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A Florida bill attacking ‘critical theory’ in higher education has the state’s Jewish academics worried
(JTA) — The University of Florida has more Jewish students than any other public college in the United States — and last week, one of them reached out to a professor, fearing that it would no longer be possible to study Jewish topics there.
Citing a graphic that had been making the rounds on social media, the student asked if it was true that a new bill working its way through the state legislature would remove all “Jewish Studies courses, majors and minors” in the state. The graphic was shared by several people with large online followings, including comedian D.L. Hughley, who has more than 750,000 followers on Twitter.
“I love my major and I can’t imagine switching to anything else,” the student wrote, according to Norman Goda, director of the university’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Goda wasn’t able to console the student. Like other Jewish academics in Florida who spoke to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he doesn’t know whether H.B. 999 would affect Jewish studies on the state’s college campuses. Though the bill’s author — a Republican state representative — says that won’t be the case, the bill’s language is much less clear.
That’s because the bill’s current wording would forbid the state’s public higher education institutions from teaching or offering any major or minor based in “methodology associated with Critical Theory.” That prohibition, say academics and other critics of the bill, would make teaching courses in Jewish studies impossible — and would also outlaw many other fields in higher education.
Exactly what the bill means by “critical theory” is unclear. To academics, the term refers to a tool for analyzing society and culture, created in the 1930s by German Jewish academics, that encourages people to view the world through power structures, and to consider why they fall short. To political conservatives, it’s a relative of “critical race theory,” a watchword for those who want to inhibit classroom instruction about racism. An earlier version of H.B. 999 mentioned only critical race theory, not the umbrella theory.
“These people don’t know what they’re talking about,” said a Jewish faculty member at a Florida university, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from the state government, regarding the lawmakers behind H.B. 999. “You’re putting people who don’t know what critical theory is, but have heard the words — and now you’re putting them in charge of universities.”
A university that completely purged such ideas from its classrooms, the anonymous faculty member said, “would be non-existent.”
The bill in question is the latest example of conservative-led state efforts to snuff out culture-war modes of thought like critical race theory and gender studies, often referred to euphemistically by lawmakers as “divisive concepts” in education. Such efforts have occasionally ensnared efforts to teach Jewish history and the Holocaust.
Attempts to legislate the classroom are particularly potent in Florida, where Republican governor Ron DeSantis, a likely presidential candidate, has frequently stated his desire to ban “woke” concepts from being taught in the state. (DeSantis has stated he will wait to see H.B. 999’s final form before he decides whether to sign it, but in a discussion with college administrators last week he continued to rail against what he called the “ideological agenda” of campus diversity, equity and inclusion programs.)
The state recently rejected the curriculum for a new Advanced Placement African-American Studies course in high schools, forcing the College Board to rework the class. Florida is also home to several active conservative “parents’ rights” groups that have lobbied to remove objectionable books and clubs from public schools.
While most legislation in this realm to date has targeted what’s taught in K-12 public schools, this bill and other efforts in Florida have gone a step further by seeking to regulate the world of state-funded higher education — creating what critics say are new and dangerous threats to academic freedom, with broad and vague wording that leaves efforts to research and teach a variety of disciplines in doubt.
“This bill would cripple the long-standing freedom universities have to design and teach a curriculum based on the development of academic disciplines,” Cary Nelson, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Association of University Professors ,who has taught multiple courses on Jewish issues, told JTA.
In a recent subcommittee hearing on the bill, Republican state Rep. Alex Andrade, who co-authored the legislation, said, “I believe that state universities should be focused on teaching students how to think, not what to think.” He said the bill’s banning of “radical” ideologies referred to “a system meant to direct and promote certain activism to achieve a specific viewpoint.”
Efforts to limit the material taught to children and college students are underway in several states. But Florida has an especially large population of Jewish students. The University of Florida stands atop Hillel International’s ranking of public colleges with the highest proportion of Jewish students, and the University of Central Florida has the third-largest. Florida State University, Florida International University, Florida Atlantic University and the University of South Florida also rank in the top 60.
