Jewish Heritage Lecture Series: The Harry and Marjorie Tobias Lecture

Meri-Jane Rochelson, Florida International University, tells how most Americans are familiar with the phrase “the melting pot,” a metaphor that envisions our society as a great cauldron into which people from a multiplicity of origins and ethnicities enter to be transformed into that new, unique entity, the American. The term has been contested for the last hundred years, but few know the play that brought it into the American lexicon in 1908.