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For theatergoers at Broadway’s recent spate of Jewish shows, attendance is a form of witness
(JTA) — Jewish stories have had top billing on Broadway this season — and Jewish audiences have been flocking to the theater.
Audiences have lined up to see Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” the multigenerational saga of a Jewish family in Vienna, and the devastating consequences of the Holocaust upon its ranks. They have packed the house for “Parade,” a musical retelling of the infamous antisemitic show trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. And just off Broadway, “The Wanderers” (which closed April 2) invited us into the slowly disintegrating marriage of two secular Jews born to mothers who dramatically left the Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a show replete with intergenerational trauma and a pervasive sense of ennui.
None of these shows offers a particularly lighthearted evening at the theater. So why have they proven so popular? Critics have penned countless reviews of the three plays, analyzing the quality of the productions, the scripts, scores, performances of principal actors, set and design. But for our new book exploring what audiences learn about Judaism from Jewish cultural arts, my colleague Sharon Avni and I have been interviewing audience members after seeing “Leopoldstadt,” “Parade” and “The Wanderers.” We are interested in turning the spotlight away from the stage and onto the seats: What do audiences make of all this? What do they learn?
Take “Leopoldstadt,” for example, a drama so full of characters that when it left London for its Broadway run the production team added a family tree to the Playbill so that theatergoers could follow along. “Leopoldstadt” offers its audience a whistle-stop introduction to modern European Jewish history. In somewhat pedantic fashion, the family debates issues of the day that include Zionism, art, philosophy, intermarriage and, in a searing final scene, the memory of the Holocaust.
For some of the theatergoers that we interviewed, “Leopoldstadt” was powerful precisely because it packed so much Jewish history into its two-hour run time. It offered a basic literacy course in European Judaism, one they thought everyone needed to learn. Others, however, thought that this primer of Jewish history was really written for novice audiences — perhaps non-Jews, or assimilated Jews with half-remembered Jewish heritage, like Stoppard himself. “I don’t know who this play is for,” one interviewee told us. “But it’s not me. I know all this already.”
Brandon Uranowitz, left, who plays a Holocaust survivor, confronts Arty Froushan as a young writer discovering his Jewish roots, in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” (Joan Marcus)
Other interviewees thought the power of “Leopoldstadt” lay not in its history lessons, but in its ability to use the past to illuminate contemporary realities. I spoke at length with a woman who had been struggling with antisemitism at work. Some of her colleagues had been sharing social media posts filled with lazy caricatures of Jews as avaricious capitalists. Upon seeing “Leopoldstadt,” she realized that these vile messages mirrored Nazi rhetoric in the 1930s, convincing her that antisemitism in contemporary America had reached just as dangerous a threshold as beheld European Jews on the eve of the Shoah.
We heard similar sentiments about the prescience of history to alert us to the specter of antisemitism today from audiences who saw “Parade.” Recalling a scene where the cast members wave Confederate flags during the titular parade celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, Jewish audiences recalled feeling especially attuned to Jewish precarity when the theater burst into applause at the end of the musical number. “Why were we clapping Confederate flags?” one of our interviewees said. “I’ve lived in the South, and as a Jew I know that when you see Confederate flags it is not a safe space for us.”
“Parade” dramatizes the popular frenzy that surrounded the trial of Leo Frank, a Yankee as well as a Jew, who was scapegoated for the murder of a young Southern girl. Jewish audience members that we interviewed told us that the play powerfully illustrated how crowds could be manipulated into demonizing minorities, comparing the situation in early 20th century Marietta to the alt-right of today, and the rise of antisemitism in contemporary America.
What we ultimately discovered, however, was that audience perceptions of the Jewish themes and characters in these productions were as varied as audiences themselves. Inevitably, they tell us more about the individual than the performance. Yet the fact that American Jews have flocked to these three shows — a secular pilgrimage of sorts — also illustrates the power and the peril of public Jewish storytelling. For audience members at “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” especially, attending these performances was not merely an entertaining evening at the theater. It was a form of witnessing. There was very little to be surprised by in these plays, after all. The inevitable happens: The Holocaust destroys Jewish life in Europe, Leo Frank is convicted and lynched. Jewish audiences know to expect this. They know there will be no happy ending. In the secular cultural equivalent to saying Kaddish for the dead, Jewish audiences perform their respect to Jewish memory by showing up, and by paying hundreds of dollars for the good seats.
The peril of these performances, however, is that audiences learn little about antisemitism in reality. The victims of the Nazis and the Southern Jews of Marietta would tell us that they could never have predicted what was to happen. Yet in “Parade” and “Leopoldstadt” audiences are asked to grapple with the naivete of characters who believe that everything will be all right, even as audiences themselves know that it will not. By learning Jewish history on Broadway, audiences are paradoxically able to distance themselves from it, simply by knowing too much.
