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A family-friendly Jewish play explores themes of forgiveness with puppets, music and more

(New York Jewish Week) — Just in time for the High Holidays, a new, family-friendly Jewish play will make its Off-Broadway debut on Sunday, Sept. 10.
“Out of the Apple Orchard” is based on the first book of Yvonne David’s acclaimed “Apple Tree” series. The two-book series — a third is forthcoming — follows the Jewish Bieman family as they immigrate from a shtetl in Lithuania, first to New York City and then to the Catskill Mountains. Adam Bieman, the boy whose family life is chronicled in the series, is inspired by the author’s own son, who was coming of age when she began writing the books.
Premiering at Actors’ Temple Theater (339 West 47th St.) on Sunday, just days before Rosh Hashanah, “Out of the Apple Orchard” explores themes of forgiveness and reconciliation — perfectly timed for Judaism’s annual season of self-reflection. During the Jewish months of Elul and Tishrei, which fall in the late summer/early fall, Jews are encouraged to look within, connect to who they’ve been and who they want to be. “Out of the Apple Orchard” follows a Jewish family at the turn of the last century that is doing just that — and in doing so provides audiences with an opportunity for both fun and introspection.
“This play has so many layers,” director Nicole Raphael told the New York Jewish Week. “It’s all about unfolding the story and its complexities. We really see things from the children’s points of view. They see the sentimentality for the Old Country, but also the harsh reality of pogroms and Cossacks; the love that permeates family life, but also the very real mistakes both adults and children make.”
“The play really asks how to handle mistakes, how to mend your ways,” she added. “To me, this is such an important theme — and especially during Rosh Hashanah.”
The “Out of the Apple Orchard” script was crafted by Ellen W. Kaplan, professor emerita of acting and directing at Smith College, who worked closely with David and Raphael to create a staged version that would bring the philosophy behind the story to the fore.
The play opens with Adam Bieman dreaming that he and his Bubbe are in a sepia-toned photograph. The picture comes alive as the family matriarch relates tales of the shtetl — setting the scene for what is to come. When the play premiered in Orlando in 2016, the staging of this scene was reminiscent of the nightmare sequence from “Fiddler on the Roof.” In the New York production, however, the ancestors aren’t warning of changes to come. Instead, Bubbe is detailing the brutality of the pogroms and the importance of leaving Lithuania for a new life.
The year is 1910, and the Bieman family leave Europe to find their fortunes in America. After a time on the Lower East Side of New York City, though, Adam’s father becomes ill. The Biemans are advised to head to the Catskills, with the idea that mountain air will do Papa a world of good. So they head north.
But the Catskills are as harsh as the city or the shtetl, albeit in different ways. Poverty persists. Papa is still ill. The family is hungry. Adam, tempted by ripe red apples in a nearby orchard, shoves some pieces of fruit under his hand-me-down cap. Later, riddled with guilt, he becomes haunted by his thievery. Through this and other travails, Adam and his family are faced with a central question: How can they retain their moral understanding of the world when hardship abounds?
“The story is almost a continuation of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’” Raphael said. “Imagine what would happen when Tevye arrived on the Lower East Side — you know, so many immigrants got sick at the turn of the last century. Adam’s Papa was a brilliant tailor, but now he’s sick. Still, he brought his family to America, did everything so they could to thrive. We want the audience to fall in love with Papa, to appreciate him for how he tries to support his family.”
And, indeed, Adam’s Papa cares deeply about his family. He worries about not being able to care for them, conceding eventually that they should help him sew the suits he was once famous for making. “With my family helping me finish the suits, we will not starve,” he says in his central scene. “My heart is kvelling and swelling with love.”
Throughout the play, a fiddler, portrayed by Victoria Chaieb (who both performs and wrote the violin music), follows Adam across the stage, emphasizing his internal process. Ben Rauch composed and orchestrated an original score inspired by traditional Yiddish and Jewish melodies and, to a lesser extent, vaudeville-inspired songs.
Extensive puppetry adds an otherworldly — even mystical — air to the staging, too. For example, as the young protagonist descends into a spiral of guilt over his thievery, a large red bird flutters around him. In the book, Adam simply glimpses a red bird as he dwells on his moral dilemma while at school. “It’s visually thrilling,” author David told the New York Jewish Week. “It represents Adam’s conscience.”
