It was a century ago this year that Israel Zangwill’s iconic play “The Melting Pot” was first staged in New York. Hailed by President Theodore Roosevelt as the quintessential expression of the American spirit, the play celebrated America as the “crucible” that would melt away all Old World hatreds and rivalries.
As I contemplated the election of Barack Obama, I could not help thinking of Zangwill’s play. To be sure, Zangwill was at best ambiguous about whether the American melting pot might include African Americans. He includes “yellow and black” in the crucible, but he also raises doubts in an afterword as to whether blacks would be assimilated into America. Yet, at its core, the play certainly affirms the vision of America as open to all, a paradise of pluralism.
Since Jews are the protagonists of “The Melting Pot,” the play also serves as a springboard for thinking about what Obama’s election and Obama as symbol might mean for Jews today. Zangwill explicitly compares the suffering of Jews in the pogroms of Russia with the contemporaneous lynchings of African Americans in the South. The now-frayed black-Jewish alliance often rested on this comparison: Jews felt called upon to take up the cause of their African-American compatriots since Jews, too, had been slaves in the land of Egypt.
The collapse of this alliance — whose original dimensions have perhaps been exaggerated — with the rise of Black Power, social and economic tensions in the inner cities and clashes over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a story too long to be told here. But with Jews having voted for Obama more disproportionately — at 78% — than did any other ethnic or religious group save African Americans, perhaps the time is now ripe to re-weave the fabric of the old alliance.
Yet while Obama’s identity as a black American is significant, so is the fact that he is the product of an interracial union — or a “mutt,” as he jokingly put it at his first post-election press conference. Indeed, he has been remarkably forthright about his hybrid origins. In his Philadelphia speech on race, he discussed his own conflicted feelings as a black grandson hearing his beloved white grandmother voice racist opinions. But by evoking his mother’s Kansas roots, he was able to build a bridge to white voters.
Obama’s mixed background led him to deliberately choose an African-American identity. Since his father was Kenyan, his identification with African Americans, whose ancestors came to America as West African slaves, was as much an act of self-invention as it was a given. His choices reflect the malleability of identity in America.
Our president-elect’s hybrid identity raises questions that are familiar from the last hundred years of Jewish history, but puts them in a new light. Can one affirm a minority identity while belonging at the same time to the majority? Does intermarriage mean the melting away of old belongings or, instead, the possibility of choosing to belong to more than one home? The old Jewish debate between universalism and particularism may have found a new expression, not from a Jewish source, but from a black one.
Which brings us back to “The Melting Pot.” The plot of the play revolves around the romance of a young Russian Jew with the daughter of a Russian nobleman (a general who commanded the Russian troops during the Kishinev pogrom at that!). For Zangwill, himself intermarried, America promised to allow affairs of the heart across religious and ethnic boundaries. The essence of the melting pot was not just formal integration but genetic recombination.
On one level, such mixing of populations might seem to presage the end of cultural and religious identities: The crucible, says Zangwill, was swallowing up German and Frenchman, Jews and Russians, turning them into “the American.” But the play also hints that such identities might still be preserved, because in America identity itself is flexible. The hero of the play never gives up his Jewish identity; America becomes more Jewish as the Jews become American. Thus, the Jewish family’s Irish maid, who denounces their religious practices in antisemitic terms, ends up speaking Yiddish and celebrating Purim.
Jewish life is dramatically different in today’s America than it was when Zangwill wrote his play. Then, Jews were a compact ethnic group, living in their own neighborhoods and still the targets of intense discrimination. To imagine the melting pot then was prophetic — or foolhardy.
Obama’s electoral triumph testifies to present-day America’s remarkable tolerance of racial, ethnic and religious difference — a tolerance that stems, in no small part, from the increasing fluidity of these very categories. While a multicultural society of mixed and fluid identities certainly represents a challenge to traditional forms of Jewish self-definition, it also offers Jews tremendous opportunities.
