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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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Workplaces open, schools remain shut — and Israeli parents pull out their hair over wartime Zoom classes
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — When news broke that Israel might gradually reopen schools in areas considered safe enough, Yael Daniel, a mother in Bat Yam in the missile-hit center of the country, joked that she was “moving north.”
The war has shut schools and pushed children onto Zoom learning while many parents, like Daniel, keep working. Trying to supervise remote lessons for her three children, ages 6 to 8, who have attention difficulties, while holding down a full-time job has turned each day into “a nightmare,” she said.
“These are kids that need to be in a serious routine, and they’re not, and it’s really hard. I’m suffering,” she said.
The strain intensified after the IDF’s Home Front Command allowed workplaces to reopen last week under updated wartime guidelines, even as the education system remained closed.
Israeli actress and mother of two Meshi Kleinstein was one of many parents who took to social media as the decision drew anger and disbelief. “What a delusional country. Who looks after the children when the parents return to work?” she said on Instagram.
In response to the outcry, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich announced Sunday that one parent in households with children under 14 would be allowed to take unpaid leave while the education system remains shut.
The move prompted further backlash from parents who say it effectively forces families to choose between supervising children at home and losing income.
And for some, like Zehavit, who was speaking from a bomb shelter during a siren in the central city of Jaffa, it didn’t make sense. “Just because my child is 14, does that automatically mean he’s fine to be alone and run to the shelter by himself in the event of a siren?”
Outside the shelter, another mother, Renana, said the arrangement has forced her to reorganize her workday around her son’s online classes.
“I have one child in first grade. Since the Zoom classes started I work less because he uses my computer,” she said.
“He has three consecutive hours with different teachers and I need to sit next to him so he can communicate with them, which means I’m listening to the whole lesson and not working.”
Claire Bloom Moradian spends her days shuffling her children between school Zooms, extracurricular Zooms and playdates just to approximate a routine. “It’s just chaos, I’m absolutely exhausted,” she said.
In a Facebook post, Rachel Sharansky Danziger recounted that the return to Zoom after Oct. 7 was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” leaving her so overwhelmed that she called a mental health hotline at the time, unable to understand why “all the death, the kidnappings, the horror” had not broken her, but remote learning did.
Zoom had revived the helplessness of the Covid years, she said, with too few devices, constant technical glitches and children yelling that nothing was working — all against a backdrop of dread about what might be looming outside the apartment doors.
“I can be strong,” she had told the woman on the other end of the helpline. “I can be positive and supportive and encouraging and manage myself and the domestic and social arena around me with precision and strength and awareness of the needs of those around me. But I can’t do all of this while trying to solve dozens of technological problems every morning.”
Education Minister Yoav Kisch said on Monday morning that he is examining a gradual reopening of schools using a color-coded system, with institutions expected to resume first in areas classified as “yellow,” meaning places where security conditions and access to protected spaces would allow limited in-person learning, with parents responsible for getting children to school.
About 40% of Israeli schools cannot offer all of their students access to bomb shelters if a siren sounds, according to data released this week.
Kisch’s terminology was another reminder of the pandemic-era, in which cities were ranked by color according to infection levels, with tighter restrictions in “red” areas. On social media, some parents greeted Kisch’s proposal with weary sarcasm. “Ah, yes, the color chart. Because that went so well the first time,” one person tweeted in response.
Municipal leaders were divided over whether to implement Kisch’s plan. Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav said the city would keep schools closed for now, saying he had “no intention of endangering students, drivers, and teaching staff,” as officials weighed the risks of transporting children during ongoing alerts. Others signaled they would move ahead. Roy Levy, mayor of nearby Nesher, said schools would reopen in line with Home Front Command guidelines, calling a return to classrooms “an emotional and social need.” Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion also said he would partially reopen the city’s education system, citing the need for “a routine, an educational framework and meetings with friends and teachers.”
But by Monday evening, Kisch was forced to backpedal after the IDF’s Home Front Command said that wartime restrictions would stay in effect across the country, keeping schools shut for now. A limited reopening may be attempted again starting next week — or not.
In one of the darkest incidents to emerge from Israel’s forced return to Zoom schooling, a teacher in Jerusalem was attacked by her partner in front of her students during an online lesson. He struck her in the head and smashed objects in their home before being arrested, later telling investigators he had acted out of “feelings of jealousy.”
Reports of domestic violence in Israel tend to rise during periods of war and home confinement. Data compiled after Oct. 7 showed a 28% increase in calls to Israel’s welfare ministry hotline related to domestic violence, sexual abuse and child neglect during the first months of the war.
Not everyone viewed Zoom as futile. Nataly Peleg, a first-grade teacher, said the classes are less about academics than about giving children a welcome distraction — even if she does not compel her own children to join theirs.
