How A Century-Old Play Refuted Identity Politics: “The Melting-Pot” by Israel Zangwill
How A Century-Old Play Refuted Identity Politics: “The Melting-Pot” by Israel Zangwill
The greatest play you've never read, with a message that's been actively suppressed.
The American “Melting-Pot” is a concept you may remember learning about in school. In short, it describes the process by which immigrants from various cultures can “melt” into a more homogeneous culture over time. Once broadly considered a core virtue of the American ideal, this concept has been under attack for decades. Alternative models such as the “Salad Bowl” or “Mosaic” have been put forward to replace it. Intended to represent multiculturalism, those metaphors visualize distinct cultures co-existing in the same space to form a greater whole.
Both models have some descriptive value, but the war between them is primarily a moral one. Should we value the give and take of cultural exchange that leads many to give up the distinctiveness of their ancestor’s cultures, but promises a better shared culture that has adopted all the best traits of its inputs? Or should we instead preserve the distinctiveness of historic cultures, preferring to find meaning in that which makes groups unique and different?
Few contemporary critics of the Melting-Pot have looked deeply into why exactly the idea first became so overwhelmingly popular and ingrained itself as a beloved American virtue. And one need not look far to understand. The term was first popularized by a 1908 play of the same name; its beauty and brilliance clearly demonstrate the tragedy of this great work of literature’s near complete disappearance from the American canon over the 115 years since its release.
The archetype of the black sheep is typically used to discuss individuals who maintain distinct views and distinct identities from a bigger group. But The Melting-Pot is prescient in telling the story of a type of black sheep that has regained relevance in a time of “special snowflakes” obsessed with their identities: the black sheep who goes against the small, tightly-knit group in the interest of joining something larger.
The Melting-Pot was written by British-Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill. Zangwill’s parents lived in the Russian Empire, then known for its segregation of Jewish and Christian citizens, and its frequent and brutal pogroms (ethnic massacres) by the latter against the former. The 1921 publication of the play’s script includes an appendix with an account of the 1905 Odessa pogrom from a nurse who witnessed it.
I do wish a few Americans could have been there to see, and they would know what America is, and what it means to live in the United States. It was not enough for them to open up a woman's abdomen and take out the child which she carried, but they took time to stuff the abdomen with straw and fill it up. Can you imagine human beings able to do such things? I do not think anybody could, because I could not imagine it myself when a few years before I read the news of the massacre in Kishineff, but now I have seen it with my own eyes. It was not enough for them to cut out an old man's tongue and cut off his nose, but they drove nails into the eyes also. You wonder how they had enough time to carry away everything of value—money, gold, silver, jewels—and still be able to do so much fancy killing.
The “massacre in Kishineff” took place just two years before Odessa and was a pogrom of particular historic significance. That pogrom was part of what inspired Zangwill to write The Melting-Pot, and it plays a key role in its story.
Spoilers for The Melting-Pot follow. The script has long since entered the public domain, and is available to read for free. Although 115 years old, even today the play is a short, worthwhile, easy read, and its relevance to contemporary America endures.
The Melting-Pot’s main character, David Quixano, narrowly survived Kishineff, where his parents and sister were brutally murdered before his eyes. Following their death, he traveled to New York in a boat’s cramped, disgusting, freezing, steerage class to live in New York City with his uncle Mendel and grandmother Frau in a small, shabby, home. Although traumatized by his past, David’s joie de vivre is overwhelming. David enters the play coming inside from a storm yet happily singing “My Country ‘tis of Thee” and asking, “Isn’t it a beautiful world, uncle?”
David is thankful for America to a comic degree. A violinist, the plot starts with David getting asked by second-lead Vera Ravendel to play a concert for the immigrants living at the settlement house where she works. In his response, we first see the endearing intensity of his worldview.
DAVID
A fee! I'd pay a fee to see all those happy immigrants you gather together—Dutchmen and Greeks, Poles and Norwegians, Welsh and Armenians. If you only had Jews, it would be as good as going to Ellis Island.
VERA [Smiling]
What a strange taste! Who on earth wants to go to Ellis Island?
DAVID
Oh, I love going to Ellis Island to watch the ships coming in from Europe, and to think that all those weary, sea-tossed wanderers are feeling what I felt when America first stretched out her great mother-hand to me!
