So things like Mac and Mabel Songs or shows you might not have been super familiar with. We, of course, were overly familiar with all those shows.
Nicole Kelly:You were like, oh, I love this, so hey, Look Me Over. The name comes from a song from Wildcat, which was actually a show Lucille Ball did.
Patrick Kelly:Which was my first audition song as a kid.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, I know that's one of the reasons I wanted to go. So they closed the show with this song from Miss Liberty and basically I, like everybody, started singing and we were both crying. It was very emotional because 2018 was a very tumultuous time in American politics, and I feel like it was very cathartic to be able to sing this song with other people. So I feel like I just like that story. I don't know how to end that.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, it was one of those magical theater moments.
Nicole Kelly:So it was just. It's just a testament to the fact that something that some that was written so long ago can still be so powerful.
Patrick Kelly:Well, in everything, berlin wrote some of the most iconic Americana songs of all time. Not just Give Me your Tired or Poor, but also God Bless America and other sorts of iconic Americana music.
Nicole Kelly:So the poem was read in and I didn't know this in the 1941 film film Hold Back the Dawn, as well, as recited by the heroine in Alfred Hitchcock's wartime film Saboteur, which I don't know if I've seen, so now I have to watch it. It was also quoted in JFK's book A Nation of Immigrants.
Patrick Kelly:Very cool.
Nicole Kelly:Joan Baez used the second half of the poem. This is very dark in her lyrics to the Ballad of Seiko and Vanzetti, part one Jesus, I know which is part of the soundtrack of the 1971 Italian film Seiko and Vanzetti, which is based on the surrounding trial and the execution of anarchist Seiko and Vanzetti. If you've never heard of the Seiko and Vanzetti trial, you need to look this up. It's very interesting. This again, I think, something Patrick and I could talk about for 15 minutes.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, I mean, the Italian immigration was the way we were talking about, the way that, I would say, modern people, especially in the news and in certain portions of our government today, are talking about immigrants coming from south of the border or post-911 immigrants who are coming from the Middle East. Are the ways that we were talking about Italians prior to the 1920s.
Nicole Kelly:This was a very influential trial in American history. If you are a true crime fan, please Google this. I think you'll find it interesting.
Patrick Kelly:Well, and kind of, the big question mark in history is were they traitors or not? Patrick White, this is why, we could talk about this for 15 minutes.
Nicole Kelly:I've read the yes, they do believe that at least one of them was guilty. Yeah, I went down like a rabbit hole of Wikipedia and articles on this, probably like a year or two ago, and they were like, yeah, they probably did this. I don't want to.
Patrick Kelly:Well, there's again. It's a question mark. I mean, that's one of those things. No, we don't know.
Nicole Kelly:For sure it was yeah there was a lot of racial bias that was involved, but a lot of historians do believe that at least one of them, if not both of them, were actually guilty. Okay, so this fun fact is just for you, Patrick. Okay so the poem is recited by BJ Blatskowitz at the end of the 2014 video game Wolfenstein A New Order.
Patrick Kelly:That is true. Yes.
Nicole Kelly:It is also the subtitle of the sequel Wolfenstein II the New Colossus.
Patrick Kelly:It is the subtitle of that. Yeah, so can you tell our?
Nicole Kelly:listeners what Wolfenstein is and why we're laughing.
Patrick Kelly:Okay, so well. Wolfenstein's an old game. It's actually one of the first.
Nicole Kelly:It's from 2014.
Patrick Kelly:Well, no, the original Wolfenstein is from 1992, and the original it predates the video game Doom. It was made by the same studio, I believe, but the game was really the first true first person shooter game. You've told me that. And the plot of Wolfenstein is basically you're an American POW during World War II and you're caught in Castle Wolfenstein and you basically have to escape the castle by killing a bunch of Nazis.
Nicole Kelly:Yeah, I remember you were playing the one from 2014 at one point and I just hear people screaming in German, so I came in through and I'm like what are you playing?
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, so they've made a number of remakes of the game over the years and then continuations of the game. The more modern version of the game is you're this character, blazkowicz, who is of Jewish descent I believe, polish Jewish descent and the game basically starts as, again, you're an American spy, don't you have to assassinate Hitler, right yeah, the original mission is to kill Hitler or to kill the evil scientist that is creating these Nazi abominations to win the war effort.