H.B. 999 would affect education at those schools in other ways, too. The bill, which recently advanced to committee, would overhaul the state’s post-tenure review process, so that instead of checking on a faculty member’s research productivity every five years, as is currently the case in the state, tenured professors could face reviews “at any time for cause” including “violation of any applicable law or rule.”
The result, one academic in the state said, would be “open season on faculty,” who could be out of a job if their university’s board — which, in public schools, is beholden to the governor — disagrees with their syllabus.
Andrade rejected the idea that H.B. 999 would undercut Jewish studies in Florida.
“Outsiders are wrong. Ethnic studies are not affected by the bill either by the bill’s intent or the bill’s language,” Andrade wrote in an email to JTA, accusing the bill’s critics of “lying and claiming that Florida’s leaders have tried to ban teaching black history in schools.”
The state’s only Jewish Republican legislator, state Rep. Randy Fine, did not return a JTA request for comment on whether he supports the bill. Fine has promoted similar culture-war legislation in the past, including a bill he co-authored in February that would prohibit all K-12 schools in the state from referring to either students or employees by pronouns that do not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth.
With a Republican-dominated House and Senate, some form of H.B. 999 seems likely to reach DeSantis’ desk. (A parallel bill in the state Senate does not contain wording on critical theory.) But there is strong opposition from the academic community. Groups including the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Professors and Florida’s statewide faculty union have harshly condemned the bill and urged lawmakers to oppose it.
The American Historical Association’s statement on the bill this month calls it a “blatant and frontal attack on principles of academic freedom and shared governance central to higher education in the United States.” More than 70 academic, historical and activist organizations co-signed the statement.
The executive committee of the Association for Jewish Studies signed a different statement authored by the American Council of Learned Societies, decrying the bill as an “effort to undermine academic freedom in Florida.”
“If it passes, it ends academic freedom in the state’s public colleges and universities, with dire consequences for their teaching, research, and financial well-being,” the statement said of the bill. “Academic freedom means freedom of thought, not the state-mandated production of histories edited to suit one party’s agenda in the current culture wars.”
Asked for comment on the bill, Warren Hoffman, the executive director of the Association for Jewish Studies, pointed to the statement.
Rachel Harris, director and endowed chair at Florida Atlantic University’s Jewish Studies program, is in her first semester at the university, having just arrived from the University of Illinois. “I’m now wondering if that was a terrible mistake,” she joked. (Harris is spending this term in Israel, researching on a Fulbright fellowship.)
Still, Harris said she was “confident” that legislators would “continue to support educational commitments in the state,” noting that Florida has a Holocaust education mandate for K-12 public schools. Her Boca Raton university is currently building an expanded center for Jewish and Holocaust studies, funded by private donors. H.B. 999 in its current form would prohibit universities from teaching critical theory concepts even when such programs are privately funded.
Despite what he described as a few students at the Jewish Studies center who are concerned about the new bill, Goda said he did not think the legislation would change the experience of Jewish students on his campus.
“Jewish kids these days are really choosing universities based on whether or not Jewish kids feel comfortable there,” he said. “And I would argue that [the University of Florida] is a very welcoming campus for Jewish kids overall. There are strong Jewish institutions associated with the campus.”
Instead, he feels the bill’s real effects would be felt in the state’s ability to recruit faculty and staff while its legislators jeopardize academic freedom, tenure and other lodestars of the humanities. He said, “The real question to me is how and in what way it’s going to be enforced.”
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Iran’s Leaders, Like Pharaoh, Won’t Budge Until They Pay a Real Price for Their Wickedness
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
There is a particular kind of self-destructive confidence that exists only at the very top of a brutal regime. It isn’t courage, and it certainly isn’t principle. It’s raw hubris, reinforced by a self-belief so detached from reality that objective facts become little more than a distraction.
