Uncategorized
‘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.
—
The post ‘An American Tail’ musical adaptation hopes its Jewish immigration story will resonate in 2023 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why
I walked into Jerusalem Chicken restaurant because someone told me it served the best maqluba this side of Jerusalem — all within a few minutes of LAX.
Outside, the well-lit sign said, “Palestinian Chicken Eatery,” which, because I’d seen the Curb Your Enthusiasm “Palestinian Chicken” episode about a dozen times, already had me smiling. Then I stepped inside.
Across from a deli counter filled with platters of rice and roasted vegetables was a cardboard sign: “End US Funding of Israel. Defend Palestine. End the Cycle of Genocide.”
This was 2022. Genocide seemed like an especially scurrilous charge, but it was their restaurant. I could yell, scream, protest, vandalize the place or call for a boycott. The young man behind the counter served me a leg and a thigh roasted dark, fragrant with sumac, clove and cinnamon. I ate.
Call me crazy but that’s what I demand of restaurants: Good food, clean kitchens and kind service. But, it seems, when it comes to Israeli restaurants, a different standard applies.
Somewhere toward the end of her long New York magazine feature on Middle Eastern food in New York City, Madeleine Leung Coleman points out that Israeli restaurants are increasingly labeling themselves as Middle Eastern or Levantine rather than Israeli.
“There could be many reasons why,” she writes. “Perhaps there’s a fear of being targeted. Or they’re second-guessing if they should call their food ‘Israeli’ at all.”
I’m going to offer a third choice: Perhaps it’s because of articles like hers.
The disappearing ‘Israeli’ restaurant
Coleman understates the actual violence against Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants (and, oddly, against Palestinian restaurants). She implies that Israeli restaurants serve food that is somehow stolen from Arab cultures. She blurs the distinction between Israeli restaurateurs and the actions of a government 7,000 miles away. In short, she reinforces the stigma she purports to describe. It’s a case study in journalism-as-activism, for which innocent restaurateurs and diners will pay the bill.
Her piece, “When Eating Out Is Political,” charts the evolution of Middle Eastern food in the city from turn-of-the-century market stalls, falafel stands and halal carts to its current incarnation in high-end, often Michelin-starred chef-driven restaurants.
The core argument is that Israeli restaurants became trendy by appropriating Palestinian, Mizrachi and North African dishes while Arab, Iranian and North African restaurants languished as cheap, “outer-borough” places, and especially post-9/11 hid their identities behind a vague “Mediterranean” label.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, and growing protest against Israel, the stigma has reversed. Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian restaurants have flourished with cheffy food, and owning their particularist labels, while Israeli restaurants have had to hide their identity.
It’s true that Middle Eastern cuisines are having their moment in New York, and Coleman’s descriptions of the “delicate, hand-shaped beef dumplings” at the Syrian restaurant Huda or the wild mallow “topped with twists of fried onion and salty black olives” at the Palestinian restaurant Tanoreen in Brooklyn make it clear that these chefs, whether Palestinian, Syrian or Iranian, should be celebrated.
But the celebration is tainted with bias and ignorance when it comes to all things Israeli.
From Moshe’s Falafel to Solomonov
First, the history. By Coleman’s recounting, Israeli restaurants swooped in to success and instant “It” status sometime in the early aughts.
“We were told this was the flavor profile of this young country,” she writes, “which was so richly funded and supported by our own.”
I’m not sure what American aid to Israel has to do with the efforts of early chefs like Einat Admony and Michael Solomonov, but that sentence shows how Coleman condemns talented individual chefs for somehow being complicit in … foreign aid decisions?
She’s also wrong on the timeline. Israeli food came to America the same way Arab food did, with immigrant sweat and no guarantees of success. Moshe Mizrachi, an Israeli of Syrian origin, opened his falafel restaurant in Manhattan in 1981. It failed. He reincarnated it as a cart, and four decades later it’s an institution.
The food these Israelis brought with them wasn’t, as Coleman writes, Arab dishes or food their grandmothers made — her attempt to dismiss Israeli food as either stolen or copied.
She might have mentioned that over half of Israel’s population has origins in the greater Middle East and North Africa. Falafel, hummus, stuffed vegetables, shakshouka and all the glorious ingredients that go into them were part of their traditions too. What was a Jewish chef from Iraq supposed to cook, lox and cream cheese?
From shattah to schnitzel
Israelis also ate what Palestinians ate, and learned to cook it. This is how every culture’s foodways evolve — including that of Palestinians.
