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How the late actor Topol turned Tevye into a Zionist
(JTA) — If you were born anytime before, say, 1975, you might remember Israel not as a source of angst and tension among American Jews but as a cause for celebration. In the 1960s and ’70s, most Jews embraced as gospel the heroic version of Israel’s founding depicted in Leon Uris’ 1958 novel “Exodus” and the 1960 movie version. The1961 Broadway musical “Milk and Honey,” about American tourists set loose in Israel, ran for over 500 performances. And that was before Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War turned even fence-sitting suburban Jews into passionate Zionists.
That was the mood when the film version of “Fiddler on the Roof” came out in 1971. The musical had already been a smash hit on Broadway, riding a wave of nostalgia by Jewish audiences and an embrace of ethnic particularism by the mainstream. The part of Tevye, the put-upon patriarch of a Jewish family in a “small village in Russia,” was originated on Broadway by Zero Mostel, a Brooklyn-born actor who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home. Ashkenazi American Jews tended to think of “Fiddler” as family history — what Alisa Solomon, author of the 2013 book “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” describes as the “Jewish American origin story.”
But Mostel didn’t star in the film, which landed in theaters while the afterglow of Israel’s victory in its second major war of survival had yet to fade. Famously – or notoriously – the part went to Chaim Topol, a young Israeli actor unknown outside of Israel except for his turns in the London productions of “Fiddler.” With an Israeli in the lead, a musical about the perils and dilemmas of Diaspora became a film about Zionism. When Topol played Tevye in London, Solomon writes,“‘Fiddler’ became a site for celebration, drawing Jews as well as gentiles to the theater — some for repeat viewings — to bask in Jewish perseverance and to pay homage to Jewish survival. The show didn’t change, but the atmosphere around it did.”
Topol died this week at 87, still best known as Tevye, and his death reminded me of the ways “Fiddler” is — and isn’t — Zionist. When Tevye and his fellow villagers are forced out of Anatevke by the czarist police, they head for New York, Chicago and Krakow. Only Yente, the matchmaker, declares that she is going to the “Holy Land.” Perchik, the presumably socialist revolutionary who marries one of Tevye’s daughters, wants to transform Russian society and doesn’t say a word about the political Zionists who sought to create a workers’ utopia in Palestine.
“There is nothing explicitly or even to my mind implicitly Zionist about it,” Solomon told me a few years back. And yet, she said, “any story of Jewish persecution becomes from a Zionist perspective a Zionist story.”
When the Israeli Mission to the United Nations hosted a performance of the Broadway revival of “Fiddler” in 2016, that was certainly the perspective of then-Ambassador Dani Danon. Watching the musical, he said, he couldn’t help thinking, “What if they had a place to go [and the Jews of Anatevke could] live as a free people in their own land? The whole play could have been quite different.”
Israelis always had a complicated relationship with “Fiddler,” Solomon told me. The first Hebrew production was brought to Israel in 1965 by impresario Giora Godik. American Jews were enthralled by its resurrection of Yiddishkeit, the Ashkenazi folk culture that their parents and grandparents had left behind and the Holocaust had all but erased. Israelis were less inclined to celebrate the “Old Country.”
“Israelis were — what? — not exactly ashamed or hostile, but the Zionist enterprise was about moving away from that to become ‘muscle Jews,’ and even denouncing the stereotype of the pasty, weakling Eastern European Jews,” said Solomon, warning that she was generalizing.
That notion of the “muscle Jew” is echoed in a review of Topol’s performance by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that he is “a rough presence, masculine, with burly, raw strength, but also sensual and warm. He’s a poor man but he’s not a little man, he’s a big man brought low — a man of Old Testament size brought down by the circumstances of oppression.”
