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‘An American Tail’ musical adaptation hopes its Jewish immigration story will resonate in 2023
(JTA) — Itamar Moses was 10 years old when he watched “An American Tail” at his Jewish day school in California. He was struck by the 1986 film, an animated musical about a family of Russian-Jewish mice who immigrate to America. Even though he was surrounded by Jewish classmates and teachers, he had never seen a cartoon with Jewish protagonists.
“Watching this mainstream hit American animated movie where the central character and the central family were specifically Jewish — it was unusual,” Moses told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think there was something that felt inclusive to us about that.”
Now a Tony Award-winning playwright, Moses has adapted the children’s classic for the stage. “An American Tail the Musical” will premiere at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis on April 25 and run through June 18. Along with writing by Moses, who won his Tony for a Broadway adaptation of the Israeli film “The Band’s Visit,” the new production features familiar songs such as “Somewhere Out There” and new music and lyrics by Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Musical”). The team hopes to tour the show if it has success in Minneapolis.
The original film created by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg follows the journey of a young, tenacious mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz. Fievel’s family lives below the human Moskowitz family in Shostka, a city in the Russian Empire, in 1885. Spielberg, who had yet to make “Schindler’s List” or widely address his Jewish family history, named the character after his maternal grandfather — Phillip or “Fievel” Posner — an immigrant from Russia.
The movie begins with the Mousekewitzes and the Moskowitzes celebrating Hanukkah when Cossacks tear through Shostka in an antisemitic pogrom, together with their animal counterparts — a battery of evil cats. The Mouskewitzes flee Europe and board a ship to America, where Papa Mouskewitz (voiced by Nehemiah Persoff) promises “there are no cats” and “the streets are paved with cheese.” But a thunderstorm at sea washes Fievel overboard, leaving his devastated parents and sister to arrive in New York City without him. Although they believe he did not survive, Fievel floats to shore in a bottle and sets out to find his family.
Of course, he quickly learns there are cats in America — along with corruption and exploitation. Fievel is sold to a sweatshop by Warren T. Rat, a cat disguised as a rat. A crooked mouse politician called Honest John (a caricature of the real Tammany Hall boss John Kelly) wanders Irish wakes, scribbling dead mice’s names in his list of “ghost votes.” But Fievel finds camaraderie with other immigrant mice rallying for freedom from the cats’ attacks and Warren T. Rat’s extortion. He befriends Italian mouse Tony and Irish mouse Bridget, who join the quest to reunite his family.
The film’s metaphors will be presented similarly in the stage version, which is also set in the 1880s, although Moses has expanded its lens on the immigrant groups that populated New York at the time. The musical will incorporate more “mice” communities, such as Chinese, Caribbean and Scandinavian mice, along with African Americans and former slaves.
A scene from rehearsal. (Kaitlin Randolph)
“An American Tail” was part of a shift in mainstream media toward Jewish representation, said Jennifer Caplan, an assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati who has studied this cultural change.
“It came out in 1986, and then ‘Seinfeld’ premiered in 1989,” Caplan told the JTA. “People point to 1989 as this moment when representations of Jews changed. There was this feeling in the late ‘80s that people were looking for new, different, possibly even more explicit representations of Jews.”
Yet despite the movie’s resonance with children like Moses, some film critics complained that it wasn’t Jewish enough. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film “two thumbs down” on a 1986 episode of their program “At The Movies,” calling it “way too depressing” for children and arguing that it “chickened out” of an explicitly Jewish story. Ebert noted that while most adults would understand the Mousekewitzes were Jewish, the word “Jewish” never appears in the film, potentially leaving young audiences in the dark.
“This seems to be a Jewish parable that doesn’t want to declare itself,” he said at the time.
Unlike in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats, the cat-and-mouse metaphor of “An American Tail” is expansive. The cats represent a universal force of oppression — Cossacks in Russia or capitalists in America — while the mice encompass all persecuted immigrants, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or national origin.