In the 15th century, Christopher Columbus brought chile peppers back from the Americas, after wreaking havoc on the native populations. Those chiles give Palestinian shattah sauce its heart and heat. The “most traditional Palestinian dish,” according to cookbook author Reem Kassis, is maftool, a pebbly couscous that likely arrived via the Berbers, whose own history of subjugation, rebellion and assimilation with the Muslim invaders is, to say the least, fraught. Schnitzel is now a popular Palestinian dish, likely adopted from Ashkenazi immigrants.
Cultures exchange food, like they do music, fashion and language. None of this is to say Israelis haven’t ignored or downplayed the Palestinian contribution to their cuisine, or used food as a political or economic weapon — most unconscionably in Gaza itself. But the Israeli chefs most associated with the New Israel Cuisine are usually the first to point all that out.
“I don’t think there’s enough understanding how deeply rooted Israeli food, as it’s cooked at the moment and seen all over the world, is actually based on Palestinian cooking,” the chef and author Yotam Ottolenghi told me in a 2022 interview.
Credit where credit is due. But the only reason to question an Israeli cook’s right to do what cooks throughout history have done is if you question Israel’s existence itself.
‘The land mass currently called Israel’
And Coleman clues us in that she leans that way.
She repeatedly refers to Israel’s attack on Gaza as a genocide. Many genocide experts and international bodies have concluded it is. Many others, including the International Court of Justice, have not, something a fair journalist would point out.
And then there is the strange way she describes an image on the menu of the Palestinian restaurant Ayat as “a cheerful tourist-style map in which the land mass currently called Israel is titled ‘Discover Palestine.’”
Even the progressive watchdog site Mediaite called that “bizarre.” Just as bizarre is her explanation for why chefs are less likely to publicize their connection to Israel.
“In the last few years,” she writes, “some Israeli restaurants have been vandalized, spray-painted with notices that accuse them of co-signing the Israeli government’s project. This may be one reason why some are staying silent.”
Here’s a better reason:
- In February 2022, vandals sprayed “F– Jews” on the wall of Miriam’s restaurant in Brooklyn.
- In December 2023 anti-Israel protesters surrounded Goldie’s, Michael Solomonov’s falafel restaurant in Philadelphia, vandalizing it and chanting, “Long live the intifada!”
- In February 2024 a masked man took a baseball bat to the windows of Rothschild TLV on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
- In July 2025, intruders broke into a Melbourne, Australia Israeli restaurant, threw chairs and shattered windows while people were eating.
- In August 2025, intruders ransacked Manny’s restaurant in San Francisco and spray-painted “F- Manny’s” and “Die Zionist” on the walls.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It isn’t a few kids with spray cans: it’s open season on Israeli and Jewish-owned restaurants. At least three Palestinian restaurants have been vandalized as well, as well as Kanaan in Berlin, which is owned by an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian. If every Israeli restaurant is complicit in the worst behaviors of the Israeli government, is Jerusalem Chicken collaborating with Hamas?
Israeli restaurants aren’t Med-washing their names because they’re reckoning or apologetic. They’re hiding because the violence against them is getting worse, for patently absurd reasons. Coleman could have written that story, not one where victims did something to deserve it.
The post Israeli restaurants are hiding their identity. New York magazine won’t say why appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Trump just used journalists as human shields — Jewish ethics has thoughts about that
Everyone has been talking about The Odyssey this summer. So much so that, apparently, the president of the United States felt the need to act out a famous piece of Greek mythology, namely the story of the Trojan horse. When an Iranian assassination threat in July seemed credible enough, the Secret Service spirited Trump off of Air Force One in a catering truck after a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey.
The plane then took off as usual, loaded with top government officials including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, as well as the usual cast of aides and journalists who often accompany the president. Most believed they were on the plane with Trump, and weren’t aware of any threat. And had Iran actually attacked, and Air Force One been shot out of the sky, they would have gone down in the president’s place.
It is not unheard of for presidents to change plans suddenly for safety reasons, or otherwise use some amount of subterfuge to obscure their location; when Bill Clinton flew to Pakistan, for example, there were several decoy planes. But it is highly unusual for the plan to involve risking numerous other people, including civilians. Several journalists have accused Trump, who has long picked fights with the press, of using the media as an expendable human shield.