From left: Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett, Zero Mostel, Julia Migenes and Joanna Merlin backstage at opening night of “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Imperial Theater in New York City, Sept. 22, 1964. (AP/Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films)
Mostel, by contrast, was plump, sweaty and vaudevillian — a very different kind of masculinity. The congrast between the two Tevyes shows up in, of all places, a parody of “Fiddler” in Mad magazine. In that 1976 comic, Mostel’s Tevye is reimagined as a neurotic, nouveau riche suburban American Jew with a comb-over, spoiled hippy children and a “spendthrift” wife; Topol’s Tevye arrives in a dream to blame his descendants for turning their backs on tradition and turning America into a shallow, consumerist wasteland. A kibbutznik couldn’t have said (or sung) it better.
Composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and book writer Joseph Stein set out to write a hit musical, not a political statement. But others have always shaped “Fiddler” to their needs.
In the original script, Yente tells Tevye’s wife Golde, “I’m going to the Holy Land to help our people increase and multiply. It’s my mission.” In a 2004 Broadway revival, staged in the middle of the second intifada, the “increase and multiply” line was excised. In a review of Solomon’s “Wonder of Wonders,” Edward Shapiro conjectured that the producers of the revival didn’t want Yente to be seen as “a soldier in the demographic war between Jews and Arabs.”
Topol himself connected “Fiddler” to Israel as part of one long thread that led from Masada — the Judean fortress where rebellious Jewish forces fell to the Romans in the first century CE — through Russia and eventually to Tel Aviv. “My grandfather was a sort of Tevye, and my father was a son of Tevye,” Topol told The New York Times in 1971. “My grandfather was a Russian Jew and my father was born in Russia, south of Kiev. So I knew of the big disappointment with the [Russian] Revolution, and the Dreyfus trial in France, and the man with the little mustache on his upper lip, the creation of the state of Israel and ‘Masada will never fall again.’ It’s the grandchildren now who say that. It’s all one line — it comes from Masada 2,000 years ago, and this Tevye of mine already carries in him the chromosomes of those grandchildren.”
The recent all-Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” — a Yiddish translation of an English-language musical based on English translations of Yiddish short stories — readjusted that valence, returning “Fiddler” solidly to the Old Country. It arrived at a time when surveys suggested that Jews 50 and older are much more emotionally attached to Israel than are younger Jews. For decades, “Exodus”-style devotion to Israel and its close corollary — Holocaust remembrance — were the essence of American Jewish identity. Among younger generations with no first-hand memories of its founding or victory in the 1967 war, that automatic connection faded.
Meanwhile, as Israeli politics have shifted well to the right, engaged liberal Jews have rediscovered the allure of pre-Holocaust, pre-1948, decidedly leftist Eastern European Jewish culture. A left-wing magazine like Jewish Currents looks to the socialist politics and anti-Zionism of the Jewish Labor Bund; symposiums on Yiddish-speaking anarchists and Yiddish-language classes draw surprisingly young audiences. A Yiddish “Fiddler” fits this nostalgia for the shtetl (as does the “Fiddler” homage in the brand-new “History of the World, Part II,” which celebrates the real-life radical Fanny Kaplan, a Ukrainian Jew who tried to assassinate Lenin).
Topol’s Tevye was an Israeli Tevye: young, manly, with a Hebrew accent. Mostel’s Tevye was an American Tevye: heimish, New York-y, steeped in Yiddishkeit. It’s a testament to the show’s enduring appeal — and the multitudes contained within Jewish identity — that both performances are beloved.
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The post How the late actor Topol turned Tevye into a Zionist appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New York Jews Don’t Need Rhetoric; They Need Equal Justice Under the Law
Zohran Mamdani is sworn in as mayor of New York City at Old City Hall Station, New York, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: Amir Hamja/Pool via REUTERS
New York City’s new antisemitism czar, Phylisa Wisdom, has introduced herself with the language of inclusion: “expanding the communal table,” “pulling up additional chairs,” convening stakeholders, listening and learning.
But New York Jews do not need metaphors. They need clarity. They need enforcement. They need a city government willing to name antisemitism plainly and confront it without evasions — because the issue at stake is not communal symbolism. It is the most basic obligation of a liberal democracy: equal justice under the law.
