Emma Lazarus (1849-1887) was born in New York City to a wealthy family and educated by private tutors. She began writing poetry as a teenager and took up the cause — through both poetry and prose — against the persecution of Jews in Russia during the 1880s. Her sonnet “The New Colossus” was engraved on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in 1886, memorializing the famous lines, “Give me your tired, your poor,/Your huddled masses....”