Caplan admitted that some might not have seen it as a Jewish story at the time.
“In 1986, we’re right at the birth of the multicultural push in American schools,” said Caplan. “You’ve got kids who are learning about the melting pot. I think if you are not looking for the coded Jewishness and you’re not familiar with it, then this just seems like a movie about immigrants.”
But Moses, who said the movie held a “mystical place” in his imagination, did not view the story’s broad allegory as a shortcoming. Instead, he saw an opportunity to pull its continuous thread for a message he hopes will feel relevant today: that while immigrants discover inequality and abuse in America, the forces of injustice are changeable, and that people can overcome life’s harsh realities through “grit and hard work and coming together.”
“That message is always timely, but definitely coming out of the last few years and the conversations that America is having about immigration,” said Moses. “I wanted to tell this story that’s really a fable, so you can get at these ideas indirectly as opposed to in a dry, didactic way.”
Jodi Eichler-Levine, a Jewish studies professor at Lehigh University, argued the tale’s success lies in being a “story of Jewish immigration that appeals to non-Jews as well” and called the movie a “fairytale about America.” It premiered 100 years after the Statue of Liberty’s dedication in 1886, amid centennial celebrations of the country’s immigration history. In the film, the statue comes alive, winking at Fievel and his sister once they find each other and look west at the vast expanse of the United States.
Itamar Moses won acclaim for adapting “The Band’s Visit” for Broadway. (Courtesy of Moses)
Whether viewers still buy into the optimistic crescendo of “An American Tail” remains to be seen. Do Americans still believe, as Moses hopes, that immigrants and oppressed peoples can unite to overthrow the tyrants of unfettered capitalism? A Gallup poll from February showed that Americans’ satisfaction with the country’s level of immigration has dropped to 28%, the lowest point in a decade.
Moses is betting that children’s theater has a way of refreshing themes adults have exhausted with political discourse. Children want to grapple with the ideas at the core of the show, he said, such as “the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective, the need to go out on your own but still remain connected to your family and your background.”
“The most successful material for kids tends to engage with real things that they’re thinking about and worrying about,” he said.
Today, another wave of families has fled Fievel’s hometown: though Shostka was part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, it is now in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. The Sumy Oblast was among the first regions stormed by Russian forces in February 2022 and continues to suffer daily shelling. Eichler-Levine expects that global refugee crises will only continue to broaden the appeal of a migration story.
“The ideas [in An American Tail] are sadly relevant for most of the planet right now, given that climate change and devastation from war are leading to another tremendous wave of global migration,” said Eichler-Levine.
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Why is the biggest soccer team in the world talking about Joseph Goebbels?
The biggest rivalry in international soccer — between Real Madrid and FC Barcelona — has erupted in recent months, as Madrid pushes the Spanish soccer federation to punish Barca for alleged referee bribery.
But the ugly sparring between the clubs took an unexpected turn last week when Spanish league president Javier Tebas entered the fray with a shocking comparison.
“Real Madrid’s management directs an orchestra of mouthpieces and Real Madrid TV leads the singing,” Tebas wrote Oct. 15 on X. “Their score is always the same: select the plays that suit them, repeat the grievance, feed the suspicion, and point fingers at the enemies.
“That method recalls propaganda mechanisms exploited by Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s minister of propaganda: systematic repetition, construction of an enemy, and subordination of facts to the narrative.”
Real Madrid, which has employed such stars as Cristiano Ronaldo and David Beckham, condemned the remark with a statement calling for Tebas’ resignation both from the Spanish league, La Liga, and the Royal Spanish Football Federation, where Tebas serves as vice president.
“Real Madrid C. F. considers it absolutely intolerable and extraordinarily serious that someone holding two positions of utmost responsibility in Spanish football resorts to a comparison with the propaganda methods of the Nazi regime to discredit our club, its management, and its television,” the club wrote Oct. 16.Tebas has thus far refused to resign or even take down the post, and has defended his critique by pointing to other Spanish leaders who have made similar comparisons in the past.
