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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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From Buenos Aires to Warsaw, ‘The Bride’ comes home
For almost 100 years, “The Bride,” a magnificent painting by Polish Jewish artist Maurycy Minkowski (1881–1930), has been in exile.
In 1930, Minkowski traveled to Buenos Aires for an exhibition of more than 200 of his works. And then tragedy struck. As a child, he had lost his hearing due to an accident. While walking on the street shortly before the exhibit’s opening, he was struck by an oncoming vehicle whose approach he couldn’t hear. The paintings, which were exhibited posthumously, stayed in Argentina and were dispersed.
Since then, Fundación IWO — the Buenos Aires branch of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna — managed to acquire more than 80 of Minkowski’s paintings, some at auction and many through a coordinated effort during the 1940s to rescue 60 works that had been pawned or were on consignment with dealers trying to sell them.
IWO’s Minkowski collection, the largest in the world, was almost lost during the 1994 bombing of the AMIA building (the Buenos Aires Jewish community center), where IWO’s holdings were kept. A volunteer rescue team led by IWO’s academic director Ester Szwarc saved the paintings from the rubble. “The Bride” was among them.
POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw had long expressed strong interest in including this painting in its core exhibition. Already in 2007, Renata Piątkowska, Chief Curator of Collections, had proposed “The Bride” for the museum’s exhibit on the Jewish wedding and its transformations in the 19th century.
On Nov. 7, 2025, almost 20 years later, that dream came true. The painting arrived at POLIN Museum to great fanfare, as a landmark gift from IWO made possible by funding from philanthropist and POLIN Museum Council member, Ronald S. Lauder.
Maurycy Minkowski was born into a well-to-do Warsaw family. He attended a school for the deaf, which encouraged his artistic talent. Minkowski graduated from the Kraków Academy of Fine Arts with a gold medal in 1905 and returned to Warsaw. He was shaken by the bloody pogroms and devastation of the Jewish community that he witnessed there and elsewhere that year. This experience prompted him to shift his focus from landscapes and portraits to the trauma of Jews fleeing violence. Those powerful paintings capture the desperation of masses of Jews on the run with nowhere to go. He is best known for these works, although he was never fully appreciated in his lifetime, neither in Poland, nor in Argentina.
Minkowski moved to Paris in 1908 and in the years that followed turned to scenes of Jewish daily life, essentially in the shtetl. It was around 1920 that he painted “The Bride,” one of several of his works on this theme. The bride’s attire and that of the married women surrounding her recall the clothing of Jewish women more than a century earlier.
The married women are dressed in keeping with tsnies, modesty. Their short hair is covered with an elaborately embroidered bonnet, shimmering with metallic thread. There is also the hint of a shterntikhl, a bejeweled panel along the front of the head covering; a brusttukh, a decorative panel on their chest, and a helzl, a ruff, around their neck.
The bride’s hair has not yet been shorn and is not yet covered. All the women are holding a prayerbook — it was customary to give the bride a beautifully bound prayerbook as a wedding gift. Set in an exquisite wooden frame hand carved by Minkowski himself, the painting captures the solemnity of this moment, as the bride contemplates her future after the wedding. The lives of Jewish women — not only their dress and weddings — would be transformed beyond recognition in the decades that followed.
“This remarkable painting is a true testament to Maurycy Minkowski’s artistic talent and his deep connection to Jewish culture,” said Zygmunt Stępiński, Director of POLIN Museum, when the painting arrived. The work will be the centerpiece of a reimagined presentation in 2027 on the evolution of the Jewish wedding during the nineteenth century.
The post From Buenos Aires to Warsaw, ‘The Bride’ comes home appeared first on The Forward.
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Why Does the Palestinian Authority Still Promote Holocaust Denial? Because It Starts at the Top
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks on as he visits the Istishari Cancer Center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Official Palestinian Authority (PA) television recently aired yet another segment questioning the reality of the Holocaust.
