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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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Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt
Anyone living in the five boroughs has likely seen the Chabad stickers on street corners proclaiming, alongside a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the “Messiah Is Here!”
But this week, a different kind of redemption feels imminent in New York — and there’s a new face on the “Messiah” posters.
With the hometown Knicks two wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, fans mocked up a t-shirt featuring an image of star point guard Jalen Brunson superimposed on the Chabad sign, black hat, beard and all. (Including Brunson’s signature cornrows.)
The Brunson memes are just one Jewish piece of an unexpected Finals run uniting the five boroughs — and perhaps, even more astonishingly, its Jewish community. There’s been a giant dreidel spinning outside Madison Square Garden, Talmud-lined shelves displayed on sports broadcasts, and a Jewish-inclusive chant going viral. The team on the court has a Jewish aspect, too: Brunson is married to a Jewish woman — and apparently signed a ketubah at his wedding.
Home to an estimated 1 million Jews (a number that nearly doubles when including the full metro area), New York probably couldn’t have had a Finals run without Jewish undertones. After all, their last title-winning team was helmed by a Jewish head coach, Hall-of-Famer Red Holzman. The team’s Jewish history goes well beyond that.
But the Jewish presence has been unmissable — and in these times, unmissably welcomed — in the city’s sports hysteria.
“I seen Hasidic Jews break-dancing with Black kids,” the rapper Fat Joe told reporters Sunday. “This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.”
‘People in yarmulkes, people in turbans’
Though the first two games of the NBA Finals were played in Texas, the home of the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, the center of the action for Knicks fans remained Madison Square Garden — the arena known as the basketball Mecca. (OK, that part’s not so Jewish.) The Knicks faithful assemble there after each game, Midtown descending (ascending?) into full-scale revelry.
That’s where a yarmulke-wearing teenager wearing a Brunson jersey was caught breaking it down like a 1970s b-boy, other fans encircling him and cheering him on. About as miraculously as a Brunson high-arcing fadeaway plunging through the net, the kippah stayed on.
Meanwhile, a fan’s improvised rallying cry was becoming an instant hit: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” (My colleague Mira Fox has written eloquently on the chant.)
Outside MSG — and at the Knicks watch party at Bryant Park — is also where Rami Even-Esh, the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, plans to bring his human-sized dreidel Monday night, when the Knicks take on the Spurs in Game 3 (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.) He did a “Knicks Shabbat” outside the Garden during Friday night’s Game 2, serving challah to passersby, and recorded a Knicks music video that featured people of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.
“There’s people in yarmulkes, people in turbans — there’s no ‘anti’ stuff, so that makes it very Jewish for me, and it feels very authentic,” Even-Esh said in an interview.
And let’s not forget that the arena — with President Donald Trump expected in attendance — now has the security infrastructure of an American mega-shul.
‘Torah-cyclopedias’
This Finals’ Jewish imprint also extends to the court. The architect of this team, Knicks team president Leon Rose, was born to a Jewish family in South New Jersey. He later became an NBA super-agent whose clients included Allen Iverson and LeBron James, before taking on the challenge of restoring the ill-fated Knicks to their former glory.
The franchise had long been a vehicle for Jewish hoopers to make their imprint on the game. The first basket in NBA history was scored by a Jew, Ossie Schectman; the late 1970s and early 1980s Knicks featured Ernie Grunfeld, the son of Holocaust survivors.
But the team became a punchline under Knicks owner James Dolan, whose verbal sparring with an elderly Jewish fan once made national headlines. Only after Rose executed a series of transactions both shrewd (like inking Brunson, then seen as a mere second-fiddle, in free agency) and bold (like big trades for Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges), the Knicks turned the ship around.
One of their latter-day stars, meanwhile, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who converted to Judaism after playing for the Knicks in the 2010s. Stoudemire is often seen wearing a black hat and a remote hit on a Barstool Sports talk show allowed basketball fans to see bookshelves behind him lined with seforim.
The background prompted a question from the program’s hosts: Are those encyclopedias? Stoudemire explained: “Those are my Torah-cyclopedias,” adding that the one book missing from the shelf was the one he is currently working through.
The Knicks’ success has presented a challenge for Jews like Stoudemire who observe Shabbat, as Game 2 of the Finals fell on Friday night.
It’s a common occurrence for Orthodox fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers — and one Knicks fans hope to get used to.
The post Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt appeared first on The Forward.
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What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran?
On Monday morning, Israelis — my family and me among them — awoke to a day of sirens, confusion and suspended normalcy.