Much has been made, particularly in the Jewish world, of the idea of human shields, particularly because Hamas is often accused of the practice. Human shields can refer to putting civilians in harm’s way as part of a military strategy, or using them as decoys or to protect soldiers. (Hamas purportedly has used civilian sites such as hospitals or schools to protect their weapons stores and headquarters.)
There are numerous stories in Jewish texts in which innocent lives are sacrificed for ulterior motives, and the perpetrators are roundly condemned. King David sends his general Uriah to the frontlines so he will die and never realize that David had slept with his wife; God sends the prophet Nathan to rebuke David for his selfishness and Batsheva loses the pregnancy as punishment. When Simon and Levi destroy Shechem in retribution for the rape of their sister Dina, the patriarch Jacob censures their actions.
Though there is plenty of warfare in the Bible, and God at times orders the destruction of entire cities or groups, most Jewish sages interpret this to only apply to combatants because other commandments, such as to leave the gates of a besieged city open to allow people to flee, instruct that innocent civilians must be protected.
Beyond general ethics, the laws of war laid out in the Geneva Convention protect civilians and forbid the destruction of pivotal resources such as hospitals. But the strategy is, in many ways, a successful one precisely because it is so contemptible; everyone agrees that killing civilians not involved in war is morally wrong, which means that there is an international uproar if combatants do kill civilians to get to an enemy stronghold.
The U.S. and Israel both hold themselves apart operating uniquely moral armies — ones that follow the laws of war and protect civilians. Both nations publicly boast of fighting only necessary, noble wars. Reality, however, often differs. During the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tens of thousands of American soldiers were discharged for misconduct. And after Oct. 7, Israel also began using human shields, forcing Palestinian civilians to go ahead of Israeli soldiers to check for traps or mines.
When Trump landed, the White House press pool asked him, on the tarmac, what the threat was, and whether the journalists and aides on board the original plane were in danger. Trump responded that he simply did what the Secret Service told him to; “I get a lot of threats,” he said, and said he believed that the plane he actually flew on — a plane no one knew he was on — was in more danger than Air Force One.
But it’s clear to everyone else — including many members of the media who were on the plane — that the civilians left on the plane targeted by the Iranian threat were human shields. Trump may have long defamed the media, but putting them knowingly in harm’s way is still a bad look. Such a bad look that, after The New York Times reported on Trump’s planes, FBI agents went to the journalists’ homes to subpoena them for their reporting.
Thankfully, neither plane was shot down. But that doesn’t make Trump’s decision to protect himself any more moral.
The post Trump just used journalists as human shields — Jewish ethics has thoughts about that appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Apple pays $150k to settle federal antisemitism lawsuit
(JTA) — Apple has agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a federal lawsuit alleging that the company failed to accommodate a Jewish employee’s observance of Shabbat, and later fired him after he complained of religious discrimination.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in September 2025, accused Apple of discriminating against Tyler Steele, a longtime employee of one of its stores in Reston, Virginia.
Steele converted to Judaism in the spring of 2023, and while his manager initially approved his request not to be scheduled on Fridays and Saturdays due to his observance of Shabbat, another manager that replaced the previous one later rescinded the accommodation.
According to the complaint, Steele’s new manager, Anthony Dosch, denied his requests to have the days off in September 2023, allegedly telling him that month that he “could become a rules Nazi with regards to our policies.”
Days after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, Dosch also warned Steele not to get into politics or debates about the conflict at work, and a month later issued him a misconduct warning claiming that Steele had body odor that violated the store’s policies.
The EEOC alleged that Steele later complained to Apple officials in November 2023 about antisemitic behavior and the denial of his religious accommodation. Steele was fired from the store in January 2024, after reminding Dosch that he could not work on a Friday the following month for religious reasons.
“Employees should not have to violate their religious beliefs to keep their jobs or live in fear of retribution because they requested an accommodation,” EEOC Philadelphia Regional Attorney Debra Lawrence said in a statement at the time the lawsuit was filed.
In its lawsuit, the EEOC accused Apple of religious discrimination and retaliation in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Apple and the EEOC unveiled the settlement in an Aug. 7 filing in federal court in Virginia, nearly a year after the initial complaint.
Apple denied the allegations and did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, which required the company to award Steele $80,000 in back pay and $70,000 in compensatory damages and interest.
Under the settlement, the company will also be required to update its religious accommodation policies and conduct trainings with some employees in its Virginia operations within 90 days.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Apple pays $150k to settle federal antisemitism lawsuit appeared first on The Forward.