On Oct. 8, 2025, PA TV brought on Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi to claim that the Jewish “victim narrative” is collapsing, and the PA TV host added that even the gas chambers could be dismissed with “simple evidence.”
Tunisian journalist Sufian Al-Arfawi: “The moral issue that they [the Jews] were victims and the issue that they were subjected to extermination by Hitler allowed them to receive support and a global popular embrace, because there was sympathy. This [victim] narrative has begun to collapse and to go in the right direction…”
Official PA TV host: “There is the narrative that says that the [German] soldier used to drag the Jews to the crematorium while calmly eating a sandwich. How does someone drag a person into a crematorium that has toxic gas and isn’t harmed by it? Meaning, even the narrative can be undone with very simple evidence.” [emphasis adde]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Oct. 8, 2025]
According to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Holocaust denial and distortion, “Holocaust denial may include publicly denying or calling into doubt the use of principal mechanisms of destruction (such as gas chambers, mass shooting, starvation and torture) or the intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people.”
Given the ideology of the PA’s leadership, this denial is entirely predictable.
PA leader Mahmoud Abbas himself laid the groundwork for this narrative decades ago in his doctoral thesis, later published as The Other Side.
Abbas argued that Zionists intentionally inflated the number of Holocaust victims for political gain and that the real number of Jews killed was only “a few hundred thousand.” He even claimed that Jews were “offered up” to increase the victim count.
Having more victims meant greater rights and stronger privilege to join the negotiation table for dividing the spoils of war once it was over. However, since Zionism was not a fighting partner – suffering victims in a battle – it had no escape but to offer up human beings, under any name, to raise the number of victims, which they could then boast of at the moment of accounting …
It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement…is to inflate this figure so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand.” [emphasis adde]
When the head of the PA has distorted the memory of the Holocaust throughout his life, such as when he suggested that Hitler killed Jews out of self-defense because “they caused ruin” and because of Jews’ “social role,” it is no surprise that PA TV echoes them.
This is not a new narrative; rather, it is a continuation of the Holocaust distortion that Mahmoud Abbas embedded into PA ideology and that its media still carries forward today.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.
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Israel Exposed Hamas’s Terror Network Across Europe. Will UK Media Now Stop Treating Its Leaders With Kid Gloves?
Basem Naim, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, speaks during an interview with Reuters in Istanbul, Turkey, Oct. 16, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Murad Sezer
Over the past two years, senior Hamas official Basem Naim has been granted multiple high‑profile interviews on UK platforms such as Sky News and the BBC — remarkable visibility for someone with a leadership position in a designated terrorist group. Now, in light of a startling disclosure by Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad concerning a Europe‑wide terror infrastructure attributed to Hamas, those media appearances demand re‑examination.
The Israeli Prime Minister’s Office released a statement this week on behalf of the Mossad saying the agency, in cooperation with European counterparts, has dismantled a network of terror cells across Germany, Austria, and beyond — cells that stockpiled weapons and stood ready to strike Jewish and Israeli targets on the continent.
Among the most striking details was a weapons cache seized in Vienna last September, consisting of pistols and explosives and traced to a certain Muhammad Naim, who was identified by Israeli intelligence as the son of Basem Naim. Investigators reportedly uncovered a meeting in Qatar between father and son, allegedly signaling leadership‑level approval of the European operation.
When one considers that Basem Naim has been treated in the UK media as a mainstream political figure, flattered with copious airtime, speaking from Istanbul and Doha, questions must be asked.
On Oct. 10, Sky News’ lightweight foreign news presenter Yalda Hakim interviewed Naim in Doha (perhaps she flew there on Sky News’ weather forecast sponsor Qatar Airways’ own fleet), where she didn’t once question Hamas’s international terrorism aimed at Jews. Instead, Naim was given time to claim Hamas was prepared to relinquish governing Gaza but would not agree to disarm.
