The Melting Pot

About

Zangwill's 1908 play gave the English language the phrase 'melting pot': it follows David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant who survived a Kishinev pogrom, as he writes a symphony celebrating American synthesis of all nationalities, falls in love across ethnic lines, and confronts his oppressor from the Old World. President Theodore Roosevelt famously stood in his box on opening night and called down to the stage 'That's a great play!' The play is melodramatic, earnest, and sometimes clumsy, but its cultural importance as the founding text of American immigrant assimilation mythology is beyond dispute — it shaped how America imagined itself for generations.