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A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary

(JTA) — Israel’s new governing coalition has been called the “most right-wing” in the nation’s history. That’s heartening to supporters who want the country to get tough on crime and secure Jewish rights to live in the West Bank, and dismaying to critics who see a government bent on denying rights to Israel’s minorities and undermining any hope for a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the far-right politics of new government ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir have drawn much of the world’s attention, a series of proposed changes to Israel’s judicial system has also been raising hopes and alarms. On Wednesday, new Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced an overhaul that would limit the authority of the High Court of Justice, Israel’s Supreme Court. It would put more politicians on the selection committee that picks judges, restrict the High Court’s ability to strike down laws and government decisions and enact an “override clause” enabling the Knesset to rewrite court decisions with a simple majority.

Levin and his supporters on the right justify these changes as a way to restore balance to a system that he says puts too much control in the hands of (lately) left-leaning judges: “We go to the polls, vote, elect, and time after time, people we didn’t elect choose for us. Many sectors of the public look to the judicial system and do not find their voices heard,” he asserted. “That is not democracy.”

Critics of the changes call them a power grab, one that will hand more leverage to the haredi Orthodox parties, remove checks on the settlement movement and limit civil society groups’ ability to litigate on behalf of Israeli minorities

To help me make sense of the claims on both sides, I turned to Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago, where he is the Leo Spitz Distinguished Service Professor of International Law and co-directs the Comparative Constitutions Project, which gathers and analyzes the constitutions of all independent nation-states. He’s also a Jew who has transformed a former synagogue on the South Side of Chicago into a cutting-edge arts space, and says what’s happening with Israel’s new governing coalition “raises my complicated relationship with the country.”

We spoke on Friday. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency: You have written about law in Israel, which lacks a constitution but relies on a series of “basic laws” to define its fundamental institutions. You’ve written that the Israeli judiciary had become “extremely powerful” — maybe too powerful — in imbuing the basic laws with a constitutional character, but worry that the current reforms will politicize the court in ways that will undermine Israeli democracy.

Tom Ginsburg: The proposed reforms were a campaign promise of certain elements of this coalition who have had longstanding grievances against the Israeli judiciary. The Israeli judiciary over the last decades has indeed become extremely powerful and important in writing or rewriting a constitution for Israel, promoting human rights and serving as a check and balance in a unicameral parliamentary system where the legislature can do anything it wants as a formal matter. A lot of people have had problems with that at the level of theory and practice. So there have been some reforms, and the court has, in my view, cut back on its activism in recent decades and in some sense has been more responsive to the center of the country. But there’s longstanding grievances from the political right, and that’s the context of these proposals.

A lot of the concerns about the new government in Israel are coming from the American Jewish left. But in an American context, the American Jewish left also has a big problem with the United States Supreme Court, because they see it as being too activist on the right. So in some ways isn’t the new Israeli government looking to do what American Jewish liberals dream of doing in this country?

Isn’t that funny? But the context is really different. The basic point is that judicial independence is a really good thing. Judicial accountability is a really good thing. And if you study high courts around the world, as I do, you see that there’s kind of a calibration, a balancing of institutional factors which lead towards more independence or more accountability and sometimes things switch around over time. 

Israeli Justice Minister Yariv Levin holds a press conference at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament in Jerusalem, Jan. 4, 2023. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)

You mean “accountability” in the sense that courts should be accountable to the public. 

Right. The Israeli promoters of these plans are pointing to the United States, in particular, for the proposals for more political involvement in the appointment process. On the other hand, in the United States once you’re appointed politically, you’re serving for life. There’s literally no check on your power. And so maybe some people think we have too much independence. If these proposals go through in Israel, there will be a front-end politicization of the court [in terms of the selection commission], but also back-end checks on the court [with the override clause that would allow a simple majority to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court]. So in some sense, it moves the pendulum very far away from independence and very much towards accountability to the point of possible politicization.

And accountability in that case is too much of a good thing.

Again, you don’t want courts that can just make up rules. They should be responsive to society. On the other hand, you don’t want judges who are so responsive to society that there’s no protection for the basic rights of unpopular minorities. 

What makes Israel either unique or different from some of the other countries you study, and certainly the United States? Part of it, I would guess, is the fact that it does not have a constitution. Is that a useful distinction?