VERA [Softly]
Were you very happy?
DAVID
It was heaven. You must remember that all my life I had heard of America—everybody in our town had friends there or was going there or got money orders from there. The earliest game I played at was selling off my toy furniture and setting up in America. All my life America was waiting, beckoning, shining—the place where God would wipe away tears from off all faces.
[He ends in a half-sob.]
MENDEL [Rises, as in terror]
Now, now, David, don't get excited.
[Approaches him.]
DAVID
To think that the same great torch of liberty which threw its light across all the broad seas and lands into my little garret in Russia, is shining also for all those other weeping millions of Europe, shining wherever men hunger and are oppressed—
MENDEL [Soothingly]
Yes, yes, David.
[Laying hand on his shoulder]
Now sit down and——
DAVID [Unheeding]
Shining over the starving villages of Italy and Ireland, over the swarming stony cities of Poland and Galicia, over the ruined farms of Roumania, over the shambles of Russia—
MENDEL [Pleadingly]
David!
DAVID
Oh, Miss Revendal, when I look at our Statue of Liberty, I just seem to hear the voice of America crying: "Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest—rest—"
[He is now almost sobbing.]
MENDEL
Don't talk any more—you know it is bad for you.
David is passionately writing and rewriting a symphony inspired by his vision of America. He describes the nation as a “crucible,” another term for a melting-pot.
VERA
So your music finds inspiration in America?
DAVID
Yes—in the seething of the Crucible.
VERA
The Crucible? I don't understand!
DAVID
Not understand! You, the Spirit of the Settlement!
[He rises and crosses to her and leans over the table, facing her.]
Not understand that America is God's Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand
[Graphically illustrating it on the table]
in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won't be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you've come to—these are the fires of God. A fig for your feuds and vendettas! Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians—into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.
We watch the process David describes over The Melting-Pot’s narrative. Apart from some of David’s more stirring lines, the play is not an intellectual argument for the Melting-Pot’s desirability, but rather a depiction of the beginnings of an American ethnogenesis and the beauty of that process.
For example, the first act opens with Kathleen, an Irish immigrant who has just taken a job in the Quixano household, expressing antisemitism towards Mendel as she quits over her frustrating inability to follow the needs of Frau Quixano’s confusing Jewish practices. Frau only speaks Yiddish, keeps Shabbat, and keeps Kosher. David explains the suffering Frau has been through throughout her life and begs Kathleen to stay. Over the course of the story Kathleen gets to know Frau and better understand Jewish culture; by the end she is enthusiastically celebrating Purim with Frau and using Yiddish idioms.
But the story’s biggest case study is in its main plot: the Romeo & Juliet-inspired love story between David and Vera. Russian by birth, Vera starts the play as a naive antisemite, carrying with her the unquestioned assumptions of her home country’s culture. But by meeting David and Mendel, who are both Jewish, she is quickly disabused of her bigoted views.
However, Vera’s estranged father, Baron Revendal, is not so easily convinced. Upon hearing of Vera and David’s plans to marry, he travels from Russia to America to put a stop to it. In the climax’s twist, David meets Baron and recognizes his face: this is the man who ordered and watched the murder of his family in Kishineff.
The story’s greatest moral lesson comes from David’s reaction to this fact. Vera did not know this truth about her father, and fully severs ties with him upon learning it. But nonetheless, David, overcome with emotion and now knowing Vera’s connection to his past, rejects her.
VERA [Trying vainly to tranquillise him]
Hush, David! Your laughter hurts more than tears. Let Vera comfort you.
[She kneels by his chair, tries to put her arms round him.]
DAVID [Shuddering]
Take them away! Don't you feel the cold dead pushing between us?
VERA [Unfaltering, moving his face toward her lips]
Kiss me!
DAVID
I should feel the blood on my lips.
VERA
My love shall wipe it out.
DAVID
Love! Christian love!
[He unwinds her clinging arms; she sinks prostrate on the floor as he rises.]
For this I gave up my people—darkened the home that sheltered me—there was always a still, small voice at my heart calling me back, but I heeded nothing—only the voice of the butcher's daughter.
