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Florida school board cancels Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent,’ a ‘queer Jewish love story’ about a censored Yiddish play
(JTA) — In 1923 in New York, a Yiddish play that featured the first lesbian scene on a Broadway stage was censored for being indecent. In 2023 in Florida, a play about the first play has been canceled for the same reason.
For many involved in the new play, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish playwright and the Florida high schooler cast in a lead role, the déjà vu is alarming.
“The 100-year anniversary of Sholem Asch’s ‘God of Vengeance’ being shut down on Broadway is the same week that our production of ‘Indecent’ would have opened,” said Madeline Scotti, the student who first drew attention on Instagram to the censorship by her local school board of the “queer Jewish love story” in which Scotti had been cast. “One hundred years — 100 years — and we are still fighting the same injustices that Sholem Asch and his company did.”
Scotti is a student at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, where students had been planning to perform Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” this spring — until officials told them on Thursday, the first day of rehearsals, that their show could not go on. Scotti attributed the censorship to Florida’s new law limiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity — what opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Vogel said she, too, was first concerned about homophobia — then added other worries as she heard from people in Jacksonville.
“Parents who live in the community have written to me and said, ‘There is rising antisemitism in our community,’” Vogel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday. “I very much think that what the school board may not be able to express is their concern about presenting a play that shows how censorship is the first step to the Holocaust.”
Vogel’s 2015 play is about the 1923 Broadway debut of “God of Vengeance,” a play written in Yiddish by Sholem Asch that includes perhaps the first romantic kiss between two women on an American stage. In “Indecent,” the actresses who play the lesbian characters in the Asch play are depicted as lovers off stage. The plot picks up after “God of Vengeance” is shuttered and its cast briefly imprisoned over obscenity charges. “Indecent” follows the stage manager who returns to Eastern Europe, disheartened by what happened in America, and is ultimately murdered by the Nazis.
Students at Douglas Anderson all had permission to act in “Indecent,” and they had put on other shows portraying sexuality in the past: “Chicago” last year, and “Rent” before that. But conditions in the state changed last year when Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Parental Rights in Education Law into effect, stoking fear among LGBTQ teachers and students and causing school districts to alter policies.
The board in Duval County has defended the law, drawing a lawsuit from parents and advocates over what they said was its enforcement and arguing in court last fall that the district should be allowed to implement the law while litigation pends.
“Tonight during rehearsal our company was notified that the school board is shutting us down not because of but related to the ideals stated in the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” Scotti said in the video. “‘Indecent’ is a story about how detrimental censorship is, about how its damaging effects can ruin a nation and a community. I don’t need to point out the irony.”
Duval County Public Schools officials denied that the decision to cancel the production had anything to do with the law.
“‘Indecent’ contains adult sexual dialog that is inappropriate for student cast members and student audiences,” the district said in a statement. “It’s that simple. The decision has no relevance to any legislation but is rather a function of our responsibilities to ensure students engage in educational activities appropriate for their age.”
Vogel said she believes the show’s contents are appropriate for teenage audiences — and that she would have permitted changes to the show’s display of sexuality. She volunteered that a school production of “Indecent” could feature the two women holding hands, rather than kissing, in a tweak she likened to removing profanities from some of her other award-winning works. “The judgment by the board that this is too mature for high school students is absolute nonsense,” she said.
The censorship in Jacksonville is the latest in a string of incidents in which works with Jewish themes or about the Holocaust have been ensnared in efforts to limit schoolchildren’s exposure to ideas that some parents oppose.
School reading materials are under increasing scrutiny amid conservative parent groups’ pressure to remove ideas they define as “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” Books about Jews have gotten caught in the dragnet, including in a Tennessee district that removed the Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum, a Texas district that briefly removed an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary and a Missouri district that briefly removed history books about the Holocaust.