They couldn’t agree on a single written constitution at the outset of the country, but they have built one through what you might call a “common law method”: norms and practices over time as well as the system of “basic laws,” which are passed by an absolute majority of the Knesset, where a majority of 61 votes can change any of those. But while they’re not formally entrenched, they have a kind of political status because of that term: basic law. 

By the way, the Germans are in the same boat. The German constitution is called the Basic Law. And it was always meant to be a provisional constitution until they got together and reunified.

If you don’t have a written constitution, what’s the source of the legitimacy of judicial power? What is to prevent a Knesset from just passing literally any law, including ones that violate all kinds of rights, or installing a dictator? It has been political norms. And because Israel has relied on political norms, that means that this current conflict is going to have extremely high stakes for Israeli governance for many decades to come.

Can you give me a couple of examples? What are the high stakes in terms of democratic governance?

First of all, let me just say in principle that I don’t oppose reforms to make the judiciary more independent or accountable in any particular country. But then you obviously have to look at the local context. What’s a little worrying about this particular example is that several members of this coalition are themselves about to be subject to judicial proceedings. 

Including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Right. And for example, they need to change the rules so that [Shas Party chairman] Aryeh Deri can sit in the cabinet despite his prior convictions. That indicates to me that maybe this isn’t a good-faith argument about the proper structure of the Israeli, uncodified constitution, but instead a mechanism of expediency.

Any one of these reforms might look okay, and you can find other countries that have done them. The combination, however, renders the judiciary extremely weak. Right now, it’s a multi-stakeholder commission that nominates and appoints judges in Israel, and the new coalition wants to propose that the commission be made up of a majority of politicians. We know that when you change the appointments mechanism to put more politicians on those committees, the more politicized they become.

Think about the United States process of appointing our Supreme Court judges: It’s highly politicized, and obviously the legitimacy of the court has taken a big hit in recent years. In Israel, you’d have politicized appointments under these reforms, but then you also have the ability of the Knesset to override any particular ruling that it wanted. Again, you can find countries which have that. It’s called the “new commonwealth model” of constitutionalism, in which courts don’t have the final say on constitutional matters, and the legislature can overrule them on particular rulings. But I think the combination is very dangerous because you could have a situation where the Knesset — which currently has a role in protecting human rights — can pick out and override specific cases, which really to me goes against the idea of the rule of law.  

You mentioned other countries. Are there other countries where these kinds of changes were enacted and we saw how the experiment turned out?

The two most prominent recently are Hungary and Poland, which are not necessarily countries that you want to compare yourself to.

Certainly not if you are Israel.

Right. There’s so much irony here. When the new Polish government came in in 2015, they immediately manipulated the appointment system for the Constitutional Court and appointed their own majority, which then allowed them to pass legislation which probably would have been ruled unconstitutional. They basically set up a system where they were going to replace lower judges and so they were going to grow themselves into a majority of the court. And that’s led to controversy and rulings outside the mainstream that have led to protests, while the European Union is withholding funds and such from Poland because of this manipulation of the court.

In Hungary, Victor Orban was a really radical leader, and when he had a bare majority to change the constitution he wiped out all the previous jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. I don’t think the Israeli government would do that. But still there is this kind of worrying sense that they’re able to manipulate interpretation of law for their own particular political interest. 

Another thing I want to raise is the potential for a constitutional crisis now. Suppose they pass these laws and the Israeli Supreme Court says, “Well, wait a minute, that interferes with our common law rules that we are bound by, going back to the British Mandate.” It conflicts with the basic law and they invoke what legal scholars call the “doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendments,” which is basically saying that an amendment goes against the core of our democratic system and violates, for example, Israel’s character as a Jewish and democratic society. Israel has never done this, but it is a kind of tool that one sees deployed around the world in these crises. And if that happened, then I think you would have a full constitutional crisis on your hands in Israel.  

Supreme Court President Aharon Barak speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a ceremony in the Supreme Court marking 50 years of law, Sept. 15, 1998. (Avi Ohayon)

What does a constitutional crisis look like? 

Suppose you have sitting justices in Israel who say, “You know, this Knesset law violates the basic law and therefore it’s invalid.” And then, would the Knesset try to impeach those judges? Would they cut the budget of the judiciary? Would they back down?

