Once the United States of America was regarded as a Melting Pot of various cultures. Immigrants sailed from all over Christian Europe to find and make a new Christian home in America, the new Promised Land. Tens of millions of new arrivals, Protestants and Catholics, came from West and East and North and South of the European continent learning America's "native" English language and sending their children to non-denominational Public Schools that offered free education with the proviso of relying on the Establishment to know best about what to teach. While most immigrants were working class, their children became upwardly mobile builders of the American Middle and Upper Classes. After spending years in colleges and universities enabling them to become professionals, most became average American citizens.
The millions of Blacks who were brought to America as slaves from Africa were quickly converted to Christianity that has lasted to the present time, even though they were brought over to be slaves in households and on plantations. After the Civil War in the 1860s between the slave-centered economy of the Confederate South and the liberated worker-employing industrialized Unionist North, they won their freedom, followed by a long struggle for Civil and Equal Rights, often led by Black Christian ministers, a struggle they eventually won by the mid Twentieth Century.
These Christian Black citizens of America entered into American mainstream society joining hands with White American Christians, especially after the Second World War. From that point on, Blacks fought alongside Whites for the same causes in all of America's wars. Most Black Americans resisted the pull of extremists in their midst to fight White America and were rewarded by the American Establishment and government accepting them to all strata of political life, with thousands of Black politicians becoming leaders in America.
The next large wave of arrivals in the tens of millions saw Christian Latin American Catholic arrivals from Central and South America to the United States become quickly accepted by fellow White and Black Christian Americans. Like the first waves of Christian White immigrants from Europe and the eventually freed Black slaves that became Christians, everyone wanted to join the mainstream of American life and culture, quickly assimilated and Americanized and joined all strata and streams of American society.
As for the Jewish immigrants to America who would grow to their present number of about six million Jewish Americans, they were always the most typical of any sample taken to measure the rapid rate of joining the American melting pot. By the Second World War, the millions of Jews who came over to America from Europe became secularized and moved away from their traditional moorings rooted in Orthodox Judaism. This is evidenced by the masses of Jews who joined the American Jewish Reform Movement practiced by the early German Jewish immigrants and then joined almost in unison the liberal Jewish American movement known as Conservative Judaism.
The social turmoil in America during the 1960s saw many Black Americans rejecting the Melting Pot theory of assimilation into American life as part of the breakdown of the old social order. Among White America there was the new Sexual Liberation movement of the 1960s that coalesced with the Anti-Vietnam War movement and the Black Civil Rights movement. This started a new cultural notion of a Rainbow Coalition that rejected the Melting Pot idea. It was a time of student rebellion, of those who yelled Make Love Not War. Paradoxically, this helped a more intensive, unique and separate Haredi and Hasidic Judaism to grow after its slow beginnings post Second World War and the Holocaust.
Historians such as the late Professor L. Cremin have noted and described the waves of immigrants arriving in America and have stated that THE SETTLEMENT OF THE NEW WORLD RESULTED FROM THE UNSETTLEMENT OF THE OLD WORLD. This is true for all subsequent waves of immigrants to America. The unsettlement of Africa by slavery and colonialism resulted in the settlement of millions of Black African in America. Likewise the unsettlement of Asia and the Middle East has resulted in the settlement of America by millions of new Asian and Middle Eastern people most of whom are devout religious Muslims to the point that Islam is now the third largest official religion in America after Christianity and Judaism.
However, the recent arrivals of Muslims in America, mostly from many different Arab countries, has produced a different social result. Islam, a strong and resilient religion, has crashed head-first into Christian America and has butted heads with Jews in America who support Israel and Zionism. The mindset, hierarchy, psychology, personality, social structures and sociology of Muslims is radically different to those of Christians and Christianity, Jews and Judaism. Even though Muslims attend America's Public Schools, Colleges and Universities learning how to speak perfect English and becoming qualified in various professions and working fields, they nevertheless fervently cling to Islam.
As is well known in Modern Times there has been a rise in Radical Islam in all streams of Islam, among both Sunnis and Shiites. Many Arab states have been dominated by radical Muslim Nationalists and Socialists all combined into ideologies such as Baathism. Not only do many Muslims cling to Radical Islamic thinking and practice, which to many means fighting the Infidels and practicing Jihad and Intifada wherever they may find themselves, they are also vehemently outspoken against any religion that challenges Islam or stands in its way. Muslims go on the counter-offensive and may engage in acts of violence, criminality and terrorism as they wage a war on behalf of Allah against the Infidels (Kaffir non-believers) so that they can go to paradise as a reward for the maiming and killing of Christians and Jews and even of other more moderate Muslims. The worst case of this phenomenon happened in America on 9/11 2001 with the horrific bombings by passenger jet planes of the World Trade Center in New York City and of the Pentagon in Washington DC.
Not only does assimilation into the American mainstream not work with Muslims who are basically unassimilable due to the fiery nature of their Islamic faith and its various doctrines and practices, but even when a Muslim decides to follow a quieter, more elaborate political path, their mindset, character, personality and inner world is shaped by the same firebrand markings of Islam they have absorbed.