Florida is a front line in this new culture war. In Walton County, in the state’s Panhandle, the children’s book “Purim Superhero” was among dozens of titles removed from shelves last year in response to parents’ protests; its main character has two fathers. And the Duval County district kept a diversity-themed collection of children’s books that included a book about Shabbat from students for more than a year. Two candidates supported by the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a group leading the censorship push, won spots on Duval County’s seven-member school board in November.
Florida has also recently emerged as a hotbed of white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity. The Anti-Defamation League issued a report last year raising alarms about extremist activity in the state — and that was before the leader of the Goyim Defense League, a prominent antisemitic group, moved there from California. The group played a role in broadcasting “Kanye is right” at a college football game in Jacksonville in October, referring to the artist Kanye West’s antisemitic comments. It is also behind the distribution of antisemitic propaganda, often in plastic bags placed under rocks at private homes, around the country and locally.
Vogel said she saw a clear echo of what happened with Asch’s play in 1923, when the play was censored amid an atmosphere of rising antisemitism in the United States. (The rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, concerned that the play could cast Jews in a negative light at a time when non-Jews were organizing antisemitic campaigns, reportedly sounded the alarm to authorities; the play was later banned in London, too.)
She said is planning a response beyond the encouraging message she left on Scotti’s Instagram post and the exhortation to Douglas Anderson’s principal that she tweeted. (“Why cancel Indecent rather than structuring post-play discussions?” she wrote. “It is a unique way to look at the Holocaust as well as gender and censorship and antisemitism.”) But the antisemitic activity in Jacksonville, Vogel said, has made her cautious about sharing details of who she is working with locally.
“I don’t want to name anybody because I don’t want anyone having more rocks with [antisemitic] literature in their driveway,” she said. “I want to talk in a group with the students, but I don’t want to jeopardize them. … I don’t want to trigger some wackadoo.”
Vogel said she had spent the weekend Zooming and speaking with members of the original cast of “Indecent,” who worked together for several years as the play made its way from a small stage to Broadway, where it won the Tony Award for best play of 2015. On Monday, she said she hoped to offer the school’s principal “a modest little proposal”: to travel to Jacksonville along with Rebecca Taichman, the play’s original director, to present “Indecent” to the students who were barred from staging it themselves and to a community that could benefit from a hard conversation.
“We know this historically: The first step towards totalitarianism is censorship of the arts. It’s burning books. It’s closing down theaters. … In all societies as we go towards fascism, the arts are labeled as degenerate,” Vogel said. “That’s the conversation we need to be having.”
Vogel said her response was informed by her decades as a teacher; she was a professor for many years at Brown University and then moved to Yale, where she was chair of the playwriting department at the vaunted Yale School of Drama.
“I have one response as a Jewish artist. I have another response as an educator,” Vogel said. “And right now it’s the educator who is coming forward.”
The principal of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts told students last week that “Indecent” would be replaced by a different play, Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” But some of the student actors may have other plans.
“The support from the Broadway theatre community feels like we have found our own mishpoche,” Scotti posted on Instagram on Sunday, using the Yiddish word for “family.”
Scotti added, “I am delighted to say that we have something in the works. The company is meeting and discussing as you’re seeing this. From ashes we rise!”
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The post Florida school board cancels Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent,’ a ‘queer Jewish love story’ about a censored Yiddish play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to build a case to strip Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-MN) of her citizenship and eventually deport her.
It is my hope that American Jews — even those who do not like Omar and can recite every questionable comment she has made over the past 15 years to illustrate why — will understand this as offensive and outrageous not only because they are Americans, but because they are Jews.
The Trump administration may claim that it is building a case against Omar due to paperwork (reports suggest that they are interested in whether her father listed her age as 17 on her citizenship application when she was really 18). It is similarly filing dozens of lawsuits attempting to denaturalize citizens by trying to prove they lied in the process of gaining citizenship. However, that this is happening now, ahead of the midterm elections against a sitting member of Congress, a high-profile progressive whom the president has said should “go back” to her country of origin, suggests that it is, to put it mildly, politically motivated.