Antisemitism in New York is not an abstract dialogue problem. It is not a misunderstanding that can be resolved through facilitated conversation. It is a civic emergency: assaults on visibly Jewish New Yorkers, threats against synagogues, harassment on public transit, and a permissive ideological environment — especially in elite progressive spaces — that treats Jewish identity as uniquely suspect.
The numbers alone should end any confusion. In 2025, the NYPD recorded 330 antisemitic hate crimes in New York City — more than all other bias categories combined, representing roughly 57 percent of all reported hate crimes. Jews make up about 10 percent of the city’s population but are targeted far more often than any other group. No other minority in New York is attacked so disproportionately and no other hatred is so often explained away.
And the crisis is accelerating. In January 2026 — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office — the NYPD recorded 31 antisemitic hate crimes, a 182 percent increase over January 2025. Jews were targeted, on average, once per day.
And the threat is not theoretical.
Orthodox Jews have been punched, kicked, and harassed in broad daylight simply for looking Jewish — attacked on sidewalks, on buses, and in subway stations. New Yorkers have watched video after video of Jews being targeted in the one city that claims, more than any other, to be a capital of pluralism.
On January 28, 2026, a car was deliberately rammed into the Chabad–Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, one of the most significant Jewish religious sites in the city. The driver was arrested at the scene and charged with multiple hate crimes; security was increased around Jewish institutions across the city in its aftermath. No one was killed. But the message was unmistakable: even the most iconic Jewish spaces in New York are targets.
This is the environment the city’s antisemitism office must confront. Yet so far, the public has been offered almost nothing beyond process language: listening tours, bridge-building, stakeholder engagement.
That is not strategy. That is atmosphere.
And it raises a deeper concern: the modern “czar” is often less a leader than a buffer — a bureaucratic layer designed to absorb outrage, issue statements, and manage optics while avoiding the harder institutional decisions that real enforcement requires. Cities appoint “czars” when they want to signal seriousness without exercising it.
The first question for any antisemitism czar is not: How many chairs are at the table? It is: What counts as antisemitism?
If the office cannot answer that, it cannot enforce anything. It cannot uphold the law. It cannot even speak honestly about what is happening.
But this question is not hypothetical. On his first day in office, Mayor Mamdani revoked the city’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism — the most widely adopted definitional framework for identifying when anti-Israel activism crosses into anti-Jewish hatred through demonization, double standards, or delegitimization. The definition has been adopted by over 1,200 entities worldwide, including 46 countries. And Wisdom herself has signaled agreement with Mamdani’s decision to discard it.
Without such a standard, the office is left without a diagnostic instrument. And the questions it must answer remain urgent:
Is “Globalize the Intifada” antisemitic? Is calling Zionists Nazis antisemitic? Is telling Jewish students they are foreign colonizers unless they renounce Israel antisemitic? Is treating the world’s only Jewish state as uniquely illegitimate antisemitic?
These are not academic puzzles. They are the daily realities of Jewish life in New York’s institutions.
To be clear: criticism of Israeli policy is legitimate in a free society. But the targeting of Jews as Jews — or the delegitimization of Jewish national existence — is not. A city that cannot draw that line is not combating antisemitism. It is managing it.
And here is the central danger of this moment: antisemitism is increasingly laundered through the language of justice. It does not always arrive wearing a swastika. It often arrives wearing the idiom of liberation, insisting that it cannot possibly be antisemitic because it locates itself on the “right side of history.” The most corrosive antisemitism today is the kind that insists it is morally impossible.
This is why definitional clarity matters.
The Jewish community has watched, again and again, as institutions respond swiftly to some forms of hatred while proceduralizing antisemitism into ambiguity. The result is moral incoherence: Jews are told they are protected, but only so long as they do not name what is happening too clearly.
That pattern is now visible on New York’s campuses.
At Columbia University, protest activity during the Gaza war escalated into harassment and intimidation so severe that a campus rabbi publicly warned Jewish students to leave campus for their own safety. That is not “difficult dialogue.” That is exclusion and fear, unfolding at one of America’s most prestigious universities.
