Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot

The term “Melting Pot” describes a model of ethnic relations in which a nation-state's constituent ethnic groups engage in a process of reciprocal fusion. The phrase entered popular parlance with such élan that its origins still remain unknown and obscure to most people. Although one might safely attribute the wide-spread dissemination of the idea to Israel Zangwill, the Anglo-Jewish Zionist-turned-assimilationist, similar references had already been made by writers like J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederick Jackson Turner who used the crucible as a persistent metaphor in the building of America’s national identity (Wang 99). But it was Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot (1908) that ingrained the image in public consciousness as the key definition of America, thereby generating far-reaching repercussions as evidenced by the New York Herald-Tribune citation which read, “Seldom has an author so molded thought by the instrumentality of a single phrase” (Novick 9).
Often regarded as ‘the Dickens of the ghettos’, Israel Zangwill is a pre-eminent Anglo-Jewish author and political visionary born of immigrant parents in Whitechapel, London, an East End ghetto inhabited …show more content…
Unlike the trivial grounds of family feud between the houses of Montague and Capulet in Shakespeare’s epic love story, here the Jewish and Cossack families are polarized by centuries of Anti-Semitism. David, the young virtuoso violinist and composer hailing from the Jewish Quixano family and Vera, the rebellious and free spirited elite of the Christian Revendal family represent the young generation’s attempt to escape the shackles of racial identity and become universal citizens. Their twin journeys – away from their roots and towards assimilation in the new country of America – mark the fulcrum of the