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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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A ‘deficit of courage’ killed the free press in Germany. Will American journalists find the courage to thwart Trump?
Paul Reusch was managing director of a major German industrial conglomerate known as GHH, whose holdings included Bavaria’s largest newspaper, the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten.
After two meetings with Adolf Hitler early in 1932, Reusch signed an agreement that the Munich broadsheet would refrain from “all unwarranted and personal attacks against Hitler and individual National Socialist leaders.”
One year later, Hitler lackeys were calling the shots in the newsroom, Jewish journalists had been forced out, and the newspaper was spewing hate propaganda.
The Third Reich brutally smashed free speech. Nearly a century later, it’s America’s Fourth Estate that is getting battered — by Donald Trump’s drive to muzzle his critics by exploiting the greed and hunger for power of corporate media executives.
Scott Pelley’s firing and the turmoil at CBS News are the freshest manifestations of this threat. But it’s been going on since the start of Trump’s second term — witness the craven settlements by ABC News and CBS News of frivolous lawsuits brought by Trump last year, his favored treatment of MAGA-aligned outlets, and his dehumanization of actual journalists.
“The news executives are acting as though, (if) we just placate Donald Trump we’ll get through this,” veteran TV journalist Jim Acosta said the other day in an interview on MS Now. “We have a deficit of courage and honor in this country right now and we need to get back to it.”
It was a deficit of courage that killed the free press in Weimar Germany. And like Paul Reusch, German media baron Alfred Hugenberg is a case study in corporate submission to authoritarianism.
Hugenberg was a steel executive, ultra-nationalist politician, and owner of some 50 provincial newspapers, of the Telegraph-Union wire service, as well as Ufa, the Third Reich’s largest producer of movies and newsreels. The Great Depression hollowed out Germany’s newspaper market, allowing Hugenberg to use his considerable capital to buy distressed papers and blanket the market with articles calling for an end to democracy.
Hitler’s Nazis and Hugenberg’s German National Peoples’ Party joined forces in 1931 in the Harzburg Front, an attempt to topple Chancellor Heinrich Brüning. Although the alliance ultimately unraveled, it brought huge financial contributions to the Nazis from German industrialists.
After Hitler came to power he struck rapidly to muzzle any dissent, either shutting down newspapers or taking them over to serve as cogs in the Nazis’ propaganda apparatus.
As America nears its 250th birthday, media turmoil is playing into the hands of Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions.
Trump’s obsession with silencing truth-writing journalists kicked into overdrive early in his second term, with his banning of The Associated Press, my former employer, from the Oval Office and from Air Force One, the Trump administration dictating who gets to be in the White House press pool, and giving preferential treatment to journalists who ask softball questions or can be relied on to make fawning statements about Trump’s grandiose ideas, as Trump’s personal insults toward journalists — mainly women — pile up in number and in viciousness.
What’s been happening at CBS News and Scott Pelley’s firing are warning signs of moves by Trump to take control of news media and suppress criticism of him. The drama started last summer with CBS’ parent company — Paramount — agreeing to pay Trump $16 million to settle a toothless lawsuit over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. And then came approval by the FCC — led by Trump loyalist Brendan Carr — of Paramount’s merger with Skydance Media. No quid pro quo here!
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, hired Bari Weiss to lead CBS News. After firing a half-dozen top people at 60 Minutes, Weiss was accused by Pelley of “murdering” the vaunted TV news program and doing Trump’s bidding.
“My impression at the time was that she was putting a thumb on the scale on behalf of the administration. Constantly looking out for the views of the president,” Pelley said in an interview with The New York Times published this past Sunday.
Weiss and CBS News have denied Pelley’s allegations.
There’s more turmoil on the horizon — and more reason to fear the Trump administration will seek to deepen its influence on news operations.
This past February, Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery signed an agreement for Paramount to acquire WBD for $110.9 billion, and WBD shareholders approved the merger. Whether the deal goes through is up to regulators. The Trump administration is eager to see Ellison, the son of Oracle CEO and Trump buddy Larry Ellison, calling the shots for CNN. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said a few months ago: “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better.”
Ellison has said “editorial independence will absolutely be maintained” at CNN. But the purges at 60 Minutes are hardly reassuring. Jim Acosta maintains that the media conglomerate resulting from the merger of Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery “will essentially act like a state media organization in support of Donald Trump.”
There are calls among journalists to show more support for each other, and to stand up to Trump when he personally attacks them. The optics at this year’s White House Correspondents Dinner weren’t great, with journalists giving a warm welcome to a man who regularly calls them “stupid,” “fake news,” “horrible,” “terrible,” among other insults. I wonder how they would have responded had a gunman not interrupted the proceedings and Trump gave a scathing speech about the assembled members of the Fourth Estate.