[Brokenly]
Let me go home, let me go home.
[He looks lingeringly at Vera's prostrate form, but overcoming the instinct to touch and comfort her, begins tottering with uncertain pauses toward the door leading to the hall.]
David’s reaction is tragic, but realistic. Throughout the narrative we witness conflicts between attachments to the past and hopes for the future. Mendel is not as religious as Frau, and David even less so. Frau weeps over Mendel and David needing to work on Shabbat to make ends meet. And Vera’s family is not the only one opposed to her and David’s marriage; Mendel disowns David over it.
MENDEL
If she was the daughter of fifty barons, you cannot marry her.
DAVID [In pained amaze]
Uncle!
[Slowly]
Then your hankering after the synagogue was serious after all.
MENDEL
It is not so much the synagogue—it is the call of our blood through immemorial generations.
DAVID
You say that! You who have come to the heart of the Crucible, where the roaring fires of God are fusing our race with all the others.
MENDEL [Passionately]
Not our race, not your race and mine.
DAVID
What immunity has our race?
[Meditatively]
The pride and the prejudice, the dreams and the sacrifices, the traditions and the superstitions, the fasts and the feasts, things noble and things sordid—they must all into the Crucible.
MENDEL [With prophetic fury]
The Jew has been tried in a thousand fires and only tempered and annealed.
…
DAVID
These countries were not in the making. They were old civilisations stamped with the seal of creed. In such countries the Jew may be right to stand out. But here in this new secular Republic we must look forward—
MENDEL [Passionately interrupting]
We must look backwards, too.
DAVID [Hysterically]
To what? To Kishineff?
[As if seeing his vision]
To that butcher's face directing the slaughter? To those—?
MENDEL [Alarmed]
Hush! Calm yourself!
DAVID [Struggling with himself]
Yes, I will calm myself—but how else shall I calm myself save by forgetting all that nightmare of religions and races, save by holding out my hands with prayer and music toward the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God! The Past I cannot mend—its evil outlines are stamped in immortal rigidity. Take away the hope that I can mend the Future, and you make me mad.
…
MENDEL
Would you stay and break my mother's heart? You know she would mourn for you with the rending of garments and the seven days' sitting on the floor. Go! You have cast off the God of our fathers!
DAVID [Thundrously]
And the God of our children—does He demand no service?
What makes The Melting-Pot different from its Shakespearean inspiration is its happy ending. The play does not end with its protagonists losing in sacrifice to the past, to the religious and racial attachments of David’s family and the violent antisemitism of Vera’s. Even Mendel and Frau are able to learn to be more forward-looking, melting incrementally into the pot as the events of the story inspire them to see the virtues in doing so. Mendel, witnessing David’s depression from the loss of Vera, recants his disowning of David, explaining “I'd rather see you marry her than go about like this.” Frau comes to the premiere of David’s symphony even though it occurred on Shabbat; Mendel explains to David, “She said that even as a boy you played your fiddle on Shabbos, and that if the Lord has stood it all these years, He must consider you an exception.” Frau, old and frail, is even convinced by David to take an elevator (generally considered forbidden on Shabbat) rather than the stairs to get home.
These changes in his family, as well as the jubilant response of the crowd to his symphony, please David, but they do not suffice to restore the optimism lost due to his distress at violating his own forward-looking values by rejecting Vera. He explains in conversation with Mendel.
MENDEL
… You are stone all over—ever since you came back home to us. Turned into a pillar of salt, mother says—like Lot's wife.
DAVID
That was the punishment for looking backward. Ah, uncle, there's more sense in that old Bible than the Rabbis suspect. Perhaps that is the secret of our people's paralysis—we are always looking backward.
But Vera’s arrival after the symphony gives David a chance to repent.
DAVID
The irony is in all the congratulations. How can I endure them when I know what a terrible failure I have made!
VERA
Failure! Because the critics are all divided? That is the surest proof of success. You have produced something real and new.
