Mothers of Exile — Emma Lazarus and Lady Liberty

This Mother’s Day program pays tribute to the twin “mothers of exile” — the poet Emma Lazarus and the Statue of Liberty.

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Esther Schor
Esther Schor is the Leonard L. Milberg ’53 Professor of American Jewish Studies at Princeton. Her 2006 biography Emma Lazarus won the National Jewish Book Award. Her poems include The Hills of Holland and Strange Nursery: New and Selected Poems; she is a co-author of Poems for Sarra, a bilingual collection about the Venetian intellectual Sarra Copia Sullam. A specialist in British romanticism, her scholarship includes Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria and The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Her most recent book is Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, a cultural history/memoir of the Esperanto movement, and she is currently writing a biography of the philosopher Horace M. Kallen.

Edward Berenson
Edward Berenson is professor of history at NYU and the author of The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story. He is a cultural historian specializing in the history of modern France and its empire, with additional interests in the history of Britain, the British Empire, and the United States. He is the author of The Accusation: Blood Libel in an American Town, which examines the lone case of a ritual murder accusation against American Jews, and the forthcoming Levittown International: Suburbanization in the Postwar World. Berenson received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award as well as UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2006, French President Jacques Chirac decorated him as Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite.

Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel is the author of three books of poetry and five books of fiction. Her fourth book of poems, Paradise, was published in February 2022. She is a recipient of numerous awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim and the NEA, and her work has been widely awarded, anthologized and translated into ten languages. Redel’s novel Loverboy was adapted for a feature film that premiered at Sundance and was directed by Kevin Bacon. She has taught at Columbia University, Davidson College, Vermont College of Fine Arts and is on the Sarah Lawrence College faculty.