The Melting Pot

Born in London to an impoverished family of immigrants from the Russian Empire, Israel Zangwill attended the Jews’ Free School in London’s East End and then the University of London. He published his first literary work while a student, and in the late 1880s he contributed columns to several humor magazines as well as Jewish newspapers. Contracted by the Jewish Publication Society of America to write its first work of fiction, Zangwill produced Children of the Ghetto in 1892, which launched him to international acclaim. He made the acquaintance of Theodor Herzl in 1895 and the following year arranged for Herzl’s address to the British Ḥibat Tsiyon society, the Maccabeans, which set the stage for the emergence of the British Zionist movement, of which Zangwill was an early adherent. By the time of the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, Zangwill had adopted territorialism, advocating in favor of working toward Jewish settlement in a “Provisional Palestine”—a territory, such as the British East Africa Protectorate (the “Uganda Scheme”), that could advance Jewish nation building while settlement in Palestine remained politically unfeasible. When the Seventh Zionist Congress voted to reject the Uganda proposal, Zangwill led a group out of the convention in protest and subsequently founded the Jewish Territorialist Organization. He rejoined the Zionist mainstream for a time following the Balfour Declaration in 1917, though he eventually returned to his Territorialist convictions. In 1908 Zangwill debuted his play, The Melting Pot, whose plot described the love of a Jewish musician and composer for the Christian daughter of a Russian antisemite as epitomizing the promise of America. The play, performed in New York and even at the White House of Theodore Roosevelt, helped to launch the phrase “melting pot” into widespread use as descriptive of immigrant assimilation in the United States. Zangwill died in Sussex.