Today, Jews are an integral part of the political and cultural elite; the top political adviser and future chief of staff to the nation’s first black president are both Jews. Can a Jewish president — or perhaps even a black-Jewish president — be far behind? If the Jewish wager on America was for a cosmopolitan, melting pot society, it is a bet that Jews have won.
David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author, most recently, of “Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians” (University of California Press).
America is not a multicultural society - certainly not for its Jewish population. "Multicultural" means a society in which different cultures flourish side by side. The main expression of culture is surely one's language. The loss of one's language and the adoption of someone else's is not a multicultural reality. Actually, many American Jews use the term "acculturation" (instead of "assimilation") in order to describe the sociological process that occurred during the last century. To take on someone else's culture or to assimilate into someone else's society is not a multicultural phenomemon, obviously. In addition to language, education is also a key element in defining cultural affinity. The education of American Jews, just like their newly adopted American English language, is essentially no different than the education of others in America. Now, it is true that the American population is of "multi-descent" - but that should not be confused with culture. The Yiddish-speaking Jews who arrived in America a century ago would be regarded by their great-great-grandchildren of today as complete foreigners. Jewish identity in American has collapse. The Jews' success as Americans is obvious, but their failure in maintaining a "multicultural" reality in which a distintive Jewish identity is obvious is a dismal failure.
THE ROLE OF AMERICAN JEWS IN THE OBAMA ERA This commentary brings peace to my heart, for I had lived through the years of the JEWISH LED AND FUELED civil rights movement and just could not lose faith. Yeah, a lot of cynical rabbis and liberal politicos saw a power base they could pirate for their not-quite-American causes, but most Jews saw the 2008 presidential election as their duty to provide for their fellow Americans-- black ones-- what was provided for them through most of American history: equality. Some Jews milked the welfare system and exploited blacks, but that was not because they were Jews, for most Jews fought, losing a lot-- even life-- and gaining nothing but the satisfaction that, this time, as Jews, instead of cowering silently as they had done as a community when European Jews in the 1930s were turned back by the State Dept. to die in the Holocaust, they, this time in the 1950s-60s civil rights struggle, spoke up, stood up, were often slaughtered or pummeled like lambs, but never fell back from saving the honor of their Jewish parents that had during the 1930s quivered self-servingly in silence while European Jews that often were distant family relatives faced the full brunt of Nazi evil with no refuge. I am a Christian refugee from the second Holocaust, Stalin's. And, with me came my East European Jewish mentors, twice Holocaust survivors and again refugees, charged with the task of mentoring me into adulthood (like many others, without ever having a childhood) by my parents. This time, they came in like me as "desirable immigrants." Their skills were wanted, now that they were escaping Communism, not rejected as when they sought to escape Nazism. By the time we shared an over a decade long refugee trajectory to what they and my dad called "THE PARADISE OF FREEDOM," their superior scholarly skills were very much wanted by America. They were the prototype Jews I believe in to this day: serene, never hating and never kvetching about their suffering through Nazism because the West forced the Great Lady in the NY Harbor to lower her arm and bar them from refuge. When I got here, I despised Americans and America. Yet, it was the NYC Jewish community that took charge of me once I left Harlem (where I lived long enough to resent the stupid conceptual (like Europeans) ethno-racism of Americans that was devoid of the seeing each man as himself (as even racio-ethnic Europeans were prone to). It was these devout anti-Communist Jews who taught me not to dismiss the civil rights movement cause because of some Communists in it and to keep my eye on the prize: equality and justice for ALL Americans. It was American Jews who taught me to love America and have faith in it, despite its flaws, for these were temporary warts, there only while good people don't struggle to make the hidden-good people inside every American see what their ethno-racism is doing to the goodness of their nation. Sooooo, am I surprised that 78% of Jews voted for Obama: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, never! I have three American