“It’s not so much whether they learn or not,” she said. “It’s about being together for a bit and focusing on something that isn’t the sirens and the surreal situations around us.”
Some children find the classes comforting, she said, while others are simply waiting for them to end or do not join at all. Still, she said, many parents have told her they appreciate the effort. “If even a handful of kids feel a bit better, it’s worth it,” she said.
Daniel, for her part, is trying to keep things in perspective. Despite feeling “super overwhelmed,” she said she is thankful her family is safe.
“Things could always be worse,” she said. “I’m just grateful we are all OK.”
In her post, Danziger said she was passing on the advice the hotline counselor had given her more than two and a half years ago.
“Don’t. Don’t let distance learning control you,” she said, adding that “nothing terrible would happen if your kids don’t join some of the Zooms — or, to be honest, all of them.”
While “we parents may not be bombing Tehran or deciphering nuclear secrets right now,” she wrote, “the responsibility for our children’s education and the functioning of our homes is still in our hands.”
The post Workplaces open, schools remain shut — and Israeli parents pull out their hair over wartime Zoom classes appeared first on The Forward.
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Ted Cruz says GOP not ‘winning’ fight against antisemitism from figures like Tucker Carlson
(JTA) — WASHINGTON — Some speakers struck a hopeful note during an antisemitism symposium on Tuesday morning hosted here by the Republican Jewish Coalition and National Review.
Ted Cruz was not one of them.
“Norm [Coleman, chair of the RJC] just said that we are winning. And I applaud him for that, because I want us to be winning,” Cruz said. “But I’m not sure it is accurate as a descriptive matter that we are winning right now.”
Cruz was referring to an ongoing battle within the Republican party over figures like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, conservative influencers who’ve spread antisemitic conspiracy theories.
It wasn’t the Texas senator’s first time speaking to the RJC crowd with grave warnings about right-wing antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric. He called antisemitism “an existential crisis in our party” at the RJC’s annual summit in November, which was held shortly after Carlson gave a friendly interview to avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
Four months later, Cruz’s speech served as a sobering follow-up: “This is the beginning of a battle where our nation, our beliefs, our Constitution, the principles that built America, are under assault. And we need to gird ourselves for battle and defeat this garbage,” he said Tuesday.
Cruz was far from the only speaker stressing the importance of rooting out right-wing antisemitism at the half-day symposium. The 100 or so attendees at the Museum of the Bible heard from speakers on how antisemitism is spread via social media, on policy responses to antisemitism, and why American exceptionalism is said to be inextricable from Jewish exceptionalism.
Cruz seemed to contradict Coleman’s assertion that “we are winning and they” — that is, “prominent polemicists” like Carlson, Owens and younger figures like Fuentes and Florida gubernatorial candidate James Fishback, who traffic in “ancient hatred” — are “losing.”
Nonetheless, Coleman said in an interview after the event, he and Cruz are on the same page.
“First of all, I’m an optimist. Second of all, I could understand Sen. Cruz’s concern,” said Coleman, suggesting that Cruz didn’t want to leave the impression that the GOP’s internecine battle over antisemitism was over and “this isn’t a fight that has to be fought.
“It has to be fought tooth and nail because it’s so critically important,” said Coleman.
He added, “We haven’t won the fight. I think we’re winning the fight — and by the way, that’s shown in the fact that 85-90% of Republicans are on our side.”
Still, Coleman — who said in his public remarks that they are “not fringe figures whispering in dark corners,” and that they “have large megaphones” — later dismissed Carlson, Owens and Fuentes as being “fringe voices on our side.” Cruz, on the other hand, said during his remarks that antisemitism “is gaining real purchase, especially with young people.”
“I don’t want to wake up in five years and find myself in a country where both major political parties are unambiguously anti-Israel and unapologetically antisemitic,” Cruz said. “And I think that is a real possibility. If Tucker and his minions prevail, that will happen.”
To stop that from happening, Cruz said Christian pastors need to fight Carlson “on theological grounds” by dispelling the replacement theory that Carlson “aggressively” pushes. He also said there should be an effort to “follow the money” because he suspects that “many of these influencers are cashing a check” from countries like Qatar, Russia and China, as part of “an operation to destroy America.”
Cruz was far more explicit in his condemnations of Carlson than he’d been in November, when he held back from using the former Fox News personality’s name.
“I believe Tucker Carlson is the single-most dangerous demagogue in this country,” Cruz said on Tuesday, drawing applause.
“And I’ll tell you,” he said, “I’ve made the decision that I’m going to take him on directly.”
The debate over antisemitism and figures like Carlson and Owens has roiled the American conservative movement. More Republicans have weighed in over the last few months, including Trump, who said last week that Carlson is “not MAGA” after the commentator criticized American and Israeli strikes on Iran. Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance has not publicly denounced Carlson, drawing skepticism and growing impatience from some Jewish Republicans.
