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7 Jewish highlights from the new Museum of Broadway
(New York Jewish Week) — There’s a reliably funny Twitter account called @JewWhoHasItAll, which imagines a universe where nearly everyone is Jewish and those who aren’t are the outliers.
That’s the sensation I got on a visit to the Museum of Broadway, which opened last month. A three-story tribute to the Theater District located in its very heart, it is organized around a series of rooms dedicated to landmark musicals and plays, and the majority bear the stamp of Jewish creators: Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s “Showboat,” Richard Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!”, Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story,” Stephen Sondheim’s “Company,” Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”
Other projects dedicated to the history of Broadway aren’t shy about noting the over-representation of Jews in the business. “Broadway Musicals: A Jewish Legacy,” a documentary that seems to run on a nearly endless loop on my local PBS station, notes that “over the [first] 50-year period of its development, the songs of the Broadway musical were created almost exclusively by Jewish Americans.”
If the Museum of Broadway acknowledges this, I didn’t notice. Some might take this as an omission or a snub, the way critics objected when a new museum about the history of Hollywood initially overlooked the essential Jewish contribution to the movie business. But in this case, the Jewishness of Broadway is taken as a given. You’d have to be culturally illiterate not to notice how many of the most celebrated creators are Jewish: In addition to the musical tributes, there are wall placards singling out the contributions of Sondheim and the director Harold Prince, a corner devoted to “Fiddler on the Roof” and a gallery celebrating Joe Papp (born Joseph Papirofsky) and his Public Theater, that reliable pipeline of breakthrough Broadway shows.
(There were, however, frequent mentions of the specifically African-American contributions to Broadway. That seemed a deliberate attempt to counter perceptions that Broadway is indeed the “Great White Way.”)
The museum, whose opening was delayed by the pandemic, is a collaboration with Playbill, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS (which is supported by a portion of the stiff $39 admission charge), the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, Concord Theatricals and Goodspeed Musicals. Its approach is chronological, with a timeline that pulls visitors from room to room, from vaudeville, through Broadway’s “Golden Age” and up to the present. Original costumes and props are on display in Instagram-ready settings that resemble the original sets for various shows.
Among the paraphernalia and stagecraft are a number of Jewish highlights. Here are seven:
A whirligig of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals
A sample of Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, on display at the Museum of Broadway. (NYJW)
Just past the cornstalks celebrating the ground-breaking 1943 musical “Oklahoma!” is a wall display showcasing the duo’s most important collaborations, including “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “Flower Drum Song” and “The Sound of Music.” Rodgers, working with Hammerstein and before him Lorenz Hart, wrote more than 900 songs and 41 Broadway musicals. Combine that with Hammerstein’s work with Kern, and it is hard to imagine two more important figures in the history of musical comedy.
Jerome Robbins’ notes on “West Side Story”
Choreographer Jerome Robbins suggested a “seder” scene in an early conception of what became “West Side Story.” (NYJW)
Look closely at this list of proposed scenes for a musical based on “Romeo and Juliet” and you’ll see the word “seder.” Robbins, the choreographer, originally proposed that the show focus on a star-crossed love story between a Jewish girl and an Irish boy, but he and his fellow Jewish collaborators — composer Leonard Bernstein, lyricist Stephen Sondheim and playwright Arthur Laurents — soon felt the interfaith idea had already been exhausted in plays like “Abie’s Irish Rose.” When the show premiered in 1957, the gangs were Puerto Rican and a medley of ethnic whites.
Florence Klotz’s costume “bible”
Florence Klotz won six Tony Awards for her costume designs. (NYJW)
Costume designer Florence Klotz frequently collaborated with Prince and Sondheim. The museum displays her sketches for Sondheim’s “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Born in Brooklyn, Klotz would win six Tony awards. She died in 2006. The museum also includes an entire floor dedicated to the “backstage” talent: costume and set designers, stage managers, prop masters and writers.
A shrine to “Company”
A display at the Museum of Broadway celebrates a recent revival of “Company.” (NYJW)
Sondheim and Prince emerge as the museum’s lodestars. “Their intense and fruitful partnership and their creative trailblazing in [the 1970s] resulted in an extraordinary artistic innovation and a slew of provocative new works,” a wall card proclaims. “Company” (1970) was a largely plotless exploration of urban anomie. The museum calls it a “frank, even painful look at modern life,” perfectly attuned to the upper-middle class theatergoers who, it says, are the “backbone” of the Broadway audience. It’s the show people love or hate if they love or hate Sondheim. The “Company” exhibit includes photos of the original cast and spare set, and a backdrop that draws on the recent gender-bending revival.
