Quotes About Assimilation

All my friends were non-Muslims. I actually knew very little about Islam - like, very little.

My own grandparents came to the United States as immigrants in 1912, and they lived for some years in Italian ghettos in New York. Most immigrant groups start in ghettos somewhere, and many of them never get out.

The Italians always know that I'm not Italian.

Like everybody coming from Europe, I didn't believe it at first, but you really need time to adjust. I thought it was going to be like going from Croatia to Italy. But you really need the time just to understand things here.

Having grown up in different countries - Jamaica, Italy, U.K. - I catch the accents quite easily. In the U.S., they don't know where I am from!

I was born in an enemy country. Only in America can someone who came from that beginning do what I am doing. It would never happen in Germany or Japan.

I do want to learn the way to do it over here. I'm not really looking to just go about my way and do it in the Japanese way that I've been doing. Basically, I'll try to get some advice, learn the way it's done here and go about it.

I grew up in a unique environment where I was immersed in both Japanese and American cultures equally.

I'm a first-generation Japanese immigrant.

I'm Japanese, of course, but spending so long in America has made me into a different kind of person.

I was a big Jersey meat-and-potatoes kind of guy before I got here.

I've begun to think like a Jew, to feel like a Jew.

Increasingly I feel like a Jew, an immigrant, a Russian - anything but a normal, mainstream American.

I feel more Jewish than I do Iranian.

The majesty of the American Jewish experience is in its success marrying its unique Jewish identity with the larger, liberal values of the United States. There is no need anymore to choose between assimilation and separation. We are accepted as equals.

One generation after another is drifting away from anything Jewish.

Russians call me German, Germans call me Russian, Jews call me a Christian, Christians a Jew.

Jews can live their own life as Jews and yet be part of a different country.

My particular pain is that the world of Jewishness that I identify with - the extremely assimilated, educated European and Russian Jews in the 19th and 20th centuries - is lost, and is not mourned enough.

Anthropology seems so bland and friendly now, but in the early 20th century, Jews could only be dissected badly by these fields. The Jews were extremely assimilated; it's a different world than now.

My family were Conservative Jews. My parents were both born in this country, but my father grew up on the Lower East Side, and my mother was born and raised in Harlem when there was a large Jewish 'colony' there. Eventually, they moved to Jersey City to get away from New York.

For decades, Indians have immigrated to the United States, joined our communities, and raised their families while maintaining their cultural heritage.

We need to promote creedal national identities built around the foundational ideas of modern liberal democracy, and use public policies to deliberately assimilate newcomers to those identities. Liberal democracy has its own culture, which must be held in higher esteem than cultures rejecting democracy's values.

Over recent decades, the European left had come to support a form of multiculturalism that downplayed the importance of integrating immigrants into the national culture. Under the banner of antiracism it looked the other way from evidence that assimilation wasn't working. The new populist right, for its part, looks back nostalgically at a fading national culture that was based on ethnicity or religion, a culture that was largely free of immigrants or significant diversities.