The Goebbels controversy comes amid growing concerns about antisemitism in Spain, including in sports, where thousands of protesters blocked an Israeli-branded cycling team from competing in the Vuelta race last year.
The bribery accusations against Barcelona first surfaced in 2023, when it was revealed the club had paid millions of dollars to companies linked to the former vice president of the Spanish refereeing body, José María Enríquez Negreira. A Spanish court dismissed the bribery charges in 2024, but the investigation continued, and earlier this month Madrid submitted a tranche of documents it said proved the bribery claims.
The conflict between the club and Tebas dates back at least to 2021, when Madrid club president Florentino Perez spearheaded a breakaway international league that would have threatened Spanish competition. Barcelona had also agreed to join the so-called Super League, but the plan was scuttled after enormous backlash from fans across the continent.
Joseph Goebbels, one of Hitler’s most devoted followers, led the German Propaganda Ministry after the Nazi party came to power in 1933. He and his wife died by suicide in 1945 after killing their six children with cyanide.
The post Why is the biggest soccer team in the world talking about Joseph Goebbels? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s election may hinge on whether Netanyahu’s opposition will accept Arab support
Israel’s approaching election is developing into an extraordinary paradox: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government presided over the catastrophe of Oct. 7 and whose record since has been a succession of security failures, assaults on democracy, capitulations to Haredi interests and international embarrassments, may yet survive politically because his opponents cannot bring themselves to accept the parliamentary support of Israel’s Arab citizens.
The polls have tightened, the opposition has conducted a strangely timid campaign, and U.S. President Donald Trump’s endorsement of Netanyahu over the weekend introduces an unpredictable element into a contest that should by any reasonable accounting be a referendum on utter failure. Yet given the picture emerging in the polls, the decisive question is whether the opposition’s leaders possess the courage to reach out to the one-fifth of Israelis who are Arabs – who are expected to vote in very high numbers on Oct. 27.
Since 1973, Israel’s classic center-left has never secured an election-day parliamentary majority without the seats of Arab parties. Yitzhak Rabin’s victory in 1992, for example, depended on a parliamentary balance that included Arab representatives, whose support later became essential to his government’s survival. By most credible polls, that is the picture that emerges now, and with that support, the opposition could become a comfortable majority of close to 70 of the 120 Knesset seats.
But things are not so simple. In 2020, most of the Joint Arab List – an alliance of Arab parties in Israel – recommended opposition leader Benny Gantz for prime minister, producing a numerical majority that collapsed because several opposition lawmakers simply could not stomach the prospect. But the Naftali Bennett-Yair Lapid government that removed Netanyahu in 2021 included the Arab party Ra’am, demonstrating that cooperation across this divide was possible even among politicians with profound disagreements about national identity and the question of a Palestinian state.
Throughout these episodes, the challenge was the elementary democratic principle that the votes of Arab citizens should carry precisely the same weight as those of Jewish citizens. And yet there are complications with these political alliances: the Arab parties are not “Zionist” – and more relevantly, they have real difficulty in a situation that involves conflict with the Palestinians, who are their non-citizen brothers and sisters.
Netanyahu has spent years exploiting the discomfort of his opponents with this reality, transforming the prospect of Arab political influence into a weapon against anyone seeking to replace him. During this election, his campaign has placed particular pressure on Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, portraying any government of his, if it’s dependent on Arab parties, as compromised from the outset.
Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and other opposition leaders are trying to win over former right wing voters who may have tired of Netanyahu’s endless scandals and failures – but those voters also have serious reservations about the Arab parties. So their prevarications are not hard to understand.
There is, of course, a double standard: Netanyahu routinely counts on the ultra-Orthodox parties, whose demands for military exemptions, public subsidies and educational autonomy have profound consequences for Israel’s security, economic resilience and civic solidarity. Their representatives are treated as legitimate negotiating partners whose seats belong automatically in the right-wing bloc, even when, indeed, they call themselves non-Zionist.
