These discords, together with the prevalent anti-Semitism and his own
ingrained persistence, tend to preserve the Jew even in the "Melting
Pot," so that his dissolution must be necessarily slower than that of
the similar aggregations of Germans, Italians, or Poles. But the process
for all is the same, however tempered by specific factors. Beginning as
broken-off bits of Germany, Italy, or Poland, with newspapers and
theatres in German, Italian, or Polish, these colonies gradually become
Americanised, their vernaculars, even when jealously cherished, become a
mere medium for American conceptions of life; while in the third
generation the child is ashamed both of its parents and their lingo, the
newspapers dwindle in circulation, the theatres languish. The reality of
this process has been denied by no less distinguished an American than
Dr. Charles Eliot, ex-President of Harvard University, whose prophecy of
Jewish solidarity in America and of the contribution of Judaism to the
world's future is more optimistic than my own. Dr. Eliot points to the
still unmelted heaps of racial matter, without suspecting--although he
is a chemist--that their semblance of solidity is only kept up by the
constant immigration of similar atoms to the base to replace those
liquefied at the apex. Once America slams her doors, the crucible will
roar like a closed furnace.
Heaven forbid, however, that the doors shall be slammed for centuries
yet. The notion that the few millions of people in America have a moral
right to exclude others is monstrous. Exclusiveness may have some
justification in countries, especially when old and well-populated; but
for continents like the United States--or for the matter of that Canada
and Australia--to mistake themselves for mere countries is an
intolerable injustice to the rest of the human race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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