Napoleon spent his final days as leader of France convinced that one more maneuver could reverse his fate, even as Europe closed in around him. And 130 years later, in a Berlin bunker, Hitler issued orders to imaginary divisions as the Third Reich disintegrated above his head.
If you’ve been watching events in Iran over the past couple of weeks, that same detached hubris has been on full display. As protests spread from city to city – sparked by economic collapse and rapidly morphing into thousands openly calling for regime change – the response from the Islamic Republic’s highest echelons has been depressingly familiar: extrajudicial killings, mass arrests, internet blackouts, and the ritual denunciation of protesters as “vandals,” “terrorists,” or foreign agents doing America and Israel’s bidding.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has conveniently hidden himself away from any public contact, insists that the Islamic Republic “will not back down.” President Masoud Pezeshkian has expressed sympathy for the economic pain endured by ordinary Iranians, even as he authorizes the brutal crackdown.
Protesters have been shot and killed, hospitals are overwhelmed with casualties, and the death toll – including police and government workers – continues to climb, all while the leadership doubles down, as though sheer refusal to yield can still bend reality to its will.
It’s horrifying. But it’s also strangely predictable. Authoritarian regimes rarely collapse because they recognize their mistakes; they collapse when the protective bubble around their leaders finally bursts. Until that moment, what passes for strength is not power at all, but blindness — an inability to see the wood for the trees.
By the time you read this, the Iranian regime may have fallen, or it may have clawed its way through yet another crisis. Either way, the pattern is unmistakable, and the writing is on the wall: systems built on fear and insulation eventually join their predecessors in the dustbin of history.
Religious narrative often prefigures political reality. Which brings us to Pharaoh, the antihero of the opening chapters of the Book of Exodus. We first encounter him in Parshat Shemot as a brutal dictator, imposing unbearable suffering on the Hebrews through enslavement, persecution, and ultimately genocide.
By the time we reach Parshat Va’era, the stakes have escalated dramatically. Pharaoh refuses to relent to Moses’ demands to free the Hebrews, and Egypt is struck by a cascade of calamities: its water supply is contaminated, frogs overrun homes, lice infest the land, and so it goes on.
Life in Egypt grinds to a halt. The economy is crippled, normal existence becomes impossible, and yet, despite all this, Pharaoh barely flinches.
The Torah tells us that Pharaoh’s heart is hardened — first through his own stubbornness, and eventually by God, who gives him the strength to resist pressure to alleviate the suffering of his people.
But that explanation only deepens the puzzle. Why is Pharaoh so immune to the devastation unfolding around him? Why doesn’t he learn? Why doesn’t he adjust? Why does each plague simply provoke the next act of defiance?
The easy answer is that Pharaoh is wicked. But that answer isn’t very satisfying. Wicked people can still be pragmatic, and history offers plenty of examples of evil tyrants who knew when to retreat. Pharaoh doesn’t — and the reason is subtle but crucial.
Like so many brutal rulers across history, Pharaoh never truly experiences the consequences of his stubbornness personally. His advisers plead, the people suffer, the nation groans — but Pharaoh himself remains untouched. Power has wrapped him in cotton wool. He is insulated from reality, and it is precisely that insulation that allows him to harden his heart.
The Torah is teaching us something uncomfortable here. The most dangerous leaders are not the ideologues or the fanatics, but those who never pay a price for being wrong. When suffering is always outsourced – to citizens, soldiers, or convenient scapegoats – there is no internal mechanism that forces change.
And that is exactly what we are seeing in Iran. The clerical elite and the Revolutionary Guard leadership are not standing in breadlines. Their children are not dodging bullets in the streets. Their electricity has not been cut, their access to water remains secure, their wealth is intact, and their personal safety is guaranteed. The pain is being borne entirely by others – and so, like Pharaoh, they respond to an existential crisis not with reform or retreat, but by doubling down on repression and violence.
There is a tragic irony here, borne out by countless historical examples – from the time of Pharaoh through the four millennia that have followed. The more violence a regime unleashes, the clearer it becomes that it has run out of ideas.
