Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women's Clubs
EMMA LAZARUS FEDERATION OF JEWISH WOMEN’S CLUBS. Named for the Jewish poet whose lines are inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, the Emma Lazarus Federation (ELF) was founded in 1951, rising from the ashes of the Women’s Division of the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order of the International Workers Order when McCarthyism liquidated that organization. Under the dynamic leadership of June Gordon (1901–1967) and, from 1967, of Rose Raynes (1903–1994), the federation developed a program of cultural and sociopolitical activism.
ELF commissioned and sponsored the publication of Eve Merriam’s biography (1956) of Emma Lazarus (1849–1887) and Yuri Suhl’s biography (1959) of Ernestine L. Rose (1810–1892), and kept in print into its fifth edition (1982) Morris U. Schappes’s Selections from the Prose and Poetry of Emma Lazarus (1944). In 1955 the ELF also published Aaron Kramer’s translation of Yiddish poems by Morris Rosenfeld (1862–1923).
In 1957 ELF established the Emma Lazarus Day Nursery for working mothers in Jaffa (now Tel Aviv) and became a founder of the Museum of Immigration in the Statue of Liberty. ELF’s several thousand members nationwide in the 1950s and 1960s campaigned on behalf of the foreign born, civil rights, women’s rights, child welfare, and consumer protection. ELF stressed opposition to the nuclear arms race and favored a political solution to the Palestine-Israel conflict that would guarantee Israel’s security and Palestinian national rights. By 1989, ELF, having failed to attract younger women to its ranks, had closed its national office, with clubs continuing in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Chicago. By the late 1990s, the only ELF still functioning was in Los Angeles.
Further reading
Antler, Joyce. “Between Culture and Politics: The Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women’s Clubs and the Promulgation of Women’s History, 1944–1989.” In U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, edited by Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Emma Lazarus Federation of Jewish Women Clubs. Papers. 1921-1989. Manuscript Collection No. 583. Finding Aid. American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Hutchins, Grace. Women Who Work. New York: International Publishers, 1952.