Evidently, the Trump administration sees citizenship not as a right or a responsibility but as a reward, one that can be taken away if that is seen as useful to the president and his adherents. That use could be silencing political opposition or something as simple (and callous) as an opportunity to brag about the sheer number of attempted denaturalizations.
Jews, too, have found themselves on the wrong end of political denaturalization. I do not mean to compare the Trump administration to the Nazis, but the stubborn fact is that Jews were indeed stripped of their citizenship as part of a political project in Germany and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And in the early 20th century in the United States, it was Jews who politicians claimed were incapable of assimilating, of ever really being a part of the United States. These arguments culminated in legislation that kept out Jews who could have found refuge here. The threat of denaturalization and the experience of perpetual otherness is a grievous part of modern Jewish history; we should be offended by its presence in our political present.
Jewish tradition as well as history encourages us to stand up to authority when that authority is wrong. Mordecai refuses to bow to Haman; Nathan yells at King David for sleeping with Bathsheba and having her husband killed; Moses famously urges Pharoah to change his oppressive ways. Even God is on the receiving end of pushback when Abraham pleads and negotiates to spare Sodom.
I do not think one needs to be Jewish to be outraged by the attempt to denaturalize Ilhan Omar. I think it is also bone-chilling as an American who believes we, including our elected officials, have the right to openly oppose our president, and I am worried as a person who thinks it would be good to continue to live in a democratic republic. And I am sure that there are Jews who will say that Omar deserves to lose her citizenship because she has said things about Israel they do not like.
But the Jewish lens through which I see this is that it is right to challenge power when it is abused, and it is wrong for the powerful to make a show of trying to cast their opponents out of the country.
The point is not whether Trump can make good on the threat to strip Omar of her citizenship and deport her, but that it is obscene to use denaturalization as punishment for being a high-profile political opponent in the first place. If he is trying to make it more dangerous to speak out while being from the “wrong” country, then the rest of us need to say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to be an American citizen.
We should do this because we are Americans and we should do this because we are Jews. We should do this because of the ways in which our American and Jewish identities bleed into one another. And, we should do this because we may not know exactly whether it is as Americans or as Jews that we know we have to protect the right to speak truth to power, but we know we need to do it all the same.
The post Whatever you think of Ilhan Omar, these threats are unconscionable appeared first on The Forward.
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Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s?
Herding political opponents into prisons and concentration camps, suspending civil liberties, and sending SA thugs to destroy newsrooms and beat up journalists were among the means used by Adolf Hitler to game Germany’s parliamentary election of March 5, 1933, won by the Nazis.
As much as Donald Trump might fantasize about deploying such brutal tactics to subvert our midterm elections, he hasn’t done so — yet. But his objective is the same: Detonate constitutional barriers standing in the way of his lust for power. “Cheat like hell,” Trump told the GOP’s midterm convention last month.
Historian Timothy Ryback has just published a book about the last gasps of the Weimar Republic, titled 53 Days: How Hitler Dismantled A Democracy. The 53 days begin when Hitler becomes chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, and end with the Reichstag’s March 23 passage of the Enabling Act, which gave him absolute power.
For our own perilous time, there is another number to take note of: 652 — the number of days between Trump’s second inauguration and our Nov. 3 midterm elections.
Hitler’s long march to despotic power occurred over 3,422 days — from his failed Beer Hall Putsch on Nov. 8-9, 1923, up until passage of the Enabling Act.
After spending less than a year of a five-year sentence for the failed 1923 coup, Hitler returned to a Nazi party that was in utter disarray. But the Great Depression turned the Nazis’ fortunes around, as jobless and disaffected Germans flocked to Hitler with his promises to make Germany great again. In parliamentary elections in 1930, the number of Reichstag seats held by the Nazis rose dramatically from 12 to 107, and more than doubled that in elections in 1932, making them the largest party. After some backroom political wheeling and dealing, President Paul von Hindenburg offered the chancellorship to Hitler, which he accepted on Jan. 30, 1933.