Brutality against the people a government claims to represent and protect is not strength – it is the language of exhaustion. When leaders can no longer persuade, they intimidate. When they can no longer inspire fear, they escalate it instead.
It is precisely this dynamic that plays out in ancient Egypt. Each plague strips away another illusion of control, but instead of adapting, Pharaoh tightens his grip. He banishes Moses – the one person capable of ending Egypt’s day-to-day nightmare – and in doing so inflicts wave after wave of suffering on his own people.
The Torah does not portray Pharaoh as a strategic mastermind undone by clever tactics. It portrays him as a man trapped by his own power, unable to imagine a world in which he is not obeyed.
That, ultimately, is why the plagues have to escalate. Only when Pharaoh’s firstborn son dies in Parshat Bo – and Pharaoh, himself a firstborn, suddenly fears for his own life – does he finally relent, and even then, only briefly.
Hubris returns almost immediately. He pursues the Hebrews in a last, futile attempt to destroy them or drag them back into slavery, and his army is annihilated at the Red Sea. The Midrash leaves Pharaoh alive, the sole survivor, condemned to live on as a witness to the ruin he brought upon himself and his people.
History suggests that this pattern is remarkably consistent. Regimes that respond to dissent with ever harsher measures, deaf to the realities unfolding around them, are not demonstrating strength but buying time – and borrowed time always runs out.
Whether Iran’s current uprising ends tomorrow, next month, or further down the road is impossible to know. What is clear is that we have seen this story before, not only in modern history, but in the Torah itself.
Pharaoh’s story reminds us that hearts hardened by power rarely soften while there is still a chance to escape the deluge. Change is imposed when consequences can no longer be deflected, and when a system built on fear finally collapses under the weight of its own cruelty.
Pharaoh learned that lesson too late. History has been relearning it ever since.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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‘All Time Is Unredeemable’: A Core Message for Israel
Smoke billows following missile attack from Iran on Israel, at Tel Aviv, Israel, June 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Gideon Markowicz ISRAEL
“If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.” — T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Behind the current noise about Iran, Hamas, America, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, etc., are much deeper conceptual issues. Accordingly, whatever the tangible facts of its strategic and tactical challenges, Israel will need to approach all potentially existential calculations at a conceptual level. In this connection, nothing could prove more important than variously contradictory ideas of time.
Precisely, what are the relevant contradictions? Though Israel lives according to “clock time,” its jihadi adversaries (both state and sub-state terror groups) regard all mechanistic chronologies as a theological profanation. It follows, inter alia, that pertinent conceptual differences on time could have major policy implications for the Jewish state’s management of war and terror.
All this will sound excruciatingly theoretic. Nonetheless, a clarifying bifurcation could be crucial to Israel’s survival. Israel’s jihadi enemies believe in “sacred time,” not “clock time,” a core belief that encourages “martyrdom operations.”
Plausibly, “over time,” these discrepant concepts of temporality and chronology could enlarge risks of a major war, including a nuclear war. To wit, even before Israel would have to face any operational nuclear adversaries, Jerusalem could find itself caught up in an “asymmetrical nuclear war.” The fact that only Israel could employ nuclear ordnance during such a conflict does not mean that Israel would necessarily avoid significant military harms.
There is more. At some point, a state enemy could become a “suicide bomber in macrocosm.” For Israel, no such force-magnification could ever be “acceptable.” Not to be minimized or overlooked in these sui generis calculations is that Israel is less than half the size of America’s Lake Michigan.
For Jerusalem, policy-relevant issues should always be framed in legal and military terms. Though generally unrecognized, Israel’s jihadi adversaries (a category that now includes reconfiguring terror groups in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Qatar, and other places) define true victory as “power over death.” For these recalcitrant foes, becoming a “martyr” (a shahid) represents “power over time.” Prima facie, there could be no comparable or greater form of power.
Because “clocks slay time” — a famous observation by American writer William Faulkner — narrowly objective chronologies would prove injurious for Israel. But what should constitute a suitably personalized and policy-centered theory of time for decision-makers in Jerusalem? It’s a demanding but imperative question.