In the final scene of “Leopoldstadt,” Leo, the character loosely based on Stoppard himself, is berated by a long-lost relative for his ignorance of his family’s story. “You live as if without history,” the relative tells Leo. “As if you throw no shadow behind you.” Audiences, at that moment, are invited to pat themselves on the back for coming to see the show, and for choosing to acknowledge the shadows of their own Jewish histories. The cold hard reality, however, is that a shadow can only ever be a fuzzy outline of the truth.
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Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne
אין קאַרלטאָן, אַ געגנט אין מעלבורן, האָט מען אַ מאָל געהערט ייִדיש אויף דער גאַס; געגאַנגען אויף בונדישע פֿאַרזאַמלונגען און אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און געזונגען ייִדישע לידער.
אין אָט דער וועלט איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן דער שרײַבער אַרנאָלד זייבל, אַ קינד פֿון בונדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון פּוילן. זונטיק, דעם 15טן נאָוועמבער, 7 אַ זייגער אין אָוונט ניו־יאָרקער צײַט, וועט אלי בענעדיקט, פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, פֿירן אַ זום־שמועס מיט זייבלען וועגן זײַנע קינדער־יאָרן אין מעלבורן — דער עיקר, וועגן די ייִדישע שולן, טעאַטערס, לידער און די מענטשן וואָס האָבן געשאַפֿן יענע וועלט.
זיי וועלן אויך אַרומרעדן ווי אַזוי די זכרונות פֿון יענער וועלט לעבן ווײַטער אין זײַנע ביכער.
אַרנאָלד זייבל איז אַ שרײַבער, דערציילער און אַקטיוויסט פֿאַר מענטשנרעכט. זײַנע ביכער, וואָס זענען אויף ענגליש, באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון אימיגראַציע, זכּרון און גלות. צווישן זײַנע באַקאַנטע ביכער געפֿינען זיך „קאַפֿע שעהעריזאַד“ און „בריליאַנטן און אַש“.
די אונטערנעמונג איז פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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At Moontower Minyan, cowboy hats meet kippot
AUSTIN, Texas – In an old churchhouse in Austin, with light streaming through the arched windows, a man wearing a cowboy hat and strumming an acoustic guitar croons the classic Willie Nelson ballad, “I thought about you, Lord.”
Along with his cowboy hat, the singer is also wearing a tallit. His bandmates, plucking at the bass and playing the drums, choose a different type of headcovering: yarmulkes. Welcome to Shabbat at Moontower Minyan, held at a former church turned artist collective.
Rabbi Dan Ain and his wife, poet Alana Joblin Ain, started Moontower Minyan shortly after the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 — when many Jews in Austin who didn’t have ties to a community sought meaningful ways to express their Judaism and meet others seeking a similar creative outlet.
“We wanted to have experiences where we didn’t feel locked into expressing Judaism in only one monolithic way,” said the rabbi, who moved to Austin from San Francisco at the end of the COVID pandemic. “We wanted to experience the diversity of what it could be in this town in order to be more human and more alive.”
In a population of more than 2.5 million in the greater Austin area, more than 62,000 are Jewish. According to a recent study of Austin by the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, 44% of Jewish adults have lived in Greater Austin for less than one decade, while just 10% were raised locally.
The Ains are two of the 11,800 who have lived in the city for less than five years – part of a larger trend of people from the coasts coming to Austin to find something more laidback and affordable. With Moontower Minyan, they are trying to infuse that vibe into Judaism, along with a healthy dose of country tunes.
Think Purim pageants with country ballads about Esther, prayers sung to bluegrass melodies or a Honky Tonk Hanukkah with two-step lessons. Ain says Moontower Minyan is doing what Diaspora Jews have always done: blending local culture and their religion. And in a city once dubbed the “Live Music Capital of the World,” a minyan would not be authentically Austin without live music.
Though services often include traditional prayers, they also include bluegrass, jazz and other melodies. In addition, congregants take turns “making offerings,” which at Moontower means taking up a mic or an instrument and joining the band.
“If you go to a traditional synagogue, you’ll often hear melodies that are German,” Ain said. “If you go to a Reform synagogue, you might hear Debbie Friedman melodies, which are from the 1960s.”
“These are aesthetic choices, and the people that I’m meeting in Texas want to figure out ‘How do we create a Jewish community that looks and feels and sounds like us without it having to be reflected through how Eastern European Jewry looked and felt?’” he added.
David Rabinowicz, 32, moved from Boston five years ago with aspirations of gaining a foothold in the music scene. He quickly found his footing, but after Oct. 7, a lot of his industry friends turned their backs.