Patrick Kelly:And it does take place in the parallel history, where the Nazis have the power of creating zombie soldiers oh. I mean, they were monsters robots and all of these crazy, over the top video game-esque things. But there are a number of these games as you continue through, but eventually Blazkowicz gets basically sent into the future, and so it's in a era where Nazis won the war and have conquered the world, but he has still this kind of Is it as crazy as whatever that?
Nicole Kelly:what was that TV show?
Patrick Kelly:It does definitely-.
Nicole Kelly:What was that TV show man in the High Castle? Yeah, I read the book, but I never watched the TV show.
Patrick Kelly:It is definitely parallels a lot of that same kind of imagery. And Wolfenstein II, the new Colossus, takes place in the United States, where the first game is in. Germany well takes place in Europe, I think in France and Germany.
Nicole Kelly:Okay, so the second game is kind of this alternate universe where the Germans won.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, so it takes place in basically 1960s America, but in an alternate world where the Nazis won, and Blazkowicz is now in 60s United States run by the Nazis, and there's a moment in the game where he goes to an all-American town and walking down the street are a group of KKK members, as like they're still kind of hanging out as like a society within Nazi-controlled Germany during this time, so Nazi-controlled United States during this time. So there's a lot of like interesting, weird parallel stuff. In the second game there's a part where you meet Hitler and you're trying to be an actor.
Nicole Kelly:I remember this.
Patrick Kelly:I watched you play this, he's kind of crazy and you're having to audition for the role that Hitler's directing and moving.
Nicole Kelly:I remember this this is bananas.
Patrick Kelly:It's a really crazy over-the-top game but I think big guns, big adventure sort of stuff it's very violent. If you're not, if that makes you a little queasy, I don't recommend playing a Wolfenstein game. But it definitely pokes fun at the idea of Nazism and the character is canonically Jewish. So there's a lot of moments where he's like, basically I'm going to go and kill some Nazis and I'm pretty unapologetically Jewish. There is a point where you go through a concentration camp. There's a lot of different stuff in the game.
Nicole Kelly:So I don't know how to segue to this last thing, so maybe we can come up with something and you can splice it in. In 2019, during the Trump administration, ken Cuccinelli, whom Trump appointed as acting director of the US citizenship and immigration services, revised the poem in support of Trump's administration's public charge rule to reject applicants for visas or green cards on the basis of income or education.
Patrick Kelly:What do you mean? He revised the power, so he changed it.
Nicole Kelly:He said give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge. He later suggested that the huddled masses were European and downplayed the poem as it was. This is what we remember, not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty. Now I remember when this happened you were like actually we're watching like MSNBC or something, and you're like that's not true. And I was like you are correct that it's not true. So it's important, when you're making statements as a politician about history, to know your history. It's just it's. It is what it is, and I think it's also just it's kind of disgusting.
Nicole Kelly:Don't pervert a classical poem to make a political statement, when it was written to be the exact opposite.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah, like that's. That's just kind of gross right.
Nicole Kelly:I hope that he visited the ghost. He visited Tenshtree and the ghost of Emma Lazarus haunts him.
Patrick Kelly:Yeah right, I will say this. I usually end my Statue of Liberty speech on the island talking about how the statue wasn't originally conceived as a symbol for immigrants, but it did become that very quickly after its creation and this poem added to it and, like all good art, it continues to evolve its meaning over time. And I think one of the great things about the Statue of Liberty today, and really Emma's poem, is that it's not just for America anymore. It's truly a symbol for everywhere in the world. Today, the Statue of Liberty is a world UNESCO site and it's meant to be the symbol for liberty and freedom and for people all around the world who are kind of striving and wanting these things. Hence why you go to the Statue of Liberty today. You see thousands of people from different countries, different languages, different cultures, different backgrounds, all coming in awe of the structure, which is pretty cool.
Nicole Kelly:So we have to end because our toddler is walking around like a drunken sailor. She's half asleep, but it has been actually really great to talk about a subject that I already knew a lot of. There you go. So it's actually been really great to talk about a subject that I already knew a lot about, but then also learn at the same time and share that with you guys. So, like I said, if you find yourself in the New York area and are interested in learning more about the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island which we will obviously do an episode about at some point you can book a private Statue of Liberty tour. Go to daddy. Go to daddy. You can book a private Statue of Liberty tour with us by going to topdogtourscom. So we're going to end with that song I talked about, written by Irving Berlin. This has been Nicole Kelly and this is Shebrew in the city. Beside the golden door.
VO:There you go. Oh, save this. The homeless man has come to me. I live my land beside the golden door. I live my land beside the golden door.