In purposeful reply, history deserves pride of place. By ironic coincidence, the complex notion of temporality as “felt time” or “subjective time” has its origins in ancient Israel. By rejecting time as a linear progression, early Hebrews generally approached the issue as a matter of qualitative experience. Among other things, the associated view identified time as logically inseparable from its personally infused content.
In terms of prospective nuclear threats from adversaries, Israeli planners should consider temporality at the level of individual decision-makers. For example, “What do authoritative enemy leaders think about time in shaping their operational military plans?” For Israeli leaders, there could be no more urgent question.
There is more. From its beginnings, the Jewish prophetic vision was one of an imperiled community living “in time.” Within this formative vision, political geography or “space” was vitally important, but not because of territoriality.
The importance of specific geographic spaces stemmed from certain unique events that had presumably taken place therein. Eventually, a subjective metaphysics of time, a reality based not on equally numbered moments but on “time as lived,” could impact ways in which (1) jihadi enemies choose to confront the Jewish state; and (2) Israeli decision-makers choose to confront these enemies.
In the final analysis, a worst case for Israel would be to face an already nuclear and seemingly irrational enemy state. Any such adversary could reasonably be described as a “suicide bomber in macrocosm.” Simultaneously, Jerusalem could need to deal with a “suicide bomber in microcosm,” i.e., an individual “flesh-and-blood” jihadi terrorist armed with crude or “small” nuclear weapons. In further elaboration, a radiological weapon or radiation dispersal device should come to mind.
What else should Israel know about time? Among Islamists at every level, “martyrdom” is accepted as the most honorable way to soar above clock time or “profane time.” Looked at from a dispassionate perspective, this “heroic suicide” is accepted by jihadists as the optimal way to justify mass murder of “unbelievers.” Ironically, because such alleged self-sacrifice is expected to confer “power over death,” it does not properly qualify as a suicide. In law, it is always an inexcusable homicide.
It’s time for conclusions. From the standpoint of Israel’s most urgent survival concerns, the time-sensitive adversary could be an individual jihadi terrorist, a sovereign enemy state, or both acting together. In the third scenario, the effects of a state-terrorist fusion could be not merely interactive, but also synergistic. This would mean that a “whole” injury inflicted upon Israel would be greater than the sum of its “parts.” The dangers to Israel of any such unprecedented synergy would be most catastrophic if the pertinent enemy state was nuclear or soon-to-be nuclear.
Sometimes, the strategist can learn from the poet. For T.S. Eliot, “all time is unredeemable.” With this unchallengeable insight in mind, an immediate goal for Israel’s defense policy planners should be a fuller awareness of jihadi capabilities and intentions “in time.” Such a deliberately enhanced understanding could ultimately prove crucial to both counterterrorism and nuclear war-avoidance.
Prof. Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and scholarly articles dealing with international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism. In Israel, Prof. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Sharon). His 12th and latest book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed., 2018).
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The exceptional actress in the Yiddish film ‘I Have Sinned’
איינער פֿון די פֿילמען וואָס מע ווײַזט די וואָך ווי אַ טייל פֿונעם ניו־יאָרקער ייִדישן קינאָ־פֿעסטיוואַל איז דער פּרעכטיקער ייִדישער פֿילם ,,על חטא“.
דער פֿילם, וואָס איז געמאַכט געוואָרן אין פּוילן אין 1936, איז געווען אַ וויכטיקע דערגרייכונג אין דער געשיכטע פֿון ייִדישן קינאָ. ער איז געווען דער ערשטער ייִדישער פֿילם מיט קלאַנג און דיאַלאָג, און האָט אויך געשילדערט אַ גאָר מאָדערנע טעמע.
