Barbara Adde’s Reviews > Melting Point: Family, Memory and the Search for a Promised Land > Status Update

Variety:
The plot: a man running for Governor of New York gets drunk and over the radio tells the American public to go to hell. The citizens think he is an honest man, so he’s elected.

March 1927, Harbor Allen
‘Loud Speaker’ (John Howard Lawson) is a satirical epic on American fakery. Every American fake is here. Fake religion, fake romance, fake politics, fake news, fake women, fake booze.

Zangwill: “America is the land of refuge, but it is also the ‘melting pot.’ No people in history has ever been able to live unmelted in the bosom of a bigger people, except when safeguarded by a separate religion. And the religion of American Jewry is not strong and separate enough to save the American Jews from absorption. Even the East Side of New York speaks Yiddish with a twang.”

“I infer from Quixano’s rhapsodies that the Jew will no longer be a Jew. I protest against his pronouncement of our doom.”

Bernard Richards, American Hebrew
“We shall be melted whether we like it or not. All our ancient traits and characteristics, our ‘hankering for the past’ and even our religious beliefs shall vanish in the great process of the crucible. There is no use arguing about it. What spiritual identity will the Jew have when he emerges out of the ‘melting pot’?”

Bill Nye, 10 May 1891
If you feel yourself getting conventional and pokey, and stiff and morbid, and the moss is beginning to grow on the north side of your soul, light out for Texas.

“It has transpired that the heat of Mesopotamia is terrific and the population hostile.”

“Australia is Zangwill’s new ITOland.”

“But imagine an Itoland established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days that may come.”

“But imagine an airplane established and Mesopotamia acting as a refuge against the evil days they may come.”

Zangwill, 1909 “We are coming into a period of history when gigantic problems occupy the world’s attention. What time has the world to trouble itself with the Jewish question? And what right have we to expect that the Jewish people will emerge from all these coming frictions any less battered than before? Who shall say what the whirligig of time has yet in store for us?”