Flights had been canceled. Schools had closed. Businesses across parts of the country had shut their doors. Once again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had led Israel into a widening regional confrontation — and the question of what exactly Israel had gained from striking Beirut’s Dahiyeh district amid a Israel-Lebanon ceasefire suddenly stood at the center of public debate.
Iran had retaliated with airstrikes against Israel after the Sunday strikes; Israel launched strikes on Iran in response; fears of a broader regional escalation rose; and, after President Donald Trump posted warnings to both parties on social media, the conflict thankfully appeared to have halted by Monday afternoon.
In one version of events, the region had merely stumbled into another familiar spiral of action and reaction. Israeli cynics see something else entirely: a prime minister who once again appeared to need a war, and was determined to restart the conflict with Iran.
“I understand neither the strategy nor the tactics,” said Nir Dvori, the military affairs analyst of the leading Channel 12 station.
Had the strike in Dahiyeh — Hezbollah’s stronghold — fundamentally altered the strategic balance, one could at least have argued there was a cold logic behind it. Had it prevented an imminent attack, saved soldiers’ lives, or significantly degraded Hezbollah’s operational capacity, perhaps the gamble could have been justified.
Yet the attack seemed to change nothing. Hezbollah was not going to collapse because another building in Beirut had been hit. Nor did the operation appear likely to prevent the kinds of attacks that had continued killing Israeli soldiers. If anything, civilian casualties only risked providing Hezbollah with renewed legitimacy.
The strikes seemed to involve great risks and few rewards. They came at an extraordinarily delicate moment in the American negotiations with Iran, as Trump has been trying desperately to lower tensions in Lebanon — including by privately cursing at and humiliating Netanyahu over Lebanon policy last week. And they threatened one of the most important strategic assets Israel had in Lebanon in years: a broad Lebanese consensus that Hezbollah has become a disaster for Lebanon and needed to be disarmed.
The Trump-Netanyahu divergence
Israel was already in an extraordinarily delicate position vis-à-vis Washington.
Despite impressive military successes in the early days of the Iran campaign, there was no clear exit strategy, nor any serious solution for Iran’s clamp down on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The war amped up political pressure on Trump, with rising energy prices and mounting public anger threatening the Republican outlook in looming midterm elections. A prolonged regional war risked transforming him within months into a weakened president facing congressional investigations and political paralysis should his party lose control of Congress.
Which means Trump and Netanyahu increasingly appear to be moving in opposite directions. Trump needs stability. Netanyahu, facing dismal polling numbers and growing public exhaustion, needs disruption.
At this point in Netanyahu’s tenure, large segments of the Israeli public no longer dismiss the possibility that political considerations influence national security decisions. As the week opened with the threat of renewed war, many openly speculated that the government had an interest in raising the temperature yet again by provoking an emergency severe enough to argue for postponing elections.
But tension between American and Israeli leaders leaves Israel’s strategic interests imperiled. Israel continues to rely on American airlifts, munitions, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and broader strategic backing against European and international pressure. And as Trump and Netanyahu’s political interests clashed, ordinary Israelis once more found themselves in shelters, with children out of school and flights grounded.
Net strategic negatives
Meanwhile, every strike that harms Lebanese civilians or damages infrastructure risks reviving Hezbollah’s preferred narrative: that it alone stands between Lebanon and Israeli aggression.
That makes each such strike a lost strategic opportunity. Under President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a new Lebanese leadership had begun cautiously presenting Hezbollah not as a defender of the state but as an obstacle to Lebanese sovereignty itself.
Rather than helping isolate Hezbollah politically inside Lebanon, Israel’s strikes risk helping it regain relevance and legitimacy.
Many Israelis are maddened by the sense that Jerusalem simply refuses to think two moves ahead.
What, exactly, was the long-term plan? Hezbollah remains deeply entrenched across Lebanon. No Israeli slogan about “relying only on ourselves” can change the basic strategic reality. Israel cannot permanently occupy large parts of Lebanon, nor sustain endless military operations. A peaceful future requires a stronger Lebanese state and a Lebanese public that views Hezbollah as a burden rather than a protector.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Israeli life in 2026 is that millions of citizens no longer consider suspicions that the state is acting against their interest in order to favor Netanyahu’s to be implausible. The notion of “ulterior motives” had become normalized in Israeli political discourse in a way unimaginable under earlier prime ministers. That erosion of public trust may have been the bleakest development of all.
The post What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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