Similar dynamics have appeared across parts of the CUNY system and other New York campuses: ideological litmus tests, demonization of Zionism as racism, and a climate in which Jewish students are told — implicitly or explicitly — that full belonging requires political renunciation.
A city serious about antisemitism cannot treat this as a mere communications challenge. It must confront the ideological ecosystem that makes antisemitism socially permissible again, especially among the educated classes.
There is also a basic credibility test. The Mamdani administration has repeatedly elevated figures who have trafficked in extremist rhetoric. His initial director of appointments, Catherine Almonte Da Costa, resigned within 24 hours after posts surfaced in which she wrote about “money hungry Jews.” A transition adviser, Hassaan Chaudhary, was flagged for calling Israel a “barbaric” nation. Another appointee, Alvaro Lopez, described people tearing down Israeli hostage posters as “heroes.” The previous head of the Office to Combat Antisemitism, Rabbi Moshe Davis, was abruptly fired and replaced with Wisdom; he told reporters he believes the administration found his identity as a “proud Zionist” incompatible with its direction. And Tamika Mallory — forced out of the Women’s March for lionizing Louis Farrakhan and reportedly claiming Jews bore responsibility for the exploitation of Black Americans — was appointed to Mamdani’s Committee on Community Safety.
And just this week, a New York City Health Department staffer, Achmat Akkad, was exposed for posting that “1 Israeli left in this world would be one too many!” and that “Jews that don’t support apartheid are safe. Zionists aren’t!” This from a city employee tasked with community engagement. It follows revelations that the city’s Health Department convened a “Global Oppression Working Group” that accused Israel of genocide while making no mention of Hamas’s October 7 attack.
The pattern is not incidental. It reflects an administration in which hostility toward Israel — and, increasingly, toward Jews who support or identify with Israel — is a background condition of employment rather than a disqualifying one. An administration that cannot vet its own staff for eliminationist rhetoric cannot plausibly present itself as the guardian against antisemitism.
New York does not need symbolic appointments designed to manage headlines. It needs leadership willing to draw bright lines — in hiring, in public language, and in enforcement — and to say clearly that those who flirt with eliminationist slogans have no place in city government.
New Yorkers do not need another figurative office. They need measurable commitments: a clear definition, explicit condemnation of eliminationist rhetoric, coordination with law enforcement and the Department of Education, and regular public reporting of incidents and prosecutions. Equal justice is not a metaphor. It is a duty.
Because antisemitism is not defeated through convenings.
It is defeated through moral seriousness: clear definitions, institutional backbone, consistent enforcement, and the courage to confront hatred even when it comes from one’s political allies.
That last part is crucial.
The most urgent antisemitism crisis in New York today is not a fringe rally in a distant borough. It is the normalization of anti-Jewish ideas inside the very institutions that claim the mantle of justice: universities, activist coalitions, cultural organizations, and parts of the political left that have decided that Jews — or at least Zionist Jews — are fair game.
If an antisemitism czar cannot confront that reality, then the office is emblematic by design and functionally useless.
New York City is the largest Jewish city in the world outside Israel. It should be setting the national standard for confronting antisemitism with seriousness and resolve.
Instead, it is offering rhetoric. The task is not to expand the table. The task is to ensure that Jewish New Yorkers receive what every citizen is owed in a constitutional republic: equal justice under the law.
A city that cannot define antisemitism cannot fight it — and a city that cannot fight it is telling its Jews that equal justice is no longer guaranteed.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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How We Should Respond to Attacks Against Jews: Be Ready to Respond with Strength
Arsonists heavily damaged the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, Australia, on Dec. 6, 2024. Photo: Screenshot
Two Jewish men in California were recently attacked after being heard speaking Hebrew. A normal conversation in a native language suddenly became the trigger for violence.
For Jews, Hebrew carries far more than vocabulary. It holds memory, culture, prayer, and identity. It connects Jewish life today with thousands of years of history. When someone is attacked for speaking Hebrew, the attack is not about language. It is about the people speaking it.