A tribute to Joseph Papp
Costumes from productions that originated at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater on display at the Museum of Broadway. (NYJW)
Joe Papp flipped the script on how shows made it to Broadway: His Public Theater produced edgy off-Broadway plays that drew audiences downtown, and then successfully transferred that same buzz to the “Big Stem.” Papp, a son of Yiddish-speaking parents who grew up in a Brooklyn slum, founded the New York Shakespeare Festival. A section of the museum includes costumes and posters from important productions that originated at The Public — including wildly popular revivals of “The Pirates of Penzance” and “The Threepenny Opera” — and a dress Meryl Streep wore in her Broadway debut, in “Trelawny of the ‘Wells.’” Two other musicals developed at The Public — “Hair” and “A Chorus Line” — get their own tribute rooms.
Al Hirschfeld’s barber chair
A room at the Museum of Broadway includes works by the famed caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. (NYJW)
The museum has an entire gallery dedicated to the work of artist Al Hirschfeld and his caricatures of Broadway stars and productions from 1923-2001. His pen-and-ink drawings were a visual shorthand for “Broadway,” and it would sometimes seem that the stars he drew would come to resemble his drawings, not the other way around. The museum includes his wonderfully kooky Barbra Streisand in “Funny Girl” and a bearish, brooding Zero Mostel as Tevye. On display is a barber chair similar to the one he used in his studio (the original had fallen apart by the 1990s).
A stage set from “The Producers”
An exhibit space at the Museum of Broadway evokes the scenery from the Mel Brooks musical “The Producers.” (NYJW)
You can sit behind a desk and pretend you are Broadway producer Max Bialystock, who was played by Nathan Lane in the phenomenally successful 2001 musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’ 1967 film about the worst musical ever staged for Broadway. The display is a reminder of the impact of the show, and not only on ticket prices: It proved the viability of adapting movies for Broadway, and earned a record-setting 12 Tony Awards. The museum calls the musical, with its tap-dancing Nazis and sweet and conniving Jewish protagonists, a “glittering homage to Broadway’s past” — a past that is unmistakably Jewish.
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The post 7 Jewish highlights from the new Museum of Broadway appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.
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Trump’s Peace Board Hands Hamas Disarmament Proposal, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., U.S., February 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has presented Hamas with a written proposal on how it could lay down its weapons, two sources said, a step the Palestinian terrorists have thus far refused to take as the US president pushes on with his plan for Gaza’s future.
The proposal, first reported by NPR, was submitted to Hamas during meetings in Cairo over the past week, one of the sources said. The talks were attended by Nickolay Mladenov and Aryeh Lightstone, the two sources familiar with the matter said.
Mladenov is the Trump-appointed Board of Peace envoy to Gaza. Lightstone is a US aide to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff.
Trump’s Gaza plan, to which Israel and Hamas agreed in October, sees Israeli troops withdrawing from Gaza and reconstruction starting as Hamas lays down its weapons.
Mladenov on Thursday said that serious efforts were underway to bring relief to war-torn Gaza, with a framework agreed by the mediators that could advance reconstruction in the enclave, much of which lies in ruins.
“It is now on the table. It requires one clear choice: full decommissioning by Hamas and every armed group, with no exceptions and no carve-outs. In this season of hope, may those responsible make the right choice for the Palestinian people,” Mladenov said on X in a post for the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr.
Representatives of Hamas were not immediately available for comment on Saturday, the second day of the holiday. Talks on disarmament had been placed on hold at the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran which began on February 28.
AMNESTY OFFER MAY BE ON THE TABLE
US officials have said that Iran-backed Hamas could be offered amnesty in any deal under which they agree to lay down any heavy weaponry and light arms including rifles.
Sources close to Hamas say the group would likely refuse to give up their rifles for fear of attacks by rival militias in Gaza, some of which have backing from Israel. Hamas and its rivals have staged deadly attacks on one another since the October ceasefire.
One of the sources said much would depend on what is acceptable to Israel, which demands the group’s complete disarmament.
Some of Hamas’ prominent officials have outright rejected any disarmament over the past few months.
Israel has shown no sign of withdrawing its troops who are in control of around half of Gaza’s territory, with Hamas keeping a firm grip on the other half of the enclave and its two million population, most of which has been rendered homeless by two years of devastating war.
The source said that amnesty and targeted investments in Gaza were being offered as incentives for Hamas, but said that it was unclear whether the Board of Peace would have funds to pay for it.
Trump garnered some $7 billion in pledges in February from countries, including some in the Gulf, before those same countries came under attack by Iran in a widening Middle East war.
The source said that only a small amount of those pledged funds had actually been provided, without specifying sums.