When you compare Israel’s judicial system to other countries’ over the years, how does it stack up? Is it up there among the very strong systems or is it known for flaws that might have maybe hobbled its effectiveness?

It’s always been seen around the world as a very strong judiciary. Under the leadership of Aharon Barak [president of Israel’s Supreme Court from 1995 to 2006] it became extremely activist. And this provoked backlash in Israeli politics. That led to a kind of recalibration of the court where it is still doing its traditional role of defending fundamental rights and ensuring the integrity of the political process, but it’s not making up norms left and right, in the way that it used to. This is my perception. But it’s certainly seen as one of the leading courts around the world, its decisions are cited by others, and because of the quality of the judges and the complex issues that Israel faces it’s seen as a strong court and an effective court and to me a balanced court.

But, you know, I’m not in Israel, and ultimately, they’re going to figure out the question how balanced it is or where it’s going to go. I do worry that an unchecked majoritarian system, especially with a pure proportional representation model like Israel, has the potential for the capture of government by some minorities to wield power against other minorities. And that’s a problem for democracies — to some degree, that’s a problem we face in the United States.

How correctable are these reforms? I am thinking of someone who says, “These are democratically elected representatives who now want to change a system. If you want to change the system, elect your own majority.” Is the ship of state like this really hard to turn around once you go in a certain direction?

This is an area in which I think Israel and the United States have a lot of similarities. For several decades now, the judiciary has been a major issue for those on the political right. They thought the Warren Court was too left-leaning and they started the Federalist Society to create a whole cadre of people to staff the courts. They’ve done that and now the federal courts are certainly much more conservative than the country probably. But the left didn’t really have a theory of judicial power in the United States. And I think that’s kind of true in Israel: It’s a big issue for the political right, but the political left, besides just being not very cohesive at the moment, isn’t able to articulate what’s good about having an independent judiciary. It is correctable in theory, but that would require the rule of law to become a politically salient issue, which it generally isn’t in that many countries. 

How do you relate to what is happening in Israel as a Jew, and not just a legal scholar?  

That’s a great question, because it really raises my complicated relationship with the country. You know, I find it to be a very interesting democracy. I like going to Israel because it’s a society in which there’s a lot of argument, a lot of good court cases and a lot of good legal scholars. On one level, I connect with my colleagues and friends there who seem very demoralized about this current moment. And I honestly worry about whether this society will remain a Jewish and democratic one with the current coalition. 

The rule of law is a part of democracy. You need the rule of law in order to have democracy function. And I know others would respond and say, “Oh, you’re just being hysterical.” And, “This isn’t Sweden, it’s the Middle East.” But the ethno-nationalist direction of the country bothers me as a Jew, and I hope that the court remains there to prevent it from deepening further.


The post A law professor worries Israel could become the next Hungary appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Iran Hits Ships and UAE Oil Port in Show of Force After Trump Orders Navy to Open Strait

Ships and boats in the Strait of Hormuz, Musandam, Oman, May 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY

Iran hit several ships in the Strait of Hormuz on Monday and set a UAE oil port ablaze, following President Donald Trump‘s announcement that he will use the US Navy to free up shipping.

The Iranian attacks marked the war’s biggest escalation since a ceasefire was declared four weeks ago.

Trump‘s new mission “Project Freedom,” which he announced on social media overnight to release ships stuck in the strait, was the first apparent attempt to make use of naval power to unblock the world’s most important energy shipping route.

But at least in the initial hours on Monday, the effort brought no surge of merchant shipping through the strait while provoking a show of force from Iran, which had long threatened to respond to any escalation with new attacks on its neighbors.

The US military said two US merchant ships had made it through the strait, without saying when. Iran denied any such crossings had taken place.

The commander of US forces in the region said his fleet had destroyed six small Iranian boats, which Iran also denied. Admiral Brad Cooper said he “strongly advised” Iranian forces to keep clear of US military assets carrying out the mission.

Iranian authorities, for their part, released a map of what they said was an expanded sea area now under their control, which went far beyond the strait to include swathes of international waters, including long stretches of the United Arab Emirates’ coastline on either side of the strait.