Even though Hitler was chancellor, his coalition wasn’t dominated by Nazis. When the Reichstag went up in flames on Feb. 27, 1933, der Führer had the pretext he needed to begin dismantling the last remnants of democracy. The Nazis’ first targets were Communists. More than 4,000 were arrested in the initial hours after the fire. It didn’t take long for Social Democrats, trade unionists and Jews to also face raids, arrests, beatings and terror, as Hindenburg — at Hitler’s urging — issued a decree that suspended Germans’ civil liberties.
There was still a barrier standing in Hitler’s way: the Reichstag. But Hitler had a scheme for getting rid of it: calling for a new election and ultimately engineering a vote by the Reichstag to abolish itself.
In the days and nights before the national election, set for March 5, Nazis carried out a campaign of repression and menace across the country. Brandishing firearms, storm troopers ruled the streets. Homes of Hitler critics were raided. His campaign speeches were blasted from loudspeakers. Voters were offered rides to the polls in transports organized by the Nazis, an unsubtle hint at which party they should vote for.
In the election, the Nazis and their Nationalist allies won a majority of seats in the Reichstag but fell short of the two-thirds needed to amend the constitution. But Hitler had a workaround: Convene the Reichstag to vote on a measure that would allow him to declare laws without the approval of the federal legislative body. With Communist delegates of the Reichstag either in hiding or in custody, Hitler already had a structural advantage; they wouldn’t be there to vote. With the Reichstag building destroyed, the delegates convened on March 23 inside the Kroll Opera House, which swarmed with armed storm troopers and members of the SS who harassed and threatened delegates who were either on the fence about giving Hitler absolute power or were known to oppose it.
In the end, weeks and months of trying to tilt elections through terror and intimidation gave Hitler his ultimate prize: of 538 delegates in the Kroll Opera House, only 94 — all Social Democrats — voted against the Enabling Act. In effect, German democracy was steered by Hitler into committing suicide.
In an essay for Literary Hub, Timothy Ryback noted parallels between Hitler’s election victory on March 5, 1933 and our midterm elections and cataloged them.
They include Trump’s “brazen attempt to quash negative press coverage” and Hitler’s and Trump’s virtually identical pre-election low approval ratings. Both the Nazi leader and the American president had gone to court to try to have earlier election results overturned, and the German election, like our fast-approaching midterms, was seen as a referendum on the nation’s leader.
“Amidst all the turmoil, everyone understood that the March 5 election was a make-or-break moment not only for the Hitler chancellorship but for democracy itself,” Ryback wrote.
With the midterms just around the corner, this can be said about America as well.
Since Trump’s second inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025, he has thrown more effort into trying to rig the midterms for the Republicans than into virtually any other endeavor — other than perhaps misusing his powers to enrich himself and his family, and dreaming up monuments to himself.
Trump’s pardon of 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol on Jan. 6 was an early signal that the defeated president had no intention of playing fair during the 2026 midterms. What followed was a barrage of assaults on the election system. Here’s just a partial list: lawsuits demanding sensitive voter data, the gutting of oversight bodies, intimidation of election officials and orders for key GOP-led states to redraw their congressional districts — all designed to both undermine Americans’ trust in the election system and manufacture pretexts for contesting any midterm outcomes that displease him.
Amid these relentless attempts to subvert the midterms, the Democrats have had success at blocking some of Trump’s poisoned salvos, such as holding the line against the so-called SAVE America Act and fending off Trump’s attempts to seize voter information. But none of this deters Trump, who just comes back with more schemes. The latest revelations come from documents obtained by Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy organization.
Those documents show that “U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) collected tens of millions of voter records, explored undercover investigations against voter registration groups and considered feeding state election data into a system used to locate people for deportation as part of a sweeping federal effort to find alleged voter fraud ahead of the 2026 midterms,” according to Democracy Docket, which reviewed the documents.
