#assimilation

#assimilation

It's a standard trope in portrayals of assimilated Jews to open with a scene built around a Christmas tree. That's how Tom Stoppard's " Leopoldstadt" and Alfred Uhry's " Last Night of Ballyhoo" begin, and also Ian Buruma's memoir about his grandparents, " Their Promised Land." The idea is, as soon as you show that, you've got the audience's full attention, especially if it's a Jewish audience, because it's so peculiar.

If you go back to the 1920s, the United States passed an Immigration Reform Act that effectively cut down immigration to close to zero for 40 years in this country. And what happened over those 40 years? The many, many people who had come from many different foreign countries and different foreign cultures, they assimilated into American culture.

But the truth is, when you've got the situation we have with wide open borders under Biden and Mayorkasor, importantly, through the legal channels with the abuse of H-1B visas, the abuse of diversity visas, the abuse of chain migrationwhen you have people that are being put on welfare And you know, they denied it for a long time because it does not sell very well. But they're basically acknowledging it.

On many college campuses, tensions are sharper than ever, and for some students and faculty, simply sharing an idea carries a deep sense of hesitation. My work over the past several decades has focused on teaching evidence-based thinking to navigate such charged environments. This approach becomes especially relevant when we consider the twin processes psychologists call assimilation and accommodation, which describe how we learn and adapt to new information.