I speak Hebrew every day. It is the language I grew up with and the language I use with my children. I speak it with friends and with members of the community. I do not lower my voice when I speak it in public spaces. Cultures survive because people carry them openly. A language that endured exile and persecution did not survive because Jews whispered it.
At the same time, reality requires clarity.
Jewish identity has again become visible in ways that sometimes attract hostility. Under those conditions, preparation is a responsibility.
I have been attacked more than once in my life. Those encounters did not end in tragedy because I had the ability to respond without losing control of the situation. Training changes how people behave under pressure. It allows a person to stay present and act with purpose.
That is the role of self defense training. It is one of the most basic life skills a person can develop. A person learns to swim in case they fall into deep water. A person learns to respond to medical emergencies in case someone collapses in front of them. Learning how to protect yourself serves the same purpose.
Jewish history has long understood this.
During the 1930s, Jewish communities in Europe faced violent attacks in the streets. Jewish athletes and community leaders began developing practical ways to defend themselves. Those efforts eventually became the foundation of Krav Maga, a system built to help ordinary people survive dangerous encounters.
The philosophy behind Krav Maga is straightforward. Avoid violence when possible. Respond decisively if violence becomes unavoidable. Return home safely.
Training produces another important effect that many people overlook. Individuals who feel capable of defending themselves often behave more calmly during confrontation. Awareness replaces panic. Confidence replaces impulsive reactions.
People who know how to fight often avoid fights.
My own willingness to protect myself and the people around me makes it harder to drag me into violence. Preparation allows restraint. The ability to act gives a person the freedom to choose when not to act.
Preparation is far safer than improvisation.
Jewish tradition often speaks about compassion and responsibility for others. These values are sometimes described as speaking the language of love. If we speak the language of love, we must also be able to speak the language of strength.
Strength protects the values that communities hold dear. Self-defense begins with protecting oneself, but it quickly expands to protecting family, friends, and neighbors. I cannot imagine watching another Jew or someone I love being attacked and doing nothing. That instinct is not about heroism. It is about responsibility.
Courage in those moments rarely comes from fearlessness. It comes from understanding that action and inaction both carry consequences.
Fear exists in those moments. I feel it when I see attacks like the one that happened in California. I think about my children. I think about Jewish communities that once believed they were fully secure in the societies around them.
What motivates me is not the absence of fear. It is the awareness that silence and hesitation often carry a higher cost over time.
For my children and for the Jewish community around them, shrinking our identity is not an option. Jews should be able to walk through any city and speak Hebrew freely.
Preparation makes that possible.
Self-defense does not encourage violence. It allows people to live openly without surrendering their dignity.
Speaking Hebrew should never require courage.
Until that reality exists everywhere, Jews must remain ready to protect what they love.
Do something amazing.
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.
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Iran Vows to Keep Strait of Hormuz Closed in New Leader’s First Statement
Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, the second son of late Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, attends a meeting in Tehran, Iran, July 18, 2016. Photo: Amir Kholousi/ISNA/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Iran will fight on and keep the Strait of Hormuz shut as leverage against the United States and Israel, new Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei said on Thursday in the first comments attributed to him since he succeeded his slain father.
Khamenei did not appear in person, and the remarks were read out by a state television presenter. No images have been released of him since an Israeli strike at the start of the war that killed much of his family, including his father and wife.
Thursday’s statement struck a defiant tone, with Khamenei calling on Iran‘s neighbors to shut US bases on their territory and warning that Iran would continue to target them.
“I assure everyone that we will not neglect avenging the blood of your martyrs,” said the hardline cleric who is close to Iran‘s top military force.
“The popular demand is to continue our effective defense and make the enemy regret it. The lever of blocking the Strait of Hormuz must continue to be used,” he added, referring to the shipping route through which a fifth of global oil normally passes along Iran‘s coast.