DAVID
I am not thinking of Pappelmeister's connoisseurs—I am the only connoisseur, the only one who knows. And every bar of my music cried "Failure! Failure!" It shrieked from the violins, blared from the trombones, thundered from the drums. It was written on all the faces——
VERA [Vehemently, coming still nearer]
Oh, no! no! I watched the faces—those faces of toil and sorrow, those faces from many lands. They were fired by your vision of their coming brotherhood, lulled by your dream of their land of rest. And I could see that you were right in speaking to the people. In some strange, beautiful, way the inner meaning of your music stole into all those simple souls—
DAVID [Springing up]
And my soul? What of my soul? False to its own music, its own mission, its own dream. That is what I mean by failure, Vera. I preached of God's Crucible, this great new continent that could melt up all race-differences and vendettas, that could purge and re-create, and God tried me with his supremest test. He gave me a heritage from the Old World, hate and vengeance and blood, and said, "Cast it all into my Crucible." And I said, "Even thy Crucible cannot melt this hate, cannot drink up this blood." And so I sat crooning over the dead past, gloating over the old blood-stains—I, the apostle of America, the prophet of the God of our children. Oh—how my music mocked me! And you—so fearless, so high above fate—how you must despise me!
…
DAVID
Ah, you cannot forgive me!
VERA
Forgive? It is I that should go down on my knees for my father's sin.
[She is half-sinking to her knees. He stops her by a gesture and a cry.]
DAVID
No! The sins of the fathers shall not be visited on the children.
Vera and David embrace and reunite, forbidding the past’s divisions, vendettas, and traumas to destroy their present and future. From a rooftop overlooking the Statue of Liberty, the play ends with its mission statement.
DAVID [Prophetically exalted by the spectacle]
It is the fires of God round His Crucible.
[He drops her hand and points downward.]
There she lies, the great Melting Pot—listen! Can't you hear the roaring and the bubbling? There gapes her mouth
[He points east]
—the harbour where a thousand mammoth feeders come from the ends of the world to pour in their human freight. Ah, what a stirring and a seething! Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian,—black and yellow—
VERA [Softly, nestling to him]
Jew and Gentile—”
DAVID
Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!
[He raises his hands in benediction over the shining city.]
Peace, peace, to all ye unborn millions, fated to fill this giant continent—the God of our children give you Peace.
[An instant's solemn pause. The sunset is swiftly fading, and the vast panorama is suffused with a more restful twilight, to which the many-gleaming lights of the town add the tender poetry of the night. Far back, like a lonely, guiding star, twinkles over the darkening water the torch of the Statue of Liberty. From below comes up the softened sound of voices and instruments joining in "My Country, 'tis of Thee." The curtain falls slowly.]
The Melting-Pot’s gripping narrative, excellent comedic and dramatic moments, and its inspiring portrayal of the promise of America to free its people not just legally but spiritually, make it a forgotten masterpiece and a strong contender for The Great American Play.
The Melting-Pot does not depict the completion of the process of cultural integration, only its beginnings. In the published script’s first appendix is documentation of the national origin of immigrants to the United States admitted in the year 1913. Totaling 1,427,227, it includes Italians, Irish, Scandinavians, Portuguese, Slovak, Finnish, German, Greek, and more. Today, those groups have indeed melted together; few would be able to tell the difference between descendants of those immigrants by their appearance or cultural choices. And many of the cultural traditions their ancestors brought to America have since been adopted by all of us.
But the process is not done. The continuing flow of new immigrants, now mostly from nations and cultures other than those once dominant at the turn of the 20th century, remain to be melted. And this process has been even more difficult for groups with stronger distinctions in physical appearance, such as African-Americans and Asian-Americans. Zangwill predicted this obstacle in the published script’s afterward, which he unfortunately explained with a splash of then-common pseudoscientific ideas about the genetics of race. Zangwill also predicted that despite his own love and his Jewish protagonist’s love of the Melting-Pot, Jews would be “the toughest of all the white elements” to melt into American culture due to “theological differences … together with the prevalent anti-Semitism and his own ingrained persistence,” although he was optimistic it would eventually happen given enough time.
Zangwill’s writing—both through his own words and David’s—speaks of the Melting-Pot in that consistently optimistic spirit. The Melting-Pot is described as the destined conclusion of multicultural society’s ever-growing interconnection of its people.
But the story of the play makes clear it isn’t quite so simple. We must open ourselves up to receive what others have to offer to us, which includes requiring us to drop any prejudices we might have.