South Korea reported one of its merchant ships had been hit by an explosion and fire inside the strait. The British maritime security agency UKMTO reported two ships had been hit off the coast of the UAE, and the Emirati oil company ADNOC said one of its empty oil tankers was hit by Iranian drones while trying to cross.

Iran has taken some shots at unrelated Nations with respect to the Ship Movement, PROJECT FREEDOM, including a South Korean Cargo Ship. Perhaps it’s time for South Korea to come and join the mission!” Trump posted on social media on Monday.

After reported drone and missile attacks inside the UAE throughout the day, including one that caused a fire at an important oil port, the UAE said Iranian attacks marked a serious escalation and it reserved the right to respond.

STRAIT STILL BLOCKED

Trump has struggled to find a solution to the disruption of international energy supplies caused by Iran‘s blockade of the strait, which carried a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas before the war.

In the more than two months since Trump launched an air war against Iran alongside Israel, Tehran has largely blocked the strait to ships apart from its own. Since last month, the United States has imposed its own blockade of ships leaving and entering Iranian ports, further crippling Iran’s already ailing economy.

The warring sides issued contradictory statements on Monday about the initial impact of the new US mission, and Reuters could not independently verify the full situation there.

But there was no immediate sign that large numbers of merchant ships were making new attempts to cross, and major shipping companies said they were likely to wait for an agreed end to hostilities before trying to sail through.

REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS SAY NO TRANSITS TOOK PLACE

In a post on X, US Central Command said some of its Navy guided-missile destroyers were inside the Gulf supporting the operation, and that two US-flagged merchant vessels had crossed the strait “and are safely headed on their journey.”

It did not identify either the warships or the merchant vessels or say when any of those crossings had taken place.

Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said no commercial vessels had crossed the strait in the past few hours, and that US claims to the contrary were false.

Earlier, Iran said it had fired on a US warship approaching the strait, forcing it to turn around. An initial Iranian report had said a US warship was struck, but Washington denied this and Iranian officials later described the fire as warning shots.

South Korea’s Foreign Ministry said there was a fire and an explosion onboard the Namu, a merchant ship operated by South Korean shipper HMM. Yonhap news agency reported that the government was checking intelligence indicating the vessel may have been attacked.

The UAE, meanwhile, reported a fire at an oil installation in its port of Fujairah following an Iranian drone attack. Fujairah lies beyond the strait, making it one of the few export routes for Middle East oil that does not require passing through it.

SHIPPING INDUSTRY AWAITS CLARITY ON SAFETY

Oil prices jumped more than 5% in volatile trade as news of the increased Iranian attacks emerged.

In his social media post announcing the new mission, Trump gave few details of what action the US Navy would take to get ships through the strait.

“We have told these Countries that we will guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business,” Trump wrote.

In response, Iran‘s unified command told commercial ships and oil tankers:

“We have repeatedly said the security of the Strait of Hormuz is in our hands and that the safe passage of vessels needs to be coordinated with the armed forces … We warn that any foreign armed forces, especially the aggressive US Army, will be attacked if they intend to approach and enter the Strait of Hormuz.”

The United States and Israel suspended their bombing campaign against Iran four weeks ago, and US and Iranian officials held one round of face-to-face talks. But attempts to set up further meetings have failed.

Iranian state media said on Sunday that Washington had conveyed its response to a 14-point Iranian proposal via Pakistan, and that Tehran was now reviewing it. Neither side gave details of any US response.

The Iranian proposal would postpone discussion of Iran‘s nuclear program until after an agreement to end the war and resolve the standoff over shipping. Trump said over the weekend he was still studying it but would probably reject it.

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Australia Begins Hearings Into Bondi Beach Attack and Rising Antisemitism

Rabbi Levi Wolff lights a menorah at Bondi Pavilion to honor the victims of a shooting during a Jewish holiday celebration at Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 15, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Hollie Adams

Australia began public hearings on Monday in an inquiry into the Bondi Beach mass shooting in December, with Jewish Australians giving evidence of their experience of rising domestic antisemitism.

The attack on a Jewish Hanukkah celebration killed 15, fueling calls for tougher gun controls and more action to tackle hatred toward Jews, following a spate of antisemitic incidents.