איך האָב אַליין געזען דעם פֿילם אויפֿן מעלבורנער „דשיף“ אינטערנאַציאָנאַלן פֿילם־פֿעסטיוואַל אין אָקטאָבער 2025, און ער האָט אויף מיר געמאַכט אַ שטאַרקן אײַנדרוק. עס שילדערט נישט בלויז דאָס ייִדישע לעבן אין שטעטל, די ראָלע פֿון רעליגיע אין טאָג-טעגלעכן לעבן, די מנהגים און די שוועריקייטן פֿון די שטעטל־ייִדן, נאָר אויך ווי פּראָגרעסיוו און בראַוו איז געווען דער אויסבליק פֿון די שרײַבער און אָנטיילנעמער אין ייִדישן טעאַטער און פֿילם אין יענער צײַט.
דער רעזשיסאָר, אַלעקסאַנדער מאַרטען, און די שפּילער האָבן נישט מורא געהאַט אָפֿענערהייט צו באַטראַכטן אַ טעמע וואָס איז דעמאָלט געווען פֿאַרבאָטן. דער פֿילם דערציילט ווי אסתּר, אַ יונגע טאָכטער פֿונעם שטעטל רבֿ, פֿאַרשוואַנגערט מיט אַן אָפֿיציר פֿון אַרמיי. דער פֿילם באַשרײַבט אירע שוועריקייטן און קאָנפֿליקטן אַלס אַ נישט־חתונה געהאַטע, וואָס זי באַשליסט צו טאָן און וואָס געשעט ווײַטער. די באַרימטע קאָמיקער דזשיגאַן און שומאַכער שפּילן דאָ הױפּט־ראָלעס. מיר זײַנען צוגעװוּינט צו זען דזשיגאַן און שומאַכער אין סלעפּסטיק און קאָמישע שטיק. דאָ אָבער זעען מיר אַ טיפֿערן אויסטײַטש אין זייער אויסשפּילונג — קאָמעדיע געמישט מיט דראַמע און איידלקייט.
די הױפּט־ראָלע פֿון אסתּר שפּילט די אויסגעצייכנטע אַקטריסע רחל האָלצער. דאָ באַװײַזט זי מיט האַרץ און געפֿיל, פֿאַרװאָס זי איז געװאָרן אַ װעלט־באַרימטע ייִדישע אַקטריסע. איר אויסטײַטש איז פּרעכטיק און רירנדיק. עס איז װערט קוקן דעם פֿילם פּשוט צו זען און אָנערקענען איר ראָלע.
רחל האָלצער איז געװען אַ הױפּט־שפּילער און רעזשיסאָר אינעם נאַציאָנאַלן פּױלישן טעאַטער, און אויך אין דער װילנער טרופּע. אין „על חטא“ איז זי שוין געווען אין די יונגע דרײַסיקער, נאָר זי שפּילט דאָ סײַ די ראָלע פֿון אסתּר ווי אַ יונג מײדל, סײַ אסתּר ווי אַן עלטערע פֿרױ. אין 1939, דרײַ יאָר נאָך דעם וואָס „על־חטא“ איז אַרױס, איז רחל געװען מיט איר מאַן, דעם באַקאַנטן דראַמאַטורג חיים ראָזענשטיין, אין מעלבורן ווי טייל פֿון אַ װעלט־טור. זײ זײַנען געקומען כּדי צו שטעלן איר סאָלאָ־פּיעסע, װען עס איז אױסגעבראָכן די צװײטע װעלט־מלחמה, און זײ האָבן נישט געקענט זיך אומקערן קײן פּױלן. אַ דאַנק זייער זײַן אין אויסטראַליע זענען זײ געראַטעװעט געוואָרן פֿון דעם חורבן, און זײַנען ביז זייער טױט געבליבן אין מעלבורן.
