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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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Remains of Omer Neutra, Israeli-American hostage killed on Oct. 7, are returned to Israel
Hamas has returned remains belonging to Omer Neutra, an Israeli-American who was killed while serving in the Israeli army on Oct. 7, 2023, to Israel.
Neutra was one of two Israeli-American soldiers killed that day, along with Itay Chen, whose bodies were still being held by Hamas in Gaza weeks after the start of a ceasefire under which the group was required to release all hostages. Twenty living hostages were released at the ceasefire’s start, but Hamas has released deceased hostages intermittently and with snafus that have tested the truce.
On Sunday, Hamas transferred remains that it said came from three deceased hostages, which if confirmed would reduce the number of Israeli hostages in Gaza to eight. Neutra was the first to be positively identified.
“With heavy hearts and a deep sense of relief — we share the news that, Captain Omer Neutra Z”L has finally been returned for burial in the land of Israel,” his family said in a statement.
Neutra, who was 21 when he was killed, was the son of Israeli parents who grew up on Long Island, where he attended Jewish day school and camp. Following graduation, he moved to Israel and enlisted in the military. He was serving as a tank commander on Oct. 7.
For more than a year, his parents labored under the possibility that he was alive. Orna and Ronen Neutra became prominent faces of the movement to free the hostages, speaking at the Republican National Convention in 2024 as well as at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition and numerous other forums. They also spoke directly with both U.S. presidents during their son’s captivity, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, in an effort to free their son and the other hostages.
After the Israeli army announced in December 2024 that it had concluded that Neutra had been killed on Oct. 7, his school and Jewish community on Long Island held a memorial service for him, while his town of Plainview named both a street and park for him. But family members continued to lobby for the remaining hostages, to return those who remained alive and give those whose loved ones had been killed the closure they desperately sought.
“They will now be able to bury Omer with the dignity he deserves,” the family’s statement said. “Omer has returned to the land he loved and served. His parents’ and brother’s courage and resolve have touched the hearts of countless people around the world.”
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Iran’s President Says Tehran Will Rebuild Its Nuclear Facilities
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian addresses the 80th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) at the UN headquarters in New York, US, Sept. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jeenah Moon
Tehran will rebuild its nuclear facilities “with greater strength,” Iran‘s President Masoud Pezeshkian told state media on Sunday, adding that the country does not seek a nuclear weapon.
US President Donald Trump has warned that he would order fresh attacks on Iran‘s nuclear sites should Tehran try to restart facilities that the United States bombed in June.
Pezeshkian made his comments during a visit to the country’s Atomic Energy Organization, during which he met with senior managers from Iran’s nuclear industry.
“Destroying buildings and factories will not create a problem for us, we will rebuild and with greater strength,” the Iranian president told state media.
In June, the US launched strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that Washington says were part of a program geared towards developing nuclear weapons. Tehran maintains that its nuclear program is for purely civilian purposes.
“It’s all intended for solving the problems of the people, for disease, for the health of the people,” Pezeshkian said in reference to Iran‘s nuclear activities.
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Nigeria Says US Help Against Islamist Insurgents Must Respect Its Sovereignty
A drone view of Christians departing St. Peter and Paul Catholic Church after a Sunday mass in Palmgrove, Lagos, Nigeria November 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Sodiq Adelakun
Nigeria said on Sunday it would welcome US help in fighting Islamist insurgents as long as its territorial integrity is respected, responding to threats of military action by President Donald Trump over what he said was the ill-treatment of Christians in the West African country.
Trump said on Saturday he had asked the Defense Department to prepare for possible “fast” military action in Nigeria if Africa’s most populous country fails to crack down on the killing of Christians.
“We welcome US assistance as long as it recognizes our territorial integrity,” Daniel Bwala, an adviser to Nigerian President Bola Tinubu, told Reuters.
Bwala sought to play down tensions between the two states, despite Trump calling Nigeria a “disgraced country.”
“I am sure by the time these two leaders meet and sit, there would be better outcomes in our joint resolve to fight terrorism,” he said.
ISLAMIST INSURGENTS WREAK HAVOC FOR YEARS
Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people and around 200 ethnic groups, is divided between the largely Muslim north and mostly Christian south.
Islamist insurgents such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province have wrought havoc in the country for more than 15 years, killing thousands of people, but their attacks have been largely confined to the northeast of the country, which is majority Muslim.
While Christians have been killed, the vast majority of the victims have been Muslims, analysts say.
In central Nigeria there have been frequent clashes between mostly Muslim herders and mainly Christian farmers over access to water and pasture, while in the northwest of the country, gunmen routinely attack villages, kidnapping residents for ransom.
VIOLENCE ‘DEVASTATES ENTIRE COMMUNITIES’
“Insurgent groups such as Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa often present their campaigns as anti-Christian, but in practice their violence is indiscriminate and devastates entire communities,” said Ladd Serwat, senior Africa analyst at US crisis-monitoring group ACLED.
“Islamist violence is part of the complex and often overlapping conflict dynamics in the country over political power, land disputes, ethnicity, cult affiliation, and banditry,” he said.
ACLED research shows that out of 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria so far this year, the number of those targeting Christians because of their religion stood at 50. Serwat said recent claims circulating among some US right-wing circles that as many as 100,000 Christians had been killed in Nigeria since 2009 are not supported by available data.
NIGERIA REJECTS ALLEGATIONS OF RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE
Trump‘s threat of military action came a day after his administration added Nigeria back to a “Countries of Particular Concern” list of nations that the US says have violated religious freedoms. Other nations on the list include China, Myanmar, North Korea, Russia and Pakistan.
Tinubu, a Muslim from southern Nigeria who is married to a Christian pastor, on Saturday pushed back against accusations of religious intolerance and defended his country’s efforts to protect religious freedom.
When making key government and military appointments, Tinubu, like his predecessors, has sought to strike a balance to make sure that Muslims and Christians are represented equally. Last week, Tinubu changed the country’s military leadership and appointed a Christian as the new defense chief.
In the capital Abuja, some Christians going to Sunday Mass said they would welcome a US military intervention to protect their community.
STRIKES WOULD TARGET SMALL GROUPS ACROSS WIDE AREA
“I feel if Donald Trump said they want to come in, they should come in and there is nothing wrong with that,” said businesswoman Juliet Sur.
Security experts said any US airstrikes would most likely seek to target small groups scattered across a very large swathe of territory, a task that could be made more difficult given the US withdrew its forces last year from Niger, which borders Nigeria in the north.
The militant groups move between neighboring countries Cameroon, Chad and Niger, and the experts said the US may require help from the Nigerian military and government, which Trump threatened to cut off from assistance.