The first block of public hearings will investigate the nature and prevalence of antisemitism, said Virginia Bell, the retired judge leading the wide-ranging national inquiry known as a Royal Commission.

“The sharp spike in antisemitism that we’ve witnessed in Australia has been mirrored in other Western countries and seems clearly linked to events in the Middle East,” Bell said.

“It’s important that people understand how quickly those events can prompt ugly displays of hostility toward Jewish Australians simply because they’re Jews.”

‘WE DON’T FEEL SAFE HERE’

Witnesses from the Jewish community told the inquiry they felt increasingly unsafe amid rising hostility since the October 2023 start of the war in Gaza.

“What is happening in Australia today is not a faint echo of a distant past,” said Peter Halasz, an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor who fled to Australia from Hungary.

“For those of us who lived through the 1930s and 1940s, it is something we recognize, and that recognition is frightening and cause for alarm.”

Sheina Gutnick, who lost her father Reuven Morrison in the Bondi attack, said antisemitism had damaged her family’s sense of safety and freedom of movement.

“As a mother, I’m constantly weighing up the risk of exposing my children to environments where they may be witness, or subject, to antisemitism,” she told the panel.

She recounted an incident in which a stranger at a shopping center called her an “effing terrorist” for wearing a Star of David necklace.

Another witness said her family was relocating to Israel because of safety concerns.

“We never expected synagogues to be burned down,” said the woman, who used the pseudonym “AAM.” “We never expected Jews to be hunted on Bondi Beach.

“My family and I no longer want to live in Australia. We don’t feel safe here. We don’t feel welcome.”

JEWISH SCHOOL LOOKS ‘MORE LIKE A PRISON’

Stefanie Schwartz, the president of Sydney Jewish primary school Mount Sinai College, spoke of holding drills to prepare young students to deal with terrorist attacks, and requiring an “extreme” security presence on campus.

“You walk past our school, and it looks a lot more like a prison than a primary school.”

Antisemitism has “run riot,” with Jewish Australians being held responsible for the actions of the Israeli government, said Benjamin Elton, the chief minister of the Great Synagogue in Sydney.

The inquiry released an interim report of 14 recommendations last Thursday, urging greater security for Jewish public events and further counterterrorism and gun reforms.

A second block of hearings later in May will focus on the circumstances leading up to the Bondi Beach attack and issues raised in the interim report.

The commission is due to deliver its final report on Dec. 14, exactly a year after the attack.

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A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews?

The Battle of Cable Street, a 1936 street scuffle off an obscure stretch of road in London’s East End, holds a totemic importance to the Jews of England, and, given how few they are in number, a correspondingly small significance in the larger British imagination.

The musical Cable Street, dramatizing that showdown between Jewish and Irish East Enders against Oswald Mosley’s fascist blackshirts, arrives Off-Broadway from London amid a spate of headlines about the safety of English Jews and a subsequent minimization of their fears. Only now, the political alignment of those defending or hectoring Jews has recalibrated from the days the play examines.

In his rhetoric and tactics, the anti-Islam “activist” Tommy Robinson, who antagonizes Muslim neighborhoods and marched through Central London in his “Unite the Kingdom” rallies, would appear to be the heir apparent to a Mosley, with the exception that he presents himself as a friend of the Jews. (Most Jews in the U.K. won’t have him; the Israeli far-right welcomed him to the Jewish state last October.)

On the left, the multicultural coalition has found a cause in Palestinian rights, which they march for like clockwork. Jews, who in the U.K. make up about .5% of the population but a whole 29% of recorded religious hate crimes, don’t count in their social justice calculus, comedian David Baddiel has argued. Evidence is mounting in that direction.

Police have surrendered to community leaders pushing to cancel an Israeli soccer club match, fabricating evidence with A.I. post facto to make it seem like the Israel fans will be the violent faction. A Panorama documentary from last month makes an earnest case for Jewish anxiety, but aired only after the BBC was made to review their standards over stories on Gaza following the network running a documentary that failed to disclose its narrator was the son of a Hamas minister. (This to my mind is nowhere near as egregious as the channel’s reluctance some years before to back down from blaming Orthodox children for their own abuse by mistranslating a word of Hebrew into an anti-Arab slur.)