Arab political leaders are now offering the opposition passive support in parliament for free, meaning they do not even demand a seat at the government table. According to all credible polls, the opposition plus the Arab parties should have a comfortable majority after the Oct. 27 vote.
Mostly Muslim, with Christian communities and the distinct Druze population, these citizens share aspects of the language, culture and historical grievances of the surrounding Arab world while participating in the institutions, economy and daily life of the Jewish state. Two stories convey this complexity.
The first: A wounded Jewish reservist, a new immigrant and Technion engineer, was driving toward a hospital for treatment of a hand injured during service in Lebanon when police stopped him for speeding last year. As the Maariv newspaper’s columnist Ben Caspit reported, the reservist presented documentation of his medical circumstances, yet the officers, who were Jewish, issued a fine and delayed him despite the potential danger to his injured finger, behaving at times with an astonishing lack of consideration.
The case eventually reached a court, where the fine was canceled in a ruling that criticized the enforcement as falling short of reasonable, proportionate and fair administrative discretion. The judge was Rasha Saadi Atamna, an Arab woman whose decision recognized the wounded soldier’s service and circumstances while holding an institution of the Israeli state accountable to its own standards. It was a recognition denied by fellow Jews.
The second: On the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, Youssef Ziadna, a Bedouin minibus driver from Rahat who had dropped off a group of young people at the Nova music festival, showed extraordinary courage.
When Hamas launched its massacre, one of his passengers called desperately for help, and Ziadna drove toward the festival, entering an area where gunmen were murdering civilians and vehicles were fleeing in panic. Near the Gaza border communities, a man running from the slaughter warned him to proceed no further, and moments later gunfire sent Ziadna and others diving into a roadside ditch.
The danger was clear, the route home was available, and every ordinary instinct of self-preservation pointed toward escape. Ziadna instead continued toward the festival, found the people who had summoned him, collected other terrified and wounded Israelis and eventually squeezed roughly 30 passengers into a minibus designed for 14. Drawing on his knowledge of the terrain, he drove across fields and away from the gunmen, with other fleeing Israelis following behind him.
The people Ziadna carried to safety were Jewish Israelis, while his own Bedouin community was suffering murder and abduction in the same assault. Speaking to Israel Radio during Oct. 7 commemorations, he explained his decision in words that deserve to resonate far beyond the immediate story of his heroism: “I could have turned around and did a U-turn, but my conscience wouldn’t let me. I am a human being first. We have to live together in this very fine country of ours.”
The election, of course, will be decided by parliamentary arithmetic rather than inspiring anecdotes, and the stakes extend well beyond the composition of the next coalition.
Consider the government’s continuing failure to confront Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, where extremist settlers have now assaulted an American journalist and European diplomats in successive days. Heidi Levine, a Washington Post photographer whom I have known for decades, was brutally beaten while covering the Palestinian olive harvest, suffering injuries requiring surgery.
The following day, settlers attacked European diplomats and a French mayor near the Christian village of Taybeh. Netanyahu’s response was to question the evidence, emphasize the diplomats’ failure to coordinate with the army and suggest a campaign to smear settlers. Such indulgence of violent extremists disgraces Israel and accelerates its international isolation.
Trump’s endorsement this weekend of Netanyahu may influence some voters, but the fundamental choices belong to Israelis.
Let’s hope they are more thoughtful than to listen to the U.S. president and reelect a leader who would endanger lives by continuing to block an Oct. 7 inquiry, redouble efforts to instill an elected dictatorship, continue to absolve the Haredim of military duty, do nothing to stem the disgrace of Jewish terrorism, and hasten the onset of global economic sanctions upon the Jewish state.
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Bob Dylan is changing his lyrics and his set list; what is he trying to tell us?