Cruz blasted his fellow Republicans who have not publicly condemned Carlson.
“Nick Fuentes is easy to denounce,” he said. “I actually think it’s a tell among Republican politicians — if they’ll denounce Fuentes but are scared to say Tucker’s name, that tells you a great deal.”
Cruz did not name any such politicians.
The post Ted Cruz says GOP not ‘winning’ fight against antisemitism from figures like Tucker Carlson appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Path to Normalization’: Lebanese President Turns on Hezbollah, Calls for Israel Talks
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun looks on during a meeting with Cyprus’ President Nikos Christodoulides at the Presidential Palace in Nicosia, Cyprus, July 9, 2025. Photo: Petros Karadjias/Pool via REUTERS
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun on Monday accused Hezbollah of dragging Lebanon toward becoming a “second Gaza” with its rocket attacks on Israel and called for negotiating a full ceasefire with Jerusalem, saying the launches served “the Iranian regime’s calculations” and risked “collapsing” the country.
Aoun’s remarks, among the most direct criticism of Iran-backed Hezbollah by a Lebanese president in years, accused the Islamist terror group of launching rockets as an “obvious trap” to lure his country back into a conflict with Israel.
“Whoever launched those rockets wanted to secure the fall of the Lebanese state, under aggression and chaos, even at the price of destroying dozens of our villages and the fall of tens of thousands of our people. For the sake of the Iranian regime’s calculations,” Aoun told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa in an online meeting.
Earlier this month, he added, the Lebanese government made “a clear and irrevocable decision” barring any military or security activity by Hezbollah.
An Israeli coalition of former diplomats, security experts, and business leaders called Aoun’s remarks a “courageous” and potentially “historic” opening by a Lebanese government seeking to disarm Hezbollah.
“Israel must seize the moment to create the necessary conditions for shaping a negotiated reality along the northern border — one that would constitute a significant strategic victory against Iran and further isolate it,” the Coalition for Regional Security said in a statement.
The group praised the “anti-Iranian Lebanese government” for seeking to disarm Hezbollah, but warned that “it is unable to accomplish this task alone.”
According to Lianne Pollak-David, the coalition’s founder, the current US-Israeli strikes on Iran were creating more space for Beirut to confront Hezbollah openly.
“The more Iran is weakened and isolated, the more the Lebanese government feels confident going directly and publicly against Hezbollah,” she told The Algemeiner.
But Pollak-David argued the Lebanese government could not disarm Hezbollah on its own and would need help from outside powers, including Israel. That, she said, would force Israel to walk a “very tricky fine line” to break Hezbollah on the one hand, without leaving Beirut to absorb the blowback by itself.
She called for “collaborating with the Lebanese government, leveraging all the regional coalition that has been formed around this war, and, under [US President Donald] Trump’s leadership, pushing for a new reality in Lebanon.”
Iran’s military and political incapacitation could even open the way to more regional peace agreements, she said.
“Everything is connected,” Pollak-David said. “The more Iran is isolated and the more its proxies are weakened, the more we’re seeing all the moderate forces in the region coordinating and collaborating,” increasing the chances of “Israel-Lebanese normalization and Israel-Arab normalization altogether.”
But Hezbollah expert Lieutenant Colonel (Res.) Sarit Zehavi offered a far more skeptical view, questioning whether Aoun’s remarks signaled any real change on the ground.
“I don’t see the difference between Aoun’s remarks now and his remarks when he was elected, except for the willingness to have direct negotiations with Israel,” she told The Algemeiner.
When Aoun took office in January of last year, he said Lebanon must eventually ensure weapons are held only by the state, but he also said repeatedly that this had to happen through dialogue, not confrontation.
“The biggest question at stake, which I don’t get an answer to, is whether Aoun’s army is willing to clash with Hezbollah, because that is what it will take to disarm it,” Zehavi said, noting Aoun’s fear that such a clash could lead to civil war.
She pointed to reports from Monday that Hezbollah operatives arrested while transporting weapons south were released almost immediately on token bail of $20, which she said showed how little appetite Beirut had demonstrated for a real confrontation with the terrorist group.
Zehavi, who founded the Alma Center — a research center that focuses on security challenges relating to Israel’s northern border — said Aoun would need to do far more than denounce Hezbollah or talk about state authority over weapons before Israel could treat his government as a real partner. The first step, she said, was for his government to formally outlaw Hezbollah and take concrete action against it.
“I will be much more convinced in Aoun’s good intentions if he designates Hezbollah as a terrorist entity,” she said. “Meanwhile, I don’t think we should negotiate with this Lebanese government.”
Until then, she said, Israel should keep up its attacks on Hezbollah, particularly south of the Litani River, located roughly 15 miles from the Israeli border.