“I lost a pretty significant amount of my community,” he said. “A lot of the arts got dominated by anti-Jewish sentiments. It became very clear to me very quickly: I wished I had invested some time into building a Jewish community, in part as a safety net, and it became clear to me that was a very important thing to me missing from my life.”
Determined to do more “Jewish things,” he attended a Shabbat dinner where he met Ain and eventually became creative director of Moontower Minyan.
“It’s done a lot for me to get to take these ostensibly different sides of my life and not only have them coexist, but actively feed off of each other,” he said.
Jew Boom
Ain, now 50, hadn’t always planned to be a rabbi. He graduated law school, took the bar exam, and was about to begin practicing in Manhattan when 9/11 happened.
“I felt a calling to serve the Jewish people, in particular those who — like me — felt called back to their faith,” he said.
The following year, Ain enrolled in rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary, part of the Conservative movement. For two decades now, he has served Jews both through traditional congregations and independent minyanim, creating start-up projects with his wife, including a Brooklyn-based group called Because Jewish, which offered musical meditations.
Raised in Long Island, he never saw himself living in the Lone Star State.
Little did he know, for more than a century, Austin had been home to a small Jewish population until 1968, when the community began to grow. Since then it has grown 20-fold, one of the fastest growing Jewish communities in the U.S. University of Texas at Austin,
the flagship of the University of Texas system, has had much to do with that growth, bringing Jewish professors and students from all over the country.
As Austin became a center for high-tech industry, more Jewish adults moved there in the 1980s to work for companies like IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola. But it was a single company, started by a Jewish UT Austin student, Michael Dell, that really made the city’s Jewish population explode: Dell Computers.
The company transformed Austin from a medium-sized college town to a booming tech-hub, drawing workers from across the country. In 2000, Michael Dell shaped the Jewish community in another way, creating the Dell Jewish Community Campus, which hosts the city’s JCC, federation, a day school and three synagogues.
Austin saw another boom during the COVID pandemic, when the Austin metro area’s population grew by 15 %. Moving to Austin in 2022 from San Francisco where Dan was a rabbi at a Conservative congregation, the Ains became part of this boom.
But the suburban-style Texas sprawl of Austin covers nearly 320 square miles, a footprint larger than New York City. Only 13% of Austin’s Jewish
families live in close proximity to the Dell campus in northwest Austin. For the Ains and many other Austin residents, getting there is practically a road trip. That might explain in part why the Brandeis study found that only
15% of Jewish households belong to a Jewish congregation either locally or elsewhere.
Light up the Texas night
Moontower Minyan fills a void in more ways than one.
Ellie Cohen, 23, is one of the few members of Moontown who was born and raised in Austin. She left for college at the University of California in Los Angeles, then came back, hoping to take advantage of the laid back vibe and musical culture. But she discovered her hometown, whose slogan famously used to be “Keep Austin Weird,” now wasn’t all that different from other American cities with high tech hubs and corporate headquarters.
As the city has become a destination, it’s also gotten more expensive. Artists have been priced out and homegrown live music venues have shuttered. For Cohen, worshiping with Moontown Minyan conjures what she missed.
“I didn’t think Jewish life could be cool in Austin, Texas,” Cohen said. “Judaism is such an intimate way to get to
know people. I love what Moontower is doing to awaken that in a lot of people.”
Moontower Minyan’s name is inspired by Austin’s history. More than a century ago Austin erected its first “moontowers,” 165-foot steel lighting structures to light up the darkness. The city still has 17 in use today, and they even got a shout out in the film “Dazed and Confused,” where the characters party under a moontower.
Dan Ain likes the imagery of a light in the darkness: “lighting up like a menorah, wanting to light up the Texas night, is a nice feeling for us.”
The minyan’s monthly Shabbats, held at the Something Cool Studios artist collective, draw around 60 people. High Holiday services were standing room only.
The Ains are even expanding the community into the area’s Hill Country, a rapidly-growing area right outside the city.
“When you leave a service that he does, you feel really good about yourself, and you feel really good about being Jewish,” said Sarah Kline, a mother of four who lives in the Hill Country town Dripping Springs. “That’s what I want my kids to feel.”
Phill Brush, a bluegrass bassist and singer who regularly performs at Moontower Minyan, had never thought to incorporate his Judaism into this bluegrass.
“Rabbi Dan is the first rabbi I hung out with since I graduated Hebrew school,” said Brush.
“His service style is not the typical sit down and say the prayers that we always say, and do that,” said Brush. “He is building and cultivating his own style and interpretation of spirituality, especially based around art and music, which resonates with me.”
Moontower Minyan even inspired Brush to start a new band, “Old Time Religion,” which sings bluegrass songs about stories from the Hebrew Bible and has become Moontower Minyan’s house band.