“This is an absolute smoking gun,” said Democracy Docket founder Marc Elias.
Trump has openly suggested a federal takeover of election administration, and during the past several months it seems like he’s been laying the groundwork for that to happen if he doesn’t get the results he wants on Nov. 3. It’s all too easy to imagine horror scenarios: Trump claims massive voter fraud, his supporters storm county election offices in protest, the FBI seizes ballots and voting machines, unrest erupts across the country, Trump declares martial law.
If Trump’s schemes trigger the kind of disorder he appears to be preparing for, the question will be whether our courts, our press, our civil servants and our voters stand firm. Germany’s institutions bent until they broke. Ours have bent, but they have not yet snapped. What happens next will reveal whether they still possess the steel that Germany’s lacked.
The post Germany couldn’t stop Hitler’s election tactics; can America stop Trump’s? appeared first on The Forward.
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Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs
(JTA) — Sally Rooney’s publisher says it will stop supplying her books in the United Kingdom because current legislation prevents it from passing her earnings on to her.
The best-selling Irish writer, whose work includes the novel “Normal People,” which was adapted into a hit BBC drama, has long been a vocal supporter of the Palestinian cause.
Faber said it would no longer supply her books in the United Kingdom because of her backing for Palestine Action, a group that the British government last year proscribed as a terrorist organization, saying it had “orchestrated a nationwide campaign of direct criminal action against businesses and institutions.”
“Current legislation in the UK has led to circumstances where Faber cannot pass on UK earnings to Sally Rooney for her work,” the publisher said.
“To sell a writer’s work and not be able to pass on earnings is an unconscionable situation for a publisher,” it said. “As such, and in full agreement with Sally, we have taken the decision that we can no longer supply her works in the UK in any format. We remain the proud publisher of her remarkable body of work, which we will continue to sell in other territories.”
Faber had no further comment, the statement said.
Yvette Cooper, then the Home Secretary, banned Palestine Action last year following an attack by the group on the Royal Air Force base at Brize Norton which caused millions of pounds of damage. It had previously targeted businesses and premises which it said were linked to Israeli defence companies.
Soon after the announcement, Rooney wrote an opinion piece in the Irish Times in which she doubled down on her support for Palestine Action, adding that she would give the proceeds of her books to back the group. “If this makes me a ‘supporter of terror’ under British law, so be it,” she wrote.
In a statement following the action announced by Faber, Rooney cited her Irish Times opinion piece as she explained that the publication of her books “could now constitute a serious criminal offence.”
The ban of Palestine Action has proven to be highly contentious in Britain. Back in February, the group’s co-founder Huda Ammori challenged the move in the High Court, with Rooney providing a supportive witness statement. She said at the time that she was “almost certain” her work would be dropped in Britain if the ban persisted.
The court ruled in Ammori’s favor, but that decision was overturned by the Court of Appeal in June. The Supreme Court is due to hear an appeal next month.
Rooney said on Wednesday: “After a process of consultation and deliberation, and with my full agreement, my publisher Faber has therefore determined that it can no longer supply my work within the UK.
“I have made every effort to be honest with the public about my beliefs and intentions, and I am wholly prepared to accept the consequences.”
Rooney’s support for the Palestinian cause predates the attack by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza. In 2021 she declined to sell Hebrew translation rights for her novel “Beautiful World, Where Are You?” to the Israeli publisher that had previously released her books in Hebrew.
At the time, she said she supported the BDS movement and would not work with an Israeli publisher unless it is willing to “publicly distance itself from apartheid and support the U.N.-stipulated rights of the Palestinian people.”
That move prompted backlash in Israel and beyond, including calls to boycott Rooney’s work. Israeli bookstore chains reportedly removed some of her books from shelves.
However, earlier this year she agreed to have her latest novel, “Intermezzo,” published by an Israeli publisher approved by boycott activists.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Sally Rooney’s publisher stops selling her books in Britain, citing ban on pro-Palestinian group she backs appeared first on The Forward.