Nobel Prize-winning rock poet Bob Dylan once famously wrote, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” (in his 1965 song “Subterranean Homesick Blues”). That may have formerly been the case, but it didn’t stop Dylan from kicking off his “Lights of Autumn Tour” in Oslo on Saturday, Oct. 17, with a setlist chock full of warnings about floods and extreme weather — a veritable apocalypse of natural disasters. He even rewrote some lines in one of his most famous and beloved songs, “Tangled Up in Blue,” to make the weather a new character in the song.
Playing “Tangled Up in Blue” in concert for the first time since 2018, Dylan revised a few verses. Where he originally sang “I had a job in the great north woods working as a cook for a spell” to kick off the third verse, Dylan instead sang “Way up in the frozen woods, teardrops touch the sky / The leaves are falling one by one, and the moments passing by,” in keeping with the “Lights of Autumn” theme. (It should be noted that Dylan has been rewriting and changing the lyrics to “Tangled” at least since 1984, when he also included the song on his opening concert of a European tour.) “Way up in the frozen woods” may also refer to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, which is so far north that you can practically see Canada from there.
On Saturday, Dylan continued to rewrite that third verse with the line “Sometimes I get so tired, sometimes I’m getting away / Lucky you found another, tomorrow’s another day.” In a clever twist, Dylan inserts the new word “lucky” into the number, which recalls the phrase “I can’t help it if I’m lucky” from the song “Idiot Wind,” also found on the 1975 album Blood on the Tracks where “Tangled Up in Blue” originated. “Lucky” also resurfaced as a cryptic moniker for Dylan himself when, in the superstar group the Traveling Wilburys that included George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison — all of whom took new names ending in “Wilbury” — Dylan opted for “Lucky Wilbury.” He can’t help it, indeed!
Dylan kicked off another rewritten verse with the phrase, “Things were gettin’ to cost too much,” leaving one to wonder if this was a pre-midterm election reference to the state of the U.S. economy and therefore an implicit criticism of the MAGA leader and his acolytes. Dylan also revised the music somewhat, slowing the tempo of what was once a mid-tempo rocker to a rubato ballad; he also inserted a minor chord that doesn’t exist in the original.
As noted, Dylan’s 19-song setlist included copious references to weather disasters. “The Man in the Long Black Coast” opens with the line “Crickets are chirpin’, the water is high,” and refers to trees that are “bent over backwards from a hurricane breeze.” The aptly titled “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood),” which he performed for the first time in over two decades, includes the lines:
Crash on the levee, mama
Water’s gonna overflow
Swamp’s gonna rise
No boat’s gonna row….
If you go down in the flood
It’s gonna be your own fault…”
Even Dylan’s choice of cover tunes seemed oriented toward the apocalyptic theme. For the first time ever, Dylan sang a Randy Newman song in concert. Keeping with the flood theme, he chose Newman’s “Louisiana 1927,” which recounts one of the worst floods ever to strike the U.S.
What’s happened down here is that the wind have changed
Clouds roll in from the north, and it starts to rain
Rained real hard, it rained for a real long time
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
River rose all day, the river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood, some people got away all right
Dylan also covered “Share Your Love” — originally recorded by Bobby “Blue” Bland in 1963 but also recorded and performed by Dylan’s former backup group, The Band — which kicks off with the line “Well, it’s an ill wind that blows no good.”
But Dylan didn’t have to go far from his own catalog to rack up mentions of climate insanity. He performed “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” which includes the lines “The air is getting hotter, there’s a rumbling in the skies / I’ve been wading through the high muddy water, with the heat rising in my eyes.” In “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere,” Dylan sang, “Clouds so swift, rain won’t lift / Gate won’t close, railings froze / Get your mind off wintertime, you ain’t goin’ nowhere.” And on “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” the seasonally appropriate narrator says, “I saw the first fall of snow, I saw the flowers come and go.”
Dylan’s tour continues tonight (Oct. 19) in Gothenburg, Sweden, before making its way through Denmark, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Slovenia, and Austria, and concluding in the UK in November and early December. The forecast for Sweden tonight is clear, but later in the week, the weather report says there’s a chance of a hard rain.
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