At a recent Shabbat dinner with Moontower’s leadership team, Alana Joblin Ain covered her eyes as she recited the blessings over the Shabbat flames. Dan Ain blessed the wine and challah, tore the bread and tossed chunks to guests across the table as he delivered a d’var Torah based on the parsha. He compared the Tower of Babel, built after the flood, to an ancient AI data center. Both illustrate humanity’s tendency toward self-preservation and conformity in the face of fear.
“God comes down and says this is not good,” he explained. “It’s not good if we lose the point of being human, which is to express our creativity and our individuality and our humanity the way God intended.”
“If you want to think about sort of after a tragedy when a lot of people wanted to get together and express their Jewish identity,” he said, referring to Oct. 7, “we’ve begun to create a space where people can do it in a way that feels authentic.”
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Jewish voters split on giving Mamdani a second term — and see Jessica Tisch as his strongest rival, new poll shows
Jewish New Yorkers divided over Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism and criticism of Israel are also split on whether he deserves a second term, with some eyeing his Jewish police commissioner, Jessica Tisch, as a potential challenger, according to a new poll. Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, won a bitterly contested Democratic primary last year without securing a majority of Jewish voters.
The survey by Honan Strategy Group of 269 Jewish Democratic primary voters across the five boroughs, shared exclusively with the Forward, found that Tisch narrowly leads Mamdani 44% to 42% in a hypothetical head-to-head matchup for mayor in 2029.
Mamdani remains the frontrunner, according to the poll, even among Jewish Democrats in a crowded primary field that hypothetically includes three Jewish rivals. He received 44% support, compared with 25% for Tisch, 7% for City Council Speaker Julie Menin and 4% for Rep. Dan Goldman, in the poll. Another 13% were undecided.
The poll was conducted Oct. 2 through Oct. 7 via text-to-web, with a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points. Among all 967 likely Democratic primary voters surveyed, Mamdani leads Tisch 54% to 17% and enjoys a 73% job approval rating. The margin of error for the overall primary voter sample was plus or minus 3.2 percentage points.
The results highlight the unusual political position of Tisch, who has become one of the most popular figures among Jewish New Yorkers while serving under a mayor whose views on Israel and handling of antisemitism have drawn widespread criticism from the community. Asked whether Mamdani should be reelected in 2029, 44% of Jewish primary voters said it was time for someone new.
But the findings also show the limits of a potential challenge.
Mamdani has a relatively stable base of Jewish support — 45% approve of his job performance, 41% favor giving him another term, and he receives between 44% and 43% in potential head-to-head matchups against Menin and City Comptroller Mark Levine, respectively.
Jewish voters make up only an estimated 16% of the primary electorate, and even before his election, Mamdani had built a coalition of Jews who support him, including some Hasidic sects that continue to embrace him. Mamdani swept progressive Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Manhattan on his way to a citywide win last November, according to analysis of election districts where at least 10% of voters have Jewish-identifiable surnames.
The results, which seem to show an increase in support for the incumbent mayor, also come nearly three years before the next mayoral election, with no indication that Tisch is considering a run.
Why Tisch stands out among Jewish voters
Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family and has publicly expressed support for Israel, has emerged as a reassuring presence for many Jewish New Yorkers who have deep concerns about Mamdani’s leadership. In the poll, 51% said they disapprove of Mamdani’s job performance, including 39% who strongly disapprove.
A separate Honan poll, conducted during the same period among 503 respondents, found that nearly two-thirds of all Jewish voters disapproved of Mamdani’s handling of antisemitism. By contrast, 75% approved of Tisch’s performance on the issue.
The partnership between Mamdani and Tisch has offered political benefits to both. Earlier this year, Mamdani declined to march at the annual Celebrate Israel Parade, citing his longstanding criticism of the Israeli government. Tisch, however, marched and represented the city.
Tisch has also made her Jewish identity visible in her public role. She placed a mezuzah on the door of her NYPD office, a gesture that resonated with Jewish New Yorkers concerned about rising antisemitism. And she spoke at Central Synagogue, where she’s been a lifelong member, at Shabbat services one week after an attack in the sanctuary.
Gov. Kathy Hochul, who endorsed Mamdani after the primary, revealed in a recent interview with Politico magazine that, before offering her support, she had urged him to retain Tisch as head of the police department, citing her Jewish identity. “I thought it was very important because she’s a credible voice, she is a Jewish woman, has a successful family,” Hochul said. “It’s important that she stays. She knows her role is important. He knows her role is important.”
Asked whether Tisch might eventually run for office, Hochul said, “I don’t know, and she had an opportunity last spring if she wanted to, as well.”
Mamdani has repeatedly defended his decision to keep Tisch in her role despite pressure from his progressive allies. “Jessica Tisch is the police commissioner. I have no plans to change that,” Mamdani said at a recent press conference following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement shooting in Manhattan that sparked protests over the NYPD’s response.
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