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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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Trump Says US May Exit Iran War Soon, Threatens to Quit NATO
Emergency personnel operate around a destroyed car following a targeted Israeli strike, amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, as the US-Israel conflict with Iran continues, in Beirut, Lebanon, March 31, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
The United States will end its war on Iran fairly soon and could return for “spot hits” if needed, President Donald Trump told Reuters on Wednesday, hours before he was scheduled to make a primetime address to the nation.
Trump also said he would state in the speech, which is due at 9 pm EDT (0100 GMT on Thursday), that he was considering withdrawing the US from the NATO alliance.
Asked when the United States would consider the Iran war over, Trump said: “I can’t tell you exactly … we’re going to be out pretty quickly.”
He was expected to reiterate a two-to-three-week timetable for ending the war in Iran during the address, a White House official later said.
US action had ensured Iran would not have nuclear arms, Trump said: “They won’t have a nuclear weapon because they are incapable of that now, and then I’ll leave, and I’ll take everybody with me, and if we have to, we’ll come back to do spot hits.”
An Iranian official, Mehdi Tabatabai, said in a post on X that an important letter to the American people from Iran‘s President Masoud Pezeshkian would be released “in a few hours.”
TRUMP CONSIDERS QUITTING NATO
Global oil supplies were expected to be hit twice as hard this month as in March, the International Energy Agency said on Wednesday, underlining the urgent need for an end to the conflict Trump began with Israel on Feb. 28.
Trump said separately on social media that Iran had asked for a ceasefire but that he would not consider it until Tehran ceased blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a major fuel shipment route. Iran denied making any such request.
Two security sources from Pakistan, which is mediating in the conflict, earlier told Reuters that Islamabad had proposed a temporary ceasefire to both sides but had not heard back from either.
US Vice President JD Vance communicated with intermediaries from Pakistan about the Iran conflict as recently as Tuesday, a source briefed on the matter told Reuters on Wednesday. At Trump‘s direction, Vance signaled privately that Trump was open to a ceasefire as long as certain US demands were met, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz, the source said.
Trump had signaled on Tuesday he could wind down the war in two to three weeks even without a deal, and scaled up threats to pull the US out of the NATO defense alliance if European states did not help stop Iran threatening the waterway.
In his remarks to Reuters on Wednesday, Trump said he would express his disgust with NATO for what he considers the alliance’s lack of support for US objectives in Iran.
European states took pains to appear unruffled, and France’s junior army minister Alice Rufo said operations by NATO in the Strait of Hormuz would be a breach of international law.
JET FUEL AND DIESEL SHORTAGE
The conflict has spread across the region and caused major energy disruption.
IEA head Fatih Birol said the main issue so far from Iran‘s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz was the lack of jet fuel and diesel that was already a problem in Asia and would hit Europe in April or May.
The head of European budget airline Ryanair said jet fuel supply to Europe could be disrupted from June if the conflict did not end in the next month, potentially forcing the airline and rivals to consider cancelling summer season flights.
Businesses around the world are struggling, with cosmetics and tea among the latest sectors to report difficulties.
However, global stocks rallied and oil prices fell almost 3% as hopes of a de-escalation fueled the biggest rebound in regional equities in more than three years.
Higher fuel prices are already weighing on US household finances before the November midterm elections, with two-thirds of Americans believing the US should work to exit the Iran war quickly, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.
TANKER HIT OFF QATAR
Drones hit fuel tanks at Kuwait’s international airport, causing a big blaze, and authorities in Bahrain reported a fire at an undisclosed company facility from an Iranian attack.
Qatar said an oil tanker leased to state-owned QatarEnergy was hit by an Iranian cruise missile in Qatari waters, but that there were no injuries or environmental damage.
An overnight strike hit Shahid Haghani Port, Iran‘s largest passenger terminal, deputy regional governor Ahmad Nafisi told state media, calling it a “criminal” attack on civilian infrastructure.
Iran has fired repeatedly on Gulf countries, some home to US bases, during the conflict, and is using the Strait of Hormuz, a conduit for a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas, as a bargaining chip.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards have threatened to hit US companies in the region including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, IBM, Tesla, and Boeing, from 8 pm Tehran time (1630 GMT) on Wednesday. Trump has said he was not concerned.
LATEST STRIKES
In Tel Aviv on Wednesday, evening air raid sirens and air defense systems were repeatedly triggered as Iran fired a volley of missiles around an hour before the start of Passover, the Jewish festival of freedom.
Israel’s fire and rescue service said there had been multiple “impacts” in the greater Tel Aviv area. It was not immediately clear if the impacts were caused by missile strikes or debris from missile interceptions.
Shortly after the latest Iranian attack, the Israeli military said in a statement that the Air Force was carrying out strikes on dozens of targets across Tehran.
