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‘An American Tail’ musical adaptation hopes its Jewish immigration story will resonate in 2023
(JTA) — Itamar Moses was 10 years old when he watched “An American Tail” at his Jewish day school in California. He was struck by the 1986 film, an animated musical about a family of Russian-Jewish mice who immigrate to America. Even though he was surrounded by Jewish classmates and teachers, he had never seen a cartoon with Jewish protagonists.
“Watching this mainstream hit American animated movie where the central character and the central family were specifically Jewish — it was unusual,” Moses told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I think there was something that felt inclusive to us about that.”
Now a Tony Award-winning playwright, Moses has adapted the children’s classic for the stage. “An American Tail the Musical” will premiere at the Children’s Theatre Company in Minneapolis on April 25 and run through June 18. Along with writing by Moses, who won his Tony for a Broadway adaptation of the Israeli film “The Band’s Visit,” the new production features familiar songs such as “Somewhere Out There” and new music and lyrics by Michael Mahler and Alan Schmuckler (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid the Musical”). The team hopes to tour the show if it has success in Minneapolis.
The original film created by Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg follows the journey of a young, tenacious mouse named Fievel Mousekewitz. Fievel’s family lives below the human Moskowitz family in Shostka, a city in the Russian Empire, in 1885. Spielberg, who had yet to make “Schindler’s List” or widely address his Jewish family history, named the character after his maternal grandfather — Phillip or “Fievel” Posner — an immigrant from Russia.
The movie begins with the Mousekewitzes and the Moskowitzes celebrating Hanukkah when Cossacks tear through Shostka in an antisemitic pogrom, together with their animal counterparts — a battery of evil cats. The Mouskewitzes flee Europe and board a ship to America, where Papa Mouskewitz (voiced by Nehemiah Persoff) promises “there are no cats” and “the streets are paved with cheese.” But a thunderstorm at sea washes Fievel overboard, leaving his devastated parents and sister to arrive in New York City without him. Although they believe he did not survive, Fievel floats to shore in a bottle and sets out to find his family.
Of course, he quickly learns there are cats in America — along with corruption and exploitation. Fievel is sold to a sweatshop by Warren T. Rat, a cat disguised as a rat. A crooked mouse politician called Honest John (a caricature of the real Tammany Hall boss John Kelly) wanders Irish wakes, scribbling dead mice’s names in his list of “ghost votes.” But Fievel finds camaraderie with other immigrant mice rallying for freedom from the cats’ attacks and Warren T. Rat’s extortion. He befriends Italian mouse Tony and Irish mouse Bridget, who join the quest to reunite his family.
The film’s metaphors will be presented similarly in the stage version, which is also set in the 1880s, although Moses has expanded its lens on the immigrant groups that populated New York at the time. The musical will incorporate more “mice” communities, such as Chinese, Caribbean and Scandinavian mice, along with African Americans and former slaves.
A scene from rehearsal. (Kaitlin Randolph)
“An American Tail” was part of a shift in mainstream media toward Jewish representation, said Jennifer Caplan, an assistant professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati who has studied this cultural change.
“It came out in 1986, and then ‘Seinfeld’ premiered in 1989,” Caplan told the JTA. “People point to 1989 as this moment when representations of Jews changed. There was this feeling in the late ‘80s that people were looking for new, different, possibly even more explicit representations of Jews.”
Yet despite the movie’s resonance with children like Moses, some film critics complained that it wasn’t Jewish enough. Critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film “two thumbs down” on a 1986 episode of their program “At The Movies,” calling it “way too depressing” for children and arguing that it “chickened out” of an explicitly Jewish story. Ebert noted that while most adults would understand the Mousekewitzes were Jewish, the word “Jewish” never appears in the film, potentially leaving young audiences in the dark.
“This seems to be a Jewish parable that doesn’t want to declare itself,” he said at the time.
Unlike in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel “Maus,” where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats, the cat-and-mouse metaphor of “An American Tail” is expansive. The cats represent a universal force of oppression — Cossacks in Russia or capitalists in America — while the mice encompass all persecuted immigrants, regardless of their religion, ethnicity or national origin.
Caplan admitted that some might not have seen it as a Jewish story at the time.
“In 1986, we’re right at the birth of the multicultural push in American schools,” said Caplan. “You’ve got kids who are learning about the melting pot. I think if you are not looking for the coded Jewishness and you’re not familiar with it, then this just seems like a movie about immigrants.”
But Moses, who said the movie held a “mystical place” in his imagination, did not view the story’s broad allegory as a shortcoming. Instead, he saw an opportunity to pull its continuous thread for a message he hopes will feel relevant today: that while immigrants discover inequality and abuse in America, the forces of injustice are changeable, and that people can overcome life’s harsh realities through “grit and hard work and coming together.”