In addition to directing the play, Raphael has created an accompanying curriculum in partnership with Park Avenue Synagogue, where she’s a second-grade Hebrew school teacher. The lessons include themes of teshuva, or repentance, Yiddish culture and the Jewish history of the Catskill Mountains. Eventually, she envisions the play and the curriculum being distributed across the country and used in classrooms everywhere. “I see this as the continuation of our oral history, both for our communities and everyone else in the modern day,” she said. “I’ve been an educator in Manhattan for 15 years at different synagogues; I really feel that directing the play and developing the companion curriculum is like everything I’ve worked on all coming together.”
While the themes of the play are rooted in Jewish culture and history, Raphael and David both told New York Jewish Week they see the play’s overarching theme as a universal one.
“There’s so much upsetting divisiveness in this country,” David said. “I think we need to come together. We’re squandering our lives on anger and discrimination. In the end, we’re all in this world together and it’s up to us to make the best of everything, not the worst.”
“Out of the Apple Orchard” is playing at Actors’ Temple Theater (339 West 47th Street) from Sunday, Sept. 10 through Thursday, Sept. 14. Tickets and info here.
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Union Antisemitism Running Rampant on College Campuses, Experts and Student Tell US Congress

Illustrative: Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Experts told the US Congress on Tuesday that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), which was represented among the expert witnesses, has spoken publicly before about a litany of alleged injustices to which UE officials subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University.
At MIT, the group said in August, “union officers” aided a riotous mob which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee on Tuesday about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.
“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,’” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”
Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.
“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Kyle Koeppel Mann, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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German Police Arrest 5 Anti-Israel Activists After Break-In, Vandalism Targeting Elbit Systems

Demonstrators attend the “Lift the Ban” rally organized by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Authorities in Germany on Monday arrested five activists linked to the anti-Israel network Palestine Action after the group broke into an Elbit Systems building in the southern city of Ulm, vandalizing the facility with red paint, smoke bombs, graffiti, and smashed windows before occupying an upper floor in an effort to oppose the Jewish state’s war to dismantle the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The officers who responded surrounded the building and apprehended the suspects. The state’s Security and Counterterrorism Center then took over the investigation.
Video posted by Palestine Action showed masked figures hurling paint, breaking through doors, and damaging equipment inside the facility owned by the Israeli defense contractor, which the activist group and recently proscribed terrorist organization has regularly targeted. The vandals claimed they had sought “to dismantle the tools used to commit genocide in Gaza.”
Elbit released a statement condemning the crime.
“Elbit Systems Deutschland GmbH is a German company and has been a reliable partner of the Bundeswehr for many years in protecting democracy and freedom in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal acts of destruction and vandalism committed at our site over the weekend,” the defense firm stated. “It is unacceptable that violent groups, presumably under the influence of foreign agitators, are repeatedly attempting to disrupt production processes in Ulm, seeking to endanger employees and to instill fear.”
The company added that “we have been an attractive employer and a driver of technical innovation in the Ulm region for decades, and we trust in the support of the authorities in quickly solving the latest crimes and restoring the status quo. The company is working that production of systems for the German Armed Forces at the Ulm plant will resume shortly.”
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, labeled the attack on Elbit an act of terrorism.
“In Ulm, the branch of an Israeli company was attacked by masked perpetrators — presumably motivated by left-extremist, Israel-hostile intent,” he wrote on X. “While Hamas supporters smash windows here, terrorists in Jerusalem murder 6 civilians in a brutal attack on a bus. Anyone who attacks Israel — whether with words, deeds, or weapons — simultaneously assaults our shared security and our values. Antisemitism and terror must have no place in Germany. These attacks are terrorist acts — they must be clearly named and harshly punished.”
Prosor was referring to a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Monday in which Hamas terrorists opened fire on a bus, murdering six Israelis and injuring several more.
The break-in is the latest in a concerted campaign of vandalism and intimidation carried out by Palestine Action across Europe. Founded in the UK in 2020, the group has specialized in spectacular stunts and property destruction aimed at shutting down Elbit facilities and other companies the group regards as complicit in an alleged genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its activists have smashed factory windows, chained themselves to gates, poured red paint over equipment, and even attacked military planes at a Royal Air Force base.
