A Musical Interlude: He Hadn’t Up Till Yesterday (Sophie Tucker)

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Have you ever wondered what America would look like now if the great migration of Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe between 1890 and 1924 had never taken place, and instead millions of Muslims had arrived? What songs, what singers, would have come out of Tin Pan Alley and Broadway? Would there have been a Tin Pan Alley? And don’t stop there in your counterfactual imaginings. Continue with, say, science and technology, conducted,in universities, in pharmaceutical companies, in industry, in the Defense Department. What would have happened? What would Europe look like now, if the Muslims had not started arriving just a few decades ago, but a century ago? And what will Europe look like, a half-century from now? Don’t flinch. Think about it.