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By Root 786 0

’s a great play,” from his box when it was performed in Washington, D.C., and to whom the published version is dedicated. I shared Roosevelt’s vision of a nation peopled by citizens who would cut their ethnic ties—an “America for Americans” in which the hyphenation of identity was a “moral treason.” This, after all, was the ideal I had absorbed at home—Roosevelt, too, spoke of the “one hundred percent American.” Even now, I am moved by the American ethic of inclusion, which contrasts so sharply with the Japanese ethic of exclusion. I question only the price of admission.

The Melting Pot captures a great sociological truth about assimilation—that older generations cannot assimilate and that younger generations cannot help but assimilate. I can read the three generations of Zangwill’s play against my own family history—my grandparents, who died Japanese; my parents, who toggle between the two countries; and I, who am now inexorably American. And yet one of the reasons I cannot embrace Zangwill’s play is that the fit is not entirely true.

I think of my name, which is more Japanese than my father’s American name. When my father came to the States, no one could pronounce his first name. So he asked a friend to rechristen him. He has used his “American” name for his entire professional career. If Zangwill’s narrative of the melting pot were truly my own, my parents should have given me an American name—the Mendels of his generation should have ceded to the Davids of mine. Yet they did not.

Even as a child, I found this curious, especially given that there were names that worked in both languages—Ken and Dan and Eugene for boys, Naomi and Amy and Kay for girls—that odd concatenation of Jewish and Irish lexicons. If my parents had truly wanted me to be “one hundred percent American in America, one hundred percent Japanese in Japan,” they could have chosen one of these names.

For many years, I felt my name misrepresented me. The character for Ken is that for “health,” the character for ji means “leadership.” Neither noun seemed to describe the quiet child I was. Yet now I see my parents encoded a wish in my name—a wish that I could live in an America that would not force me to surrender my ethnicity. They must have intuited that people with white-sounding names fare better than individuals with ethnic ones. But they flaunted a little, on my behalf.

SEX-BASED COVERING

The portraits that range the walls of this Yale Law School classroom are, with one exception, of men. They figure honored graduates—judges, professors, and deans. As the seats ripple from the lectern in scalloped tiers that widen as they rise, these portraits hover like a row of backbenchers, whose flushes will never fade, whose hands will never fall. We who reason under their gaze are scraps of unrecorded history.

The seventy people sitting in this classroom tonight are, with few exceptions, women. We are law students, faculty, and staff who have come to a town-hall meeting to discuss the charge that the law school disadvantages women.

In 2001, when this meeting takes place, women have made national headlines for comprising more than half the nation’s entering law-school class. The day the story broke, one of my female students worried aloud the profession would lose prestige if it came to be associated with women.

I think she, at least, should be reassured by these portraits, which testify that men still dominate law’s upper echelons. According to the American Bar Association, women in 2001 made up only 15 percent of federal judges, 15 percent of law firm partners, 10 percent of law school deans, and 5 percent of managing partners of large law firms. While some believe this is just a “pipeline” problem, others are less sanguine. Confirming that differential treatment persists, law professor Deborah Rhode shows that men in legal practice still earn about $20,000 a year more than comparably qualified women and are at least twice as likely to make partner. A 2000 ABA Journal poll showed female lawyers to be less optimistic about professional opportunities