State television offered no explanation for why the message was read out rather than delivered in person. Iranian officials have said Khamenei was lightly wounded in the initial Feb. 28 airstrikes, but the extent of his injuries is unclear.
The prospect that one of the most severe disruptions ever to hit global energy supplies could drag on sent oil prices surging back above $100 a barrel, after falling back earlier in the week on hopes of a swift end to the conflict.
TANKERS ABLAZE IN IRAQI PORT
Shortly after the address was read out, the Revolutionary Guards announced they would keep the strait shut in line with his orders.
Two tankers were ablaze in an Iraqi port on Thursday after a hit by suspected Iranian explosive-laden boats, a clear sign of defiance toward US President Donald Trump, who said on Wednesday the United States had already won the war.
Images verified by Reuters as filmed from the Iraqi port of Basra showed ships engulfed in massive orange fireballs that lit up the night sky. At least one crew member was killed.
Hours earlier, three other ships were struck in the Gulf. Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards claimed responsibility for at least one attack – on a Thai bulk carrier that was set ablaze – saying it had disobeyed their orders. Another container vessel reported being struck by an unknown projectile near the United Arab Emirates.
In another front of the unpredictable war, Israeli airstrikes hit a building in central Beirut on Thursday, sending thick smoke above the Lebanese capital.
Israel also ordered residents out of another swathe of southern Lebanon, intensifying its offensive against the Iran-backed Hezbollah group after it fired its biggest volley of rockets into Israel since the start of the war.
So far the war has killed more than 2,000 people, including almost 700 in Lebanon.
AS DRONES FLY, TRUMP SAYS US WILL BENEFIT
Undermining US and Israeli claims to have knocked out much of Iran‘s stock of long-range weapons, more drones were reported on Thursday flying into Kuwait, Iraq, the UAE, Bahrain, and Oman.
Iran has said it will not let oil back through Hormuz until US and Israeli attacks cease, but Trump played down the surge in energy prices, saying Washington would ultimately benefit.
“The United States is the largest Oil Producer in the World, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” he wrote on social media, adding that “of far greater interest and importance to me, as President, is stopping an evil Empire, Iran, from having Nuclear Weapons.”
The US is a net oil exporter but also the world’s biggest oil consumer, burning roughly twice as much as the European Union. Economists say sustained high prices would drive broad inflation.
In separate comments, Trump said the Iranian men’s national soccer team was welcome to participate in the 2026 World Cup, which the US is co-hosting, but added that it was not appropriate that they be there “for their own life and safety.”
‘SECURITY FORCES ARE EVERYWHERE’
Inside Iran, residents said security forces were increasing their presence on the streets to demonstrate continued control.
“Security forces are everywhere, more than before. People are afraid to come out, but supermarkets are open,” teacher Majan, 35, said by phone from Tehran.
Three sources told Reuters that US intelligence indicated that Iran‘s leadership remained largely intact and not at risk of imminent collapse.
Israel and the United States have called on Iranians to rise up and topple their clerical rulers. Many Iranians want change and some openly celebrated the elder supreme leader’s death on the war’s first day, after his forces had killed thousands of anti‑government protesters in January. But there has been no sign of organized dissent while the country is under attack.
TEHRAN SEEKS PROLONGED ECONOMIC SHOCK
Khamenei’s remarks reinforce Iran‘s message that its strategy now is to impose a prolonged economic shock to force Trump to back off. A spokesperson for Iran‘s military command said on Wednesday that the world should prepare for oil prices of $200 a barrel.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on Thursday he did not expect that to happen, but did not totally rule it out. “I would say unlikely, but we are focused on the military operation and solving a problem,” Wright told CNN.
Thursday’s oil price surge came despite the announcement the previous day that developed countries would release 400 million barrels of oil from their strategic reserves, nearly half from the United States.
That is by far the biggest-ever coordinated intervention in oil markets. But releasing the reserves will take months, and account for just three weeks of supply from the blockaded strait.
“The only way to see oil prices trade lower on a sustained basis is by getting oil flowing through the Strait of Hormuz,” ING analysts said.