As typical examples and proof of this in real life one need look no further than examples of three current young radical Muslim politicians in America:
Rashida Tlaib (born 1976) is a US House of Representative member from Michigan since 2019. Although she was born in America, her parents are Palestinian Arabs and she is the oldest of 14 children. Her mother hails from Ramallah and her father is from eastern Jerusalem. They are in America as legitimate immigrants but their daughter Rashida acts as if she is living in the middle of the fight between the Israelis and the Palestinian Arabs. Although she is officially a member of the radical left Democratic Socialists of America she is a fanatical Muslim despite that.
In September 2018, The New York Times reported that Tlaib walked into her family's mosque to express her gratitude for the opportunity to run for Congress, articulating a belief that 'my Allah is She'. The Detroit Free Press reported that, although she recognizes that some in her faith community consider her not 'Muslim enough', she believes that Allah understands that she deems her actions 'reflective of Islam'." All this in spite of receiving an all-American education from beginning to end: "She graduated from Southwestern High School in Detroit in 1994, from Wayne State University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science in 1998, and from Thomas M. Cooley Law School with a Juris Doctor in 2004. Tlaib was admitted to the bar in the state of Michigan in 2007." (Wikipedia). Her advanced American education has in no way influenced her to stop being a vicious anti-Israel antisemite as she clings to her core Islamic roots.
Ilhan Omar (born 1982) is a US House of Representatives member from Minnesota since 2019. She was born in Somalia and was welcomed into America as a refugee in 1995.when she was thirteen years old. Her parents were Somalian Sunni Muslims. "Omar attended Thomas Edison High School, from which she graduated in 2001, and volunteered as a student organizer. She graduated from North Dakota State University in 2011 with a bachelor's degree, majoring in political science and international studies. Omar was a policy fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs." (Wikipedia) In spite of being welcomed into America and given a good all-American education Omar proudly and arrogantly espouses one of the most rabid Islamist anti-Israel and antisemitic points of view.
Zohran Kwame Mamdani (born 1991) is a New State Assemblyman currently running for mayor of New York City as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. He was born in Uganda to an Indian Muslim father and an Indian Hindu mother who moved to the United States in 1998 when Zohran was eight years old. "Mamdani attended the Bank Street School for Children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in Kingsbridge Heights, Mamdani then attended Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, where he co-founded the school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine. He graduated in 2014 with a bachelor's degree in African Studies." (Wikipedia). Due to winning the recent Democrat primary for mayor of New York City, his controversial, hateful anti-Israel and antisemitic positions have been thrust into the limelight as he proudly identifies as a Socialist-Islamic activist with a decidedly un-American and even anti-American agenda.
The question therefore arises: how is it that these three rising stars representing the new young up and coming Muslims in America of the American Muslim community, one an Arab, another a Somalian, and the other an Indian from Uganda, are Muslim fundamentalists? How is it that in spite of their families being welcomed into the United States as helpless and hapless refugees, and in spite of being given all the privileges of an elite all-American education, they seem not much different than the ingrate Arabs who sit in the Israeli Knesset and still hate Israel and Jews? Why do they support Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran and all sorts of outcast Arab and Islamic regimes but not what so-called Middle America holds, namely a core support for Israel and a respect for the Jewish People and Judaism?
It is not just these three examples it is also the vast majority of Muslims in America and Europe or wherever they have moved to from their mostly failed state home countries, such as the wreck that the Palestinian Arabs have made of Gaza and the ruins of Uganda and Somalia.
One can only conclude that at the core of this resistance to the main purpose of the excellent and superior secular education they receive in America, is their remaining loyal Muslims at heart. This in and of itself is not a problem, but what is the problem is that in our days, much of being a Muslim means practicing and adhering to a revolutionary form of violent radical Islam that seeks the overthrow and destruction of the countries they move to and a virulent hate of Israel coupled with antisemitism.
Many remain committed to a wild dream and violent fantasy of an Islamic Caliphate empire that will be achieved either by violent Jihad and Intifada or by sly, what the Muslims call Hudna tactics, that Mohamed himself practiced - trickery using statecraft, diplomacy and politics to accomplish the same goals of Islamic dominance.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed!
Rabbi Yitschak Rudomin was born to Holocaust survivor parents in Israel, grew up in South Africa, and lives in Brooklyn, NY. He is an alumnus of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin and of Teachers College-Columbia University. He heads the Jewish Professionals Institute dedicated to Jewish Adult Education and Outreach - Kiruv Rechokim. He was the Director of the Belzer Chasidim's Sinai Heritage Center of Manhattan 1988-1995, a Trustee of AJOP 1994-1997 and founder of American Friends of South African Jewish Education 1995-2015. From 2017-2024 he was a docent and tour guide at The Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust in Downtown Manhattan, New York.He is the author of The Second World War and Jewish Education in America: The Fall and Rise of Orthodoxy.