There are trade-offs to melting to be sure. Not all cultures are equal, not all elements of all cultures are equal, and in melting the lesser elements of some cultures will be traded to adopt the greater elements of others. To gain a marriage to her love, Vera had to give up her family and their antisemitic views. To gain employment and a joyful friendship with Frau, Kathleen had to give up convenience and simplicity by learning Frau’s complicated religious practices. To keep his nephew as part of his family, Mendel had to give up enforcing the centuries-long Jewish prohibition against intermarriage. To gain the ability to attend the premiere of her grandson’s symphony, Frau had to give up her strict adherence to Shabbat. The virtue of such choices was debated then (Zangwill noted “the Jewish pulpits of America have resounded with denunciation” despite his simultaneous popularity amongst more liberal and secular Jews) and continues to be debated now, but the story of the play makes fully clear the characters see themselves as having gained much more than they gave up in the trade-off.
To be fair to its critics, the virtues of the Melting-Pot have been misrepresented even by its advocates. Henry Ford, a noted antisemite of the era (although he recanted and apologized later in life), took the Melting-Pot idea and instituted it in a manner far different than Zangwill’s description. At The Ford English School, rather than focusing on multidirectional cultural exchange between native-born Americans and the numerous immigrant groups, the focus was on unidirectional immigrant acculturation to American norms. Ford required his immigrant employees to attend his “Americanization” courses. As visualized in the school’s graduation ceremony,
On the stage was represented an immigrant ship. In front of it was a huge melting pot. Down the gang plank came the members of the class dressed in their national garbs and carrying luggage such as they carried when they landed in this country. Down they poured into the Ford melting pot and disappeared. Then the teachers began to stir the contents of the pot with long ladles. Presently the pot began to boil over and out came the men dressed in their best American clothes and waving American flags.
While Zangwill certainly would have supported the flag waving, the idea that immigrants should acculturate to allegedly “superior” American dress style or other cultural norms was clearly opposed in The Melting-Pot. A villainous side character, Quincy Davenport, is used to make this point. The only native-born American in the play, Quincy is wealthy through inheritance rather than labor; he sees himself as a higher-class person than others, seeks to associate with other “high-class” people, and looks down on poorer immigrants. Quincy particularly looks down on Jews, whom he refuses to hire for his orchestra, but is so impressed by David’s symphony he’s prepared to make an exception. David refuses the opportunity in disgust.
QUINCY
You low-down, ungrateful—
DAVID
Not for you and such as you have I sat here writing and dreaming; not for you who are killing my America!
QUINCY
Your America, forsooth, you Jew-immigrant!
VERA
Mr. Davenport!
DAVID
Yes—Jew-immigrant! But a Jew who knows that your Pilgrim Fathers came straight out of his Old Testament, and that our Jew-immigrants are a greater factor in the glory of this great commonwealth than some of you sons of the soil. It is you, freak-fashionables, who are undoing the work of Washington and Lincoln, vulgarising your high heritage, and turning the last and noblest hope of humanity into a caricature.
David prophesizes to Quincy that: “There shall come a fire round the Crucible that will melt you and your breed like wax in a blowpipe.” Zangwill likely would have said exactly the same to Henry Ford.
Ford’s misinterpretation of the Melting-Pot ideal continues amongst its advocates to this day. For example Bruce Thornton, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, despite citing Zangwill in his article advocating for the Melting-Pot over the Salad Bowl clearly demonstrates he did not actually bother to read the play.
If some custom, value, or belief from the old country conflicted with those core American values, then the old way had to be modified or discarded if the immigrant wanted to participate fully in American social, economic, and political life. The immigrant had to adjust. No one expected the majority culture to modify its values to accommodate the immigrant; this would have been impossible, at any rate, because there were so many immigrants from so many lands that it would have fragmented American culture. No matter the costs, assimilation was the only way to forge an unum from so many pluribus.
Beyond the mistake of making the Melting-Pot about unidirectional acculturation, the notion of instituting it by force “no matter the costs” would have been anathema to Zangwill. At each point in the narrative where a character moves to melt further into the cultural pot of America, it is always an individual choice made as a result of realizing that adopting elements of another culture would make that individual a better, happier, person. It is never once depicted as a top-down government-driven process.