אין אױסטראַליע איז רחל האָלצער אויפֿגעטראָטן אױף די גרעסטע בינעס מיט גרויסן דערפֿאָלג. אין 1940 האָט זי, צוזאַמען מיט יעקבֿ װײַסליץ, געשאַפֿן דעם „דוד הערמאַן טעאַטער“ אין מעלבורן וואָס איז געבליבן אַקטיוו מער ווי פֿערציק יאָר. זי האָט אױך ווײַטער געשפּילט אין סאָלאָ־פֿאָרשטעלונגען. זעקס טויזנט מענטשן האָבן זי למשל געהערט רעציטירן יעווגעני יעווטאָשענקאָס ליד „באַבי־יאַר“ אינעם מעלבורנער שטאָטזאַל. צווישן זיי: יעווטאָשענקאָ אַליין. די וועלכע האָבן עס געזען און געהערט האָבן געזאָגט אַז עס איז געווען, ווי אַלע אירע פֿאָרשטעלונגען, אומפֿאַרגעסלעך.
איך האָב נישט געקענט רחל האָלצערן ווי אַ יונגע אַטקריסע, און געדענק זי נאָר אַלס אַן עלטערע פֿרױ. אָבער זי האָט קײנמאָל נישט פֿאַרלױרן איר עלעגאַנץ, איר שײנקײט. זי איז געװען די מלכּה פֿון דער ייִדישער טעאַטער און איז געבליבן אַ מלכּה, אַפֿילו אין אירע נײַנציקער, ווען איך האָב זי באַזוכט אין אַ מושבֿ-זקנים.
איך האָב אויך געהאַט אַ פּערזענלעכן שײַכות צו רחל האָלצער. איר מאַן, חיים ראָזענשטיין, איז געװען דער ברודער פֿון מײַן באָבעס מאַן, מאָטל ראָזענשטיין. נישט געקוקט אויף דעם װאָס חיים און מאָטל זײַנען בײדע געשטאָרבן איידער איך בין נאָך געווען אויף דער וועלט, האָב איך געװוּסט אַז זי איז אַ װײַטע קרובֿה, און איך פֿלעג זי זען אינעם ייִדישן קולטור־קלוב אין מעלבורן, „קדימה“, אָדער בײַ מײַנע עלטערן. און אַוודאי אויך אויף דער בינע.
ווען איך בין געווען דרײַצן יאָר אַלט האָב איך געהאַט אַ ספּעציעלע איבערלעבונג מיט איר. מיר זײַנען ביידע געווען אין „קדימה“, אינעם גרױסן זאַל װוּ מע האָט אָפֿט געשפּילט ייִדישן טעאַטער. איך האָב רעציטירט אַ דראַמאַטישע פּאָעמע אויף דער בינע. נאָך דער פֿאָרשטעלונג איז רחל האָלצער צוגעקומען צו מיר, מיך אָנגעכאַפּט בײַ דער האַנט, און מיט אַ שמײכל פֿון נחת געזאָגט: „דו ביסט מײַן משפּחה, דו ביסט מײַן משפּחה!“ אַזאַ כּבֿוד פֿון דער קעניגין פֿון ייִדישן טעאַטער האָב איך נישט דערװאַרט! איך האָב דעמאָלט נישט פֿאַרשטאַנען די גרױסע מתּנה װאָס זי האָט מיר געגעבן מיט די װערטער. איך וועל דאָס קײנמאָל נישט פֿאַרגעסן.
דער גרױסער זאַל און די בינע זענען הײַנט אַן אַלגעמיינער קינאָ־הויז. װען איך האָב אין נאָוועמבער דאָרט געקוקט דעם פֿילם „על חטא“, בין איך געזעסן ממש נאָר אַ פּאָר רײען פֿונעם אָרט, וווּ רחל האָלצער האָט אַמאָל גענומען מײַן האַנט און מיך אַזוי וואַרעם באַגריסט.
פֿאַר די פֿון אײַך וואָס וועלן דעם זונטיק זען „על חטא“ אויפֿן ניו־יאָרקער ייִדישן קינאָ־פֿעסטיוואַל, װעט איר האָבן אַ געלעגנהײט אַליין צו זען רחל האָלצערס וווּנדערלעכן טאַלאַנט ווי אַן אַקטריסע. דאָס אַליין איז ווערט דאָס גאַנצע געלט.
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