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UK Police Arrest 3 More Men Over Arson Attack on Jewish Community Ambulances
Charred remains of ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish community organization, which were set on fire in an incident that the police say is being treated as an antisemitic hate crime, in northwest London, Britain, March 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Hannah McKay
British police said on Wednesday they had arrested three more men in connection with an arson attack on Jewish community ambulances in north London last month.
The ambulances were set on fire on March 23 in what British Prime Minister Keir Starmer described as a “deeply shocking antisemitic arson attack.”
The SITE Intelligence website has said an Iran-aligned multinational militant collective called Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand had claimed responsibility for the incident near a synagogue in the Golders Green area of London.
Counter-terrorism officers are heading the investigation, but as yet the incident is not being treated as terrorism.
The Metropolitan Police said the three men, aged 20, 19, and 17, had been arrested at separate addresses in east London on suspicion of conspiracy to commit arson with intent to endanger life.
Two were British nationals, while the third was a dual British-Pakistani national. Last week, detectives detained two British nationals aged in their 40s and later released both on police bail.
“We know concern among the Jewish community remains high, but I hope these arrests show that we are doing everything we can to bring those responsible to justice,” said Commander Helen Flanagan, Head of Counter Terrorism Policing London.
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New York City Mayor Mamdani Heckled While Speaking at Passover Seder in Manhattan After Comedian Drops Out
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds a press conference at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, as a major winter storm spreads across a large swath of the United States, in Brooklyn, New York City, US, Jan. 25, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Bing Guan
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was reportedly heckled mid-speech at a Passover seder celebration in Manhattan on Monday night.
An attendee shouted “every Jewish organization is a target” when Mamdani, 34, t0ld the crowd at the 33rd annual Downtown Seder at City Winery about how the rise in antisemitism “has caused enormous pain for so many Jewish New Yorkers,” according to the New York Post.
Other attendees reportedly shushed the heckler and applauded the mayor as he finished his speech. Another attendee told the Post on Tuesday that when Mamdani was introduced on stage, a woman in the crowd shouted, “Shame, shame, shame.”
A far-left democratic socialist and anti-Zionist, Mamdani refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state; supports boycotts of all Israeli-tied entities, has been accused of promoting antisemitism; has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and “genocide”; and refuses to explicitly condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada,” which has been used to call for violence against Jews and Israelis around the world.
Monday’s Passover seder at City Winery was hosted by the venue’s Jewish founder and owner Michael Dorf. Israeli-American comedian Modi Rosenfeld, also known as Modi, was scheduled to perform at the event but pulled out last minute after learning that Mamdani was participating. “We were not aware Mamdani was participating until today. Modi will not be attending this evening,” Rosenfeld’s team said on social media early Monday.
Dorf defended Mamdani’s attendance in a Substack but added, “While I respect Modi’s decision not to share the stage with Mayor Mamdani, I truly wish he had been there.” The head of City Winery said “hate mail started rolling in” as soon as it was announced publicly the day prior to the event that Mamdani would attend the Passover celebration.
When Dorf introduced Mamdani on stage Monday night at the Passover event, he described the mayor as a “person who is trying hard to bridge divides in our community and our great city.”
The Passover event featured 15 special guests and 100 percent of proceeds were donated to Seeds of Peace, a nonprofit organization that helps create young leaders “who work in solidarity across differences to create more just and inclusive societies,” according to its website.
Jewish comedian Olga Namer performed and made jokes about New York City’s mayor. She introduced herself as a Syrian Jew and said, “I’m confident that Mamdani likes half of me.” She then compared Mamdani to the Biblical figure Moses because “he is also causing an exodus of Jews to go to Florida.”
Israeli musician David Broza performed and former CNN anchor Don Lemon asked the “four questions” mentioned in the Passover Haggadah “but done with a special orientation based on his arrest a few weeks ago protecting freedom of expression,” according to a description of the event by City Winery. Lemon was arrested for participating in a protest at a Minnesota church where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official is a pastor.
George Floyd’s brother spoke at Monday night’s event about “racism” and Israeli-American Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie was featured in a live stream from Israel.
Earlier in March, Mamdani celebrated Ramadan with Abdullah Akl, the political director of the Muslim American Society of New York. The latter called for the Hamas terrorist organization to “strike Tel Aviv’” before leading a crowd in chanting for an “intifada” during a protest in New York City, according to the Washington Free Beacon. He was arrested at a pro-Hamas demonstration in 2024 and has posted antisemitic and anti-Israel messages on social media, including one message in which he encouraged others to “teach [their] children that the Zionist entity is an enemy.”
Mamdani also hosted an Iftar dinner at Gracie Mansion with Mahmoud Khalil, the anti-Israel activist and Hamas supporter who justified the Hamas-led terrorist attack across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and said “we couldn’t avoid” the deadly massacre.