Back in 1909, Jewish Immigrant Israel Zangwill had an idea whose time had come. Zangwill wrote a play about American immigrants and called it The Melting Pot. It ran for months on Broadway, and the phrase entered the language as an expression of faith in American homogeneity. That faith lasted until the 1960s, when blacks first challenged its homey apple-pie vision and prepared the way for a similar awakening among other ethnic groups.
Whites Ignored. The latest challenges to the old melting-pot theory come from the "new ethnicity," a movement that began in the...
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