Jews being gunned down outside shuls on Yom Kippur or stabbed in the streets – as they were just last week, two days before I saw this musical — don’t mobilize the masses. They do get the odd pundit condemning the violence, only to then to whatabout with the humanitarian disaster in Gaza or blame Jewish institutions’ efforts to conflate Jews and Israel, as if only when uncoupled will their targeting be truly horrendous.

British Jews are so much a rounding error they could hardly sway a council election. That fact scarcely moves the needle on the old libels of governmental control, as Labour responds to violence with crack downs on pro-Palestinian protests.

The development of Cable Street goes back years before the current bloodletting, yet it has hit on a rhyme in history.

The story provides a framing device of a present-day walking tour before jumping back in time to follow three youths and their families: Irish immigrant Mairead (Lizzy-Rose Essin-Kelly), who dreams of a writer’s life during her day job rolling bagels; Sammy Scheinberg (a dynamic Isaac Gryn), who wants to be a boxer against the wishes of his shmata business father; and Ron (Barney Wilkinson) a recent Lancashire transplant, underemployed, with hair the color of threshed wheat, ripe for recruitment by a band of populist nativists.

The show finds hope in an unlikely coalition of Irish dockworkers, Jews and Communists rallying to stop a police-escorted British Union of Fascists (BUF) march through London’s Jewish Quarter. The parable is so near to today’s headlines that it can make one’s head spin, and, in the particular case of a Jew, scan for allies. Better luck in New York, with the Brits Off Broadway festival, than across the pond, where this may be taken as a more general parable, with Jews as allegorical victims standing in for other marginalized groups. To read into the story the excesses of today’s protests, and what the authorities allow under the pretext of free speech, would surely be sacrilege, depending on which marchers it’s applied to and where your loyalties lie.

The cast take on a horse — in the real battle, local kids tripped the cavalry with marbles. Photo by

The music by Tim Gilvin has shades of what I’ll call Hebraic Hamilton (“Dream of making the dough, making the bread, baking the challah,” Sammy spits bars over a backbeat). There’s an Irish jig and a ballad that sounds like Coldplay, and “Only Words,” an elegiac plea from a Jewish father to his hothead son. (Jez Unwin plays the Scheinberg patriarch, a modern-day descendant and the leader of the Stepney BUF.) A ragtime number of chattering broadsheets sellers feeds us intermittent exposition.

The introduction of the BUF imagines them as a ‘90s boy band, making fun before they prove their menace. It works better downtown, when the Nazis in another British import, Operation Mincemeat, do their K-Pop number, as that show is an all-out farce.

Better by far is the play’s treatment of Jewish scenes, scripted by book writer Alex Kanefsky with deft direction by Adam Lenson. We hear a hamotzi, see a synagogue (with an implied women’s balcony) and hear a refrain of Sholem Aleichem and Sim Shalom integrated into musically layered sequences.

The indefatigable cast of 13 plays countless characters, switching allegiances from Mosleyites to Jews at the donning of an armband. This can lead to odd stage imagery, as when musician-actor Max Alexander-Taylor is togged up like a blackshirt while riffing on an electric guitar. (The rest of the band is on a top level, shielded in by the corrugated metal and chainlink of Yoav Segal’s set design.)

But there are moments of sublime stage work, après Les Miz, as the story’s action rises and the street mounts a defense with slogans borrowed from Spanish Republicans. The play, in its chilling wisdom, doesn’t stop at this high point. It allows room for what followed: The BUF’s membership only grew after the battle. Regrouping, they retaliated with a pogrom against the Jews. This time, no one showed up to defend them.

The cringey lyric of the battle song — “we’re not like the others, we won’t let you demonize our sisters and brothers” — is replaced with a more sober conclusion from Sammy’s sister in the wreckage of the attack.

After noting how “the rich blame the poor, the poor blame the rich and everybody hates the Jews,” Rosa Scheinberg (Romona Lewis-Malley) laments that “when the common enemy’s defeated, old wounds flare up, and old mistakes get repeated.” Solidarity was but a brief and shining moment.

As a concession to hope, the show doesn’t end there, but it very well might.

The musical Cable Street plays at 59E59 in New York through May 24. Tickets and more information can be found here.

The post A new musical wonders: What happened to solidarity with English Jews? appeared first on The Forward.

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