Hakim’s three softball interviews of Naim never one challenged the terrorist and his organization’s evil, sadistic behaviors or ideology in as aggressive a way as she badgered me for doubting the discredited and disproven Hamas-supplied casualty figures during the Gaza war. Earlier, a BBC “HardTalk” session with Sarah Montague on Jan. 29 featured Naim on Gaza’s future, once again without evident interrogation of his organization’s international terror links.
I myself appeared on Hakim’s Sky studio show back in February 2024, immediately after another segment with Naim, and openly criticized the absurdity of the interview — from Turkey, during active warfare in Gaza — where no questions were asked about Hamas’s torture of its own people or its transnational terror ambitions. I pointed out that he had served as minister of health in the first government of arch-terrorist Ismael Haniyeh, only for the other guest, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to jump in and suggest that his willingness to perpetuate the suffering of Gazans while he was safe in Turkey was somehow akin to Yair Netanyahu, the son of the Israeli Prime Minister and a private citizen, living in the US. In conversion outside the studio, she insisted to me that Israel’s main problem was its democratically elected leader but, when challenged, couldn’t name a single other Israeli leader who she thought would act differently in the circumstances. I’m not sure she could name any other Israeli politicians at all. No criticism of Dr. Naim, though.
Having highlighted this at the time, I hope that now the mainstream media and establishment’s choice to confer legitimacy on Naim without substantive challenge on important issues is reconsidered. (I haven’t had the opportunity to ask Hakim or Warsi since then).
To dismiss Palestinian terrorism as only a local Israeli problem is to ignore how Hamas has long viewed itself: as a regional, even global, movement, and an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood — a transnational Islamic jihadist movement. Indeed, senior Hamas leadership in Gaza have, for years, framed their cause not simply as liberation of the enclave but as vanguard of a broader “resistance” spanning all of Israel, with their own founding charter clear on its views of Jews in general. They want us dead. To anyone who claims it’s all just rhetoric, the European arrests and weapon caches expose their ambitions in operational form.
The recent arrest in London of a British man accused of helping move firearms into Europe for attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets should dispel any lingering doubt about how far these networks extend.
German authorities say the suspect was detained in the UK on a German warrant after a monthslong investigation into a Hamas-linked cell operating across Germany and Austria. According to Germany’s Federal Prosecutor, he was a member of Hamas and twice traveled to Berlin over the summer to meet a German citizen referred to as Abed Al G, who was arrested earlier alongside two others described as “foreign operatives” alleged to have been seeking weapons for attacks on Jewish sites. During those arrests police seized an AK-47, several handguns, and quantities of ammunition. Prosecutors say the suspect had already taken delivery of five handguns and ammunition and transported them to Vienna for safekeeping.
The picture emerging is of a network that now reaches into Britain itself.
In this context, Britain’s recent decision to admit young Palestinian students from Gaza with fully‑funded scholarships — and dependent family members — is disturbing. On the face of it, the initiative is humanitarian. But when set against the backdrop of a terror network active on European soil, rooted into Hamas leadership and stretched into host‑countries, it smacks of policy naïveté, or worse, “suicidal empathy.”
Granting access to students and their families from a territory under Hamas control where generations have been educated to idolize terrorists and carry out attacks like the Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of southern Israel seems more than a little foolish. UK campuses are experiencing rising extremism as it is, and radicalization is a known problem without importing the children of a Gazan education system built on antisemitism and violence.
The threat, it seems, is not only on Israel’s doorstep — it may be on our own. And while compassion is a noble instinct, in a world of asymmetric warfare, porous borders, and subterranean terror networks, we risk opening doors without knowing what, or whom, may walk through.
When the media treats a senior Hamas figure as legitimate without challenge, when Western academic institutions open their doors to students from societies led by terrorist groups, and when intelligence agencies expose the apparatus of terror on our continent, can we still afford to view Palestinian terrorism as someone else’s problem? Or have we now become part of that problem ourselves?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.