children and four American grandchildren, all because American Jews taught me, as John McCain would say: to never surrender, to never give up because America is truly great. I had spent years in unity with the neocons because, without them, I felt all alone in my "meaningful dialogue" with Communism (something that could never have happened without the patriotic struggle of a NYC Jew and Communist at UC Berkeley, Betina Aptheker). Victorious, she dropped her call for a Red Revolution and chose to champion "meaningful dialogue" instead. She was indeed the bright star of the FSM Student Movement of the 60s. But the neocons were simply Leninists who changed sides to the Right. Tactically, they stayed Leninist polarizers, they are incapable of the traditional American Great Compromise because their real issue is whether they can be considered "mensch"-- and they stupisly think that real mensch never compromise. They had a "negro problem" because they had been cowared and beated by young blacks in their youth. Now, as white haired politicos, they peddle themselves as the sole spokesmen of American Jews. They pumelted Obama as a Muslim "schwartza" and slandered him every which way. Media believed that they indeed are the voice of the Jews. But me, raised by Jews that made me love America, I knew that the vast majority of Jews had no mensch-hood problem and no cash retainers from the military-industrial complex. I knew that they cared deeply for Israel, as I care for Romania, but that they are AMERICANS FIRST. Yes, I do beleive in that "special relationship" with Israel that I had borne it in my heart ever since my first encounter with Israel through Habonim. But I feared that a mix of political power for the yahoo Right in the name of Jesus (only as a cover) and catastrophic economic times would bring forth an anti-Semitic backlash to the skulldugery of the neocons. I thought they might stampede Jews in fear of the neocons' "negro problem." STUPID ME...no such thing! Jews once again proved their conviction and courage to stand up as Americans and look a man INTO his character instead of ONTO his skin. I should have never feared, forgive me, for I never feared that Jesus would abandon me and he too is a Jew. Let us now hope that Jews will continue in their historic mission to bring out the best in America. Jews must move us away from practicing ethno-racism to away from celebration ignorance. Jews must now work to save the children of their America from pride in imbecility. Jews must double, ney triple, their historic effort to educate Americans in science, philosophy, the quest for truth and out of this "shop till we drop" Bushi-t blind consumerist arrogance. Disproportionately, Jews are our teachers, and like Dr. Weinstein, who decades ago taught me to love geometry and the quadratic equasion, they must be the pedagogues of America's Green Revolution. Your quest never stops, even though the appreciation is sparce and the rewards are few. But you've always given ten times what you got in return, and that has made you stand tall when you face God. Don't stop...keep going when you hear the dogs bark, keep going.... when you hear the guns fire, keep going.... and when you see the torches of ignorant rage, keep going, keep going...for that's what God-- as he put Obama on Earth-- put you on earth to do. I hope I can work with you, now as an old man, as successfully as I argued with you all these years (I seemed to often be the 7th opinion in a room of six Jews). Israel will be fine and will be "a light onto the [Arab] nations." What needs saving now from the Rovian Gobbles-like disease of politics is Jews to fight to bring our political discourse back to the hope and dedication of youth it was at under JFK so that it may again rise, this under the black JFK Obama with your help, the American Jews.
Yehuda, You are mistaken. "The Yiddish-speaking Jews who arrived in America a century ago would" NOT "be regarded by their great-great-grandchildren of today as complete foreigners." THINGS CHANGE. Throughout Jewish history, there has been change, and the Jew has kept the Jewish heart, and always will.
Would you call all the ultra-Orthodox in a America a failure? I chose them because they have the most "overt" Jewish identities but they obviously identify as Americans, as American Jews. And they go on speaking their Yiddish, their Hebrew and their English.
Yes and the current "war on terror" that is going on is just as it appears?
It is no coincidence that as the jews have gained power, and used the other minorities to increasse their leverage in american politics, america is fighting israels war against islam.
That is probably the real reason for all of this, and not any noble cause. If it was about equality,and human rights, why not do the same for palistinians? They have not changed. But they have changed america for their own benifit.
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