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New Holocaust Musical Gives Hope Amid Despair of Global War on Israel
Watching actor Jacob Ben-Shmuel refer to a boy whose parents were killed by Nazis in the stunning new musical Amid Falling Walls, I could not help but think of 12-year-old Ariel Zohar from Kibbutz Nahal Oz. His parents, Yaniv and Yasmin, as well as his sisters, Techelet and Keshet, were murdered by Hamas when he went out for a jog on the morning of October 7.
Two days later, the team at The National Yiddish Theatre Folksbeine (NYTF) began rehearsals for its musical, which takes the audience to ghettos in Warsaw, Vilna, Lodz, Cracow, as well as labor camps and forests from 1939 to 1945. The show is now playing at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan, and the company had decided to do Amid Falling Walls a year earlier.
“Every moment in rehearsal was infused with our concern,” Zalmen Mlotek, artistic director of the NYTF, said in an interview. He also said that his daughter is in Israel, and that many cast members have relatives there.
Yael Eden Chanukov, who was born in Haifa and grew up in San Diego, plays Esther, and had the most emotive facial expressions of any cast member.
“I felt myself connecting so much to the material,” Chanukov said. “Before, I would have said the only thing that separates me from these Holocaust survivors is time. My family are all Holocaust survivors. Seeing these horrific things that I never thought I would see in my lifetime informed a lot of the work and weirdly made it healing and therapeutic to do every night, especially with how the show ends. I’m helpless to do anything in the sense that I’m not in Israel, but this feels like a small way to do something.”
Steve Skybell, who starred at Tevye in the Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof that ran off-Broadway and at NYTF, here is Mordkhe, and he grounds the show with a palpable intensity.
Rachel Zatcoff, who plays Mina, nailed two epic high notes. While nearly all of the 28 songs were stellar, one standout was “Mues,” or “Money,” a jazzy upbeat tune with plenty of wow factor and sass, due to the delivery of Daniella Rabbani, who plays Khane. Some of her relatives are Holocaust survivors, and others are from Iran.
“I feel like if I wasn’t doing this show I might collapse in grief,” Rabbani said. “I have the opportunity to step into the shoes of my ancestors who never lost their dignity, never lost their creativity, and never lost their connection to the divine, to music, to each other, and to rage. It gives me peace, perspective, and chizuk [strength] to perform. One of the songs I sing, ‘Moshe Halt Zikh’ is about not losing hope, because at the time people were committing suicide. The message is not to give up.”
Two actors who light up the stage are Abby Goldfarb and Eli Mayer, who respectively play Sore and Moyshe. Both have movie-star looks and ooze with charisma.
“A show like this is important no matter what’s going on or what century we’re in,” Goldfarb said. “The plan was to do this a year ago. Selfishly, this is a distraction from everything online. But it’s amazing that during the Holocaust these people were able to create music and performances. I think it says a lot about the capacity of the human spirit.”
The show includes testimony from noteworthy figures, including Holocaust survivor Wladislaw Szpilman, famously played by Adrian Brody in The Pianist. I cried at three different moments, and many in the row I sat in did as well.
The show is a rush of oxygen in a time when it has been difficult to breathe. While we cannot unsee the horrors we have seen, or unhear the haunting screams we have heard, we can be presented with the power of our people and a history that tells us those who seek to cause our demise end up sealing their own fate.
Not long after the performance I saw, a kosher restaurant on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was vandalized, with its main window shattered.
Slated to run until December 10, this production is a gem of a show, and you should not miss it. Presented in Yiddish, with subtitles in English and Russian, the experience is user friendly. Several audience members told me the show gave them a sense of hope.
While I don’t know if there is any intention to try to push the show to a bigger life, the musical performances are certainly good enough. It might require scenes with more exposition by Skybell, as well as a love story between the characters played by Goldfarb and Mayer. Many of the songs are obscure, but some are well known, like “Ani Maamin” and “Piskhu Li.”