The UK regards Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. On Sunday, police announced the arrests of almost 900 at a demonstration organized in support of the group. Charges included 857 alleged to support a banned extremist entity and 17 alleged assaults.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart said of the event that “the violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people … intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”
James “Fergie” Chambers, an American heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, pays the legal fees of arrested Palestine Action members. He once wrote online, “I chant death to America every day” and that “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.”
Richard Barnard, a co-founder of the UK-designated terrorist group, is scheduled to face trial next year on “one count of inviting support for a proscribed organization, namely Hamas, under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act and two counts of encouraging ‘criminal damage’ against Israeli weapons factories under s44 of the Serious Crime Act.”
Barnard stated in a June 2024 interview that he had previously broken into US Air Force bases in Germany. In October 2023, he said that “when we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood [Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel], we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.”
Huda Ammori, another co-founder of Palestine Action, also expressed her enthusiasm for the mass slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Zionists spend 75 years stealing Palestinian land but fails [sic] to take away the Palestinian determination for liberation. Palestine will be free!” Ammori wrote on the day of the attack. “If armed thugs stormed your home, forced you and your family to live in the garage, routinely beat you and starved you. Would you fight back? #FreePalestine.”
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‘End Hate’: Major New Campaign Targets Antisemitism in K-12 Schools

Pro-Hamas activists calling themselves the United Front for Liberation lead march through Valley Plaza Mall. The ‘Ceasefire’ rally began at Wilson Park in Bakersfield, California, on Dec. 16, 2023. Photo: Jacob Lee Green via REUTERS CONNECT
EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism on Tuesday, launching its new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement on Tuesday. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Creeping antisemitism in public education is a growing problem, as The Algemeiner has reported previously. In June, for example, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) raised alarms when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents obtained by The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Another module reviewed by The Algemeiner contains a question based on a May 15, 1948, statement from The Arab League — a group of countries which adamantly opposed Jewish immigration to the region in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel and refused to condemn antisemitic violence Arabs perpetrated against Jewish refugees — after Israel declared its independence. The passage denies that Jews faced antisemitic indignities when the land was administered by the Ottoman Empire, a notion that is inconsistent with the historical record, and asserts that “Arab inhabitants” are “the lawful owners of the country.”
Following the passage, students are asked to agree with its content as a prerequisite for proceeding to the next module. That means selecting as the correct answer the choice which says “the creation of Israel failed to consider Arab interests.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday, Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of EJH and The Lawfare Project, a partner organization, said the Wissahickon case highlights the degree to which antisemitism and anti-Israel bias has planted itself in public schools.
“What we’re seeing in colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization in schooling, in reality, starts much earlier,” Filitti said. “We’re seeing lesson plans which push the idea that Israel is a genocidal state, or that it is an illegitimate state. We see faculty and administrators who do not support Zionist identity and reject that it can be the basis of discriminatory hate.”
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” he added. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The problem has taken hold in private schools as well, according to a recent Anti-Defamation Leage (ADL) survey.
Among surveyed school parents, 25.2 percent said their children had experienced or witnessed antisemitic symbols in school since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the data showed. Perhaps more striking, 45.3 percent of surveyed parents reported that their children had experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and 31.7 percent said their children had “experienced or witnessed problematic school curricula or classroom content related to Jews or Israel.”
Parents are displeased with schools’ handling of the issue, the ADL said. Focus groups told its experts that schools decline to denounce antisemitism or resort to denying altogether that it is fostering a negative learning environment which causes student discomfort and precipitous declines in academic performance. In a poll, over a third of parents have said their local school’s response “was either somewhat or very inadequate.”
Moreover, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which were purportedly meant to improve race relations, abstain from recognizing antisemitism as a form of hatred meriting a focused response from administrators. The Algemeiner has previously reported that many of those programs also ignore antisemitism because they actively contribute to spreading it. Due to this, schools often lack authority figures who understand antisemitism, its subtle and overt variations, leaving Jewish students with no recourse when they become victims of hate.
“These independent schools are failing to support Jewish families. By tolerating — or in some cases, propagating — antisemitism in their classrooms, too many independent schools in cities across the country are sending a message that Jewish students are not welcome. It’s wrong. It’s hateful. And it must stop,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement at the time. “ADL is partnering with parents to demand change.”
ADL vice president of advocacy, Shira Goodman, added: “School administrators and faculty have a duty to ensure safe, inclusive environments for all. ADL will fully invest in bolstering the families who are demanding that their schools meet this obligation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.