Acosta and other journalists are urging their colleagues — as well as news executives — to show more backbone.
“They (the Trump administration) are trying to put together a state-dominated media system in this country. And it has to be stopped,” Acosta said.
“There are a lot of journalists who can do something about it, and a lot of corporate executives who can do something about it. “
Acosta is not wrong.
Journalists working in the Third Reich were a mixed bag of Nazi fanatics, sycophants, opportunists, and career professionals who may have felt queasy about collaborating with the Nazis but kept quiet about it.
Resistance could have fatal consequences. Fritz Gerlich, editor of the Munich-based newspaper Der gerade Weg (The Straight Path), was murdered at Dachau. Erwein von Aretin, political editor at the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, was also hauled off to Dachau, but survived. Editors and reporters at the Münchener Post, a pro-democracy newspaper owned by the Social Democrats, were rounded up, jailed, and after their release ostracized and forced to live in penury, a story I tell in my book Enemy of The People: The Munich Post and The Journalists Who Opposed Hitler.
German journalists never put up any serious resistance to Hitler’s suppression of the free press at least partly because most of the populace had turned against democracy.
American journalists are in a different situation, one far less perilous than that of their German colleagues. They might lose access to administration officials by standing up to Trump, perhaps forfeit their seat at press conferences to MAGA media, be banished from Air Force One, suffer juvenile insults from Trump, or anger their corporate bosses.
But today’s journalists need to ask themselves this: Isn’t standing up for democracy worth more than a seat in the briefing room?
While interviewing Trump on Meet The Press this past Sunday, Kristen Welker showed how it should be done, persisting in holding Trump to account. When Welker challenged Trump’s claims of election rigging by Democrats, he exploded.
“We’re like a Third World country,” he yelled at Welker. “Your elections are crooked. And you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked, and so is ABC and CBS and CNN.” Red-faced, Trump stood up and stormed out
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YiddishPOP can bring more diversity to American Jewish education
Every Sunday morning, a group of families in Stockholm, Sweden, meets in a local school to create handicrafts, do gymnastics — and learn Yiddish.
Katka Mazurczak, the instructor of this grassroots group called The Yiddish Club, told me that the families seem to really enjoy the weekly Yiddish immersion. One of the resources she uses is YiddishPOP, a free online animated and game-based learning tool that features short episodes about a young teenager named Nomi, her robot sidekick Moby and her friends.
I’ve known about YiddishPOP for years and often share its videos with my grandchildren. The episodes cover topics that are familiar and easy for children to relate to. In one, a friend of Nomi’s finally scores a basket. In another, Nomi and Moby laugh as they look at their comical reflections in funhouse mirrors.
Each story is accompanied by a video clip presenting the new vocabulary and grammar, interactive games and a multiple choice quiz.
“Children love YiddishPOP,” said Mazurczak, who also uses the program when teaching kids in more formal school settings like the Stockholm Jewish Hillel School, known as Hillelskolan. “It has captivating graphics, clear speech and the movie goes at a good pace. Some episodes are really funny and kids laugh out loud.”
Part of the appeal of YiddishPOP, particularly for beginners, lies in Moby’s slapstick antics. I too find myself laughing during those scenes.
In a time when seeking diversity has become a main focus in schools across America, Jewish educators might want to consider introducing young students to the multi-faceted language and culture of Ashkenazic Jewry, using a contemporary language learning tool like YiddishPOP.
Teaching the Yiddish language through animation and interactive games helps it come alive for children, depicting it as a natural, even cool way to express Jewish identity, rather than stereotypically sending the language to the dustbin of history.
One school that has tried out YiddishPOP is the Krieger Schechter Day School in Baltimore, MD. When the school piloted the program with its third-grade class last year, the director of the lower school, Toby Kaplowitz, was impressed.
“Though students had just four sessions, they were truly engaged and walked away with both a sense of the language and an appreciation for its connection to their Jewish learning,” Kaplowitz wrote in an email. Krieger plans to continue using YiddishPOP with these same students, as they transition to fourth grade.
Last year, YiddishPOP began distributing $500 microgrants to help teachers and parents bring the Yiddish program to schools. Dana Yudovich Katz, a teacher at Kehillah High — a supplemental program for students in grades 8–12, run by the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston — was the first recipient. She added YiddishPOP to a course she had initiated with the teens called TAM: A Taste of Yiddish Language and Culture. Tam is Yiddish for “flavor.”
Most of the students came away from using YiddishPOP with a positive feeling towards the language. As one student in Yudovich Katz’s class told her: “The film was good at using the words in a way I could understand because it was just slow enough.”
The YiddishPOP team is now working on teacher materials that will make it easier for people without a background in Yiddish or language teaching to use YiddishPOP. Teachers and school administrators who’d like to apply for a YiddishPOP microgrant can do so here until July 31.
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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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