The show is directed by Matthew “Moti” Didner, with choreography by Tamar Rogoff.
The author is a writer based in New York.
The post New Holocaust Musical Gives Hope Amid Despair of Global War on Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Former Columbia University President Appointed as UK Economic Adviser
Columbia University administrators and faculty, led by President Minouche Shafik, testified before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, 2024. Photo: Jack Gruber/Reuters Connect
i24 News – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named Minouche Shafik, former president of Columbia University, as his chief economic adviser at Downing Street, a move aimed at stabilizing the country’s fragile economy and averting a potential budget crisis.
Shafik, an economist of Egyptian origin with dual British and American nationality, has held senior roles at the Bank of England, the IMF, and the World Bank.
She later led the London School of Economics and was elevated to the House of Lords in 2020.
Her tenure in the United States was more turbulent. Shafik stepped down as president of Columbia University in 2024 after just a year in office, amid fierce criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protests following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
US officials accused her of failing to confront antisemitism on campus, while students and faculty condemned her decision to call in police to dismantle protest encampments.
Since returning to Britain, Shafik has played an active role in policy and cultural institutions. She advised Foreign Secretary David Lammy on international aid reform, has chaired the Victoria & Albert Museum since January, and led the “Economy 2030” inquiry for the Resolution Foundation, where she argued for reforms to the UK’s system of wealth taxation.
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Israel Mulls West Bank Annexation in Response to Moves to Recognize Palestine
The Jordan Valley. Photo: Юкатан via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is considering annexation in the West Bank as a possible response to France and other countries recognizing a Palestinian state, according to three Israeli officials and the idea will be discussed further on Sunday, another official said.
Extension of Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank – de facto annexation of land captured in the 1967 Middle East war – was on the agenda for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet meeting late on Sunday that is expected to focus on the Gaza war, a member of the small circle of ministers said.
It is unclear where precisely any such measure would be applied and when, whether only in Israeli settlements or some of them, or in specific areas of the West Bank like the Jordan Valley and whether any concrete steps, which would likely entail a lengthy legislative process, would follow discussions.
Any step toward annexation in the West Bank would likely draw widespread condemnation from the Palestinians, who seek the territory for a future state, as well as Arab and Western countries. It is unclear where US President Donald Trump stands on the matter. The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar did not respond to a request for comment on whether Saar had discussed the move with his US counterpart Marco Rubio during his visit to Washington last week.
Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the prime minister supports annexation and if so, where.
A past pledge by Netanyahu to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley was scrapped in 2020 in favor of normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office.
The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The United States said on Friday it would not allow Abbas to travel to New York for the United Nations gathering of world leaders, where several US allies are set to recognize Palestine as a state.
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Israel Pounds Gaza City Suburbs, Netanyahu to Convene Security Cabinet
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone.”
“They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave,” said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu’s security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas’ last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in.
HAMAS SPOKESPERSON TARGETED
Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israeli forces had targeted Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Abu Ubaida was killed. Two Hamas officials contacted by Reuters did not respond to requests for comment.
Gaza health authorities said 15 people, including five children, were killed in the attack on a residential building in the heart of Gaza City.
Abu Ubaida, also known as Hozayfa Al-Khalout, is a well-known figure to Palestinians and Israelis alike, close to Hamas’ top military leaders and in charge of delivering the group’s messages, often via video, for around two decades, delivering statements while wearing a red keffiyeh that concealed his face.
The US targeted him with sanctions in April 2024, accusing him of leading the “cyber influence department” of al-Qassam Brigades.
In his last statement on Friday, he warned that the planned Israeli offensive on Gaza City would endanger the hostages.
On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the enclave is equipped to absorb, with shortages of food, shelter and medical supplies.
“People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others, including myself, didn’t find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded,” said Ghada, a mother of five from the city’s Sabra neighborhood.
Around half of the enclave’s more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.