Ends of Assimilation examines how Chicano literature imagines the conditions and costs of cultural change, arguing that its thematic preoccupation with assimilation illuminates the function of literature. John Alba Cutler shows how mid-century sociologists advanced a model of assimilation that ignored the interlinking of race, gender, and sexuality and characterized American culture as homogeneous, stable, and exceptional. He demonstrates how Chicano literary works from the postwar period to the present understand culture as dynamic and self-consciously promote literature as a medium for influencing the direction of cultural change. With original analyses of works by canonical and noncanonical writers--from Américo Paredes, Sandra Cisneros, and Jimmy Santiago Baca to Estela Portillo Trambley, Alfredo Véa, and Patricia Santana--Ends of Assimilation demands that we reevaluate assimilation, literature, and the very language we use to talk about culture.

Presenting an analysis of American assimilation theory Bash attempts to dissect the concept and what it has come to mean in the United States. After tracing the "natural history" of the assimilation notion and later its theoretical elaboration, he explores far more theoretical linkages by way of concept formation and theory construction in the area of racial and ethnic group relations.

The most comprehensive Zionist collection ever published, The Zionist Ideas: Visions for the Jewish Homeland—Then, Now, Tomorrow sheds light on the surprisingly diverse and shared visions for realizing Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Building on Arthur Hertzberg’s classic, The Zionist Idea, Gil Troy explores the backstories, dreams, and legacies of more than 170 passionate Jewish visionaries—quadruple Hertzberg’s original number, and now including women, mizrachim, and others—from the 1800s to today. Troy divides the thinkers into six Zionist schools of thought—Political, Revisionist, Labor, Religious, Cultural, and Diaspora Zionism—and reveals the breadth of the debate and surprising syntheses. He also presents the visionaries within three major stages of Zionist development, demonstrating the length and evolution of the conversation. Part 1 (pre-1948) introduces the pioneers who founded the Jewish state, such as Herzl, Gordon, Jabotinsky, Kook, Ha’am, and Szold. Part 2 (1948 to 2000) features builders who actualized and modernized the Zionist blueprints, such as Ben-Gurion, Berlin, Meir, Begin, Soloveitchik, Uris, and Kaplan. Part 3 showcases today’s torchbearers, including Barak, Grossman, Shaked, Lau, Yehoshua, and Sacks. This mosaic of voices will engage equally diverse readers in reinvigorating the Zionist conversation—weighing and developing the moral, social, and political character of the Jewish state of today and tomorrow.

When immigrants leave their home country to live in a host country that has a different culture, the acculturation process begins. There is subtle cultural, social, and political pressure on immigrants to adopt the cultural values of the host nation. The acculturation process occurs over time. Exposure to a new culture is often stressful, as one is exposed to new values, beliefs, and behaviors that may be different from their home culture. Strategies for Cultural Assimilation of Immigrants and Their Children: Social, Economic, and Political Considerations increases awareness of the cultural assimilation process among parents, children, employers, and educators. This book discusses internal conflicts and promotes harmony and understanding. Covering topics such as civic literacy, mental health, and identity formations, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for sociologists, psychologists, government officials, educators and administrators of both K-12 and higher education, students of higher education, librarians, researchers, and academicians.

An argument that the way we listen to speech is shaped by our experience with our native language. Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.