And yet the plays that describe their experience seldom portray the Jews as victims or dwellers in the Christian Louboutin shoes sale. The major theme of the plays Novick discusses, from the first decade of the 20th century to the last, is assimilation – which suggests that from a very early moment, these writers felt at ease in this strange new Zion. A remarkable Christian Louboutin of how rapidly they came to prominence is that at the Washington, D.C., opening night of the first play Novick discusses, The Melting Pot, in 1909, President Theodore Roosevelt was in the audience. Admittedly the play was not by a “greenhorn” – the author was a noted English Jew named Israel Zangwill. Touring America, he came away with the impression of this new land as “God’s Crucible,” a place for melting the races of Old Europe into an entirely new one. Not surprisingly, his play met with hostility from many Jews who resisted the notion of being “melted Christian Sandals.”
Flash forward to 1989 and Donald Margulies’s The Loman Family Picnic, in which 12-year-old Stewie, angry about the arduous preparations necessary for his bar mitzvah, declares: “Remember, Ma, I’m doing this for you. I’ll go through with it, and sing nice, and make you proud, and make the relatives cry, but once I’m bar mitzvahed, that’s it, Ma, I’m never setting foot in that place again. Never again.” His mother replies, “Thank you, louboutin Shoes, thank you.”
Decades earlier, this exchange might have been rendered melodramatically, as it was in Samson Raphaelson’s iconic The Jazz Singer, in which the title character, torn between carrying on his father’s work as the cantor of a synagogue and forging his own path on Broadway, declares that prayers are “stuff that doesn’t mean anything to me any more.” (In the final analysis, of course, they do.)