However, none of this excuses the Melting-Pot’s critics making the same mistake by rejecting the idea without understanding it. A Newsweek article by writer Julia Higgins spends many paragraphs discussing the content of and reaction to Zangwill’s play, yet she makes it painfully clear that she never actually read the play when, right at the start of her piece, she confidently asserts that the play is about David’s “intent on moving to the United States.” She then argues its depiction of “America as a wholly inclusive land was not in touch with reality, with a widespread desire to strip immigrants of their individual customs—and force them into a version of whiteness that permeates society—lurking right beneath the surface.”
Miguel A. De La Torre, a Professor of Social Ethics and Latinx Studies, has a proudly divisive take that’s even worse than Higgins’. De La Torre writes, “The problem with melting pots is that the scum usually rises to the top while those on the bottom get burned. This happens because the melting pot paradigm reinforces oppressive structures presently existing within society while blaming the victims of those structures for their own oppression.” After recounting failed experiments to present himself as less Latino and more Anglo, De La Torre concludes, “I am proud of the heritage and accomplishments of my people. I am also shamed by the atrocities my people have committed. Both the good and bad of my culture make me who I am today.”
The fear of lost identity is what drives many critics of the Melting-Pot, but what they miss is what each and every one of us can gain by opening ourselves up to the process of cultural integration. One should never trade a greater value for a lesser one, but neither should one deny themselves a greater value over a pathological attachment to the past.
This is what the viewer witnesses in The Melting-Pot when David almost gives up Vera due to his memory of Kishineff, and when Vera blames herself and falls into self-hatred over the sins of her father. This attachment to the past can also manifest as ethnic or racial solidarity and pride. People should never be proud of the accomplishments or feel ashamed of the atrocities committed by people who are not them. As my friend Daryl Davis, famous for inspiring former white supremacists to leave their hate groups, has remarked,
I believe one must strive to make the world a better place by accomplishing those things that will benefit our future rather than trying to reactivate the past. … I pray for the time when people focus on showing each other what they are capable of accomplishing, rather than concentrating on what color they are or from where their family originated. In such an era, we will gain personal respect from our deeds and the pre-designated color of our skin won’t matter. We should never be ashamed of what is God-given, such as our skin color. We can only be proud of what we become through our own given endeavors.
Especially in today’s era of identity politics and victimhood culture, Zangwill’s vision is being bitterly resisted. The sins of one’s ancestors manifesting into bitterness towards their descendants is omnipresent even for crimes drastically less severe and generations less immediate than David’s connection to Kishineff. For example, an article in The Occidental, Occidental College’s student newspaper, goes as far as to call the Melting-Pot concept “creepy” and “along the lines of eugenics and racial engineering” (The Black Sheep founder Salomé Sibonex has pushed back on the culture at Occidental by speaking at an event there). Writer Maisha Z. Johnson argued for Everyday Feminism that “we must resist getting dumped into the pot,” that we should maintain separate spaces for “people of color” from those racialized as white, and that “When we ‘share’ our cultures without considering the impact on marginalized people, it’s usually white people who benefit the most, while other people suffer.” Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consultants are now teaching these ideas to corporate America too, with Cheryl Ingram of Diverse City Group claiming people need to “stop saying America is a Melting-Pot” as the idea implies “oppression” and the “normalcy of whiteness.”
Although Zangwill was unflinchingly optimistic that his vision of the Melting-Pot would come to pass despite his living in times of much greater division, it is not inevitable. Each of us must choose it to make it a reality. Progress is capable of reversing. Both for the sake of the mental health of individuals and the cultural health of our shared society, the virtues of The Melting-Pot must be rediscovered. The Melting-Pot does not lecture its audience about what to think or spend its time bogged down in intellectual arguments, but by having characters with conflicting perspectives interact in the context of American immigrant society, shows its audience on a powerful emotional level how the values manifested in David Quixano can lead to a brighter future for those who choose them.
Zangwill’s play must be returned to its rightful place in the American canon. The Melting-Pot deserves to be read and studied by all of us who have forgotten it, it deserves to be in the English Literature curriculum of our schools, and it ought to be revitalized on the stage as it was meant to be seen.