“That message is always timely, but definitely coming out of the last few years and the conversations that America is having about immigration,” said Moses. “I wanted to tell this story that’s really a fable, so you can get at these ideas indirectly as opposed to in a dry, didactic way.”
Jodi Eichler-Levine, a Jewish studies professor at Lehigh University, argued the tale’s success lies in being a “story of Jewish immigration that appeals to non-Jews as well” and called the movie a “fairytale about America.” It premiered 100 years after the Statue of Liberty’s dedication in 1886, amid centennial celebrations of the country’s immigration history. In the film, the statue comes alive, winking at Fievel and his sister once they find each other and look west at the vast expanse of the United States.
Itamar Moses won acclaim for adapting “The Band’s Visit” for Broadway. (Courtesy of Moses)
Whether viewers still buy into the optimistic crescendo of “An American Tail” remains to be seen. Do Americans still believe, as Moses hopes, that immigrants and oppressed peoples can unite to overthrow the tyrants of unfettered capitalism? A Gallup poll from February showed that Americans’ satisfaction with the country’s level of immigration has dropped to 28%, the lowest point in a decade.
Moses is betting that children’s theater has a way of refreshing themes adults have exhausted with political discourse. Children want to grapple with the ideas at the core of the show, he said, such as “the needs of the individual and the needs of the collective, the need to go out on your own but still remain connected to your family and your background.”
“The most successful material for kids tends to engage with real things that they’re thinking about and worrying about,” he said.
Today, another wave of families has fled Fievel’s hometown: though Shostka was part of the Russian Empire in the 19th century, it is now in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. The Sumy Oblast was among the first regions stormed by Russian forces in February 2022 and continues to suffer daily shelling. Eichler-Levine expects that global refugee crises will only continue to broaden the appeal of a migration story.
“The ideas [in An American Tail] are sadly relevant for most of the planet right now, given that climate change and devastation from war are leading to another tremendous wave of global migration,” said Eichler-Levine.
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Woody Allen’s biggest fans were easy marks for a fake monologue about antisemitism
Those still wondering “what would Woody Allen say about today’s antisemitism” were treated to what looked like an answer last week in the form of a viral monologue bemoaning the price of coffee in a roast of Ivy-educated anti-Zionism.
The only issue: It seems to be entirely fake.
The post, according to X, where the post first gained traction, was initially posted in Spanish by a pro-Israel writer named Simy Benarroch and was originally the work of a previous Russian writer named Rami Yudovin.
As hoaxes go, this one seemed credible at first glance. It’s hard not to read it in Allen’s nasal voice. It has his cadence, his references to philosophers and the inclusion of an intrusive female relative that are his hallmarks, leading many who didn’t believe this to be genuine to conclude a prompt was fed through an AI mimic. (It’s not the first time something like this has happened.)
But there are tells for those looking. See the fourth paragraph, in which Allen encounters protesters outside a synagogue: “I was walking through Brooklyn thinking about death.”
From a ripe young age, Allen has perseverated on the end, but walking through Brooklyn? Now? That far from the Upper East Side? I’m skeptical.
This could all, of course, be a rhetorical flourish. The types of woke stereotypes the author plays with, i.e.: “someone with a scarf [presumably a keffiyah], who looks like he writes poems about his own beard, explains to you — with help from Heidegger and Nietzsche — why the existence of Jews is a form of aggression and a threat to humanity,” have a home in his native borough.
The thrust of this argument, that pro-Palestinian protesters use the language of the academy to justify the oldest hatred is hardly novel. They are in fact facile to the point of tracking with Allen’s own “witch hunt” comments about #MeToo (for which he said he should be the poster boy; he achieved this in a sense, but not in the way he meant.)
But if this is any type of Allen, it’s one of his characters, not the man himself.
“My grandmother, by the way, lived through actual Nazis,” the author writes, of hearing a protester indulging in Holocaust inversion. “She hid in a basement in Poland with a man who coughed so hard the Germans could have found them just from the bronchial racket.”
Allen’s grandparents were in the U.S. during World War II, but nice line.
John Podhoretz slammed this forgery, remarking how the real auteur has been “shamefully silent since October 7.”
This is an odd kind of indictment, aside from not being strictly true.
Who, exactly, would Allen reach in his activism for Jews? Should he shift to advocacy, he would likely find the exact same audience that shared the fake and found themselves nodding reverently along.
Perhaps this bodes well for Allen’s continued influence on the segment of the population still dying to hear his insights. Woody Allen may be 90, cancelled and taking a break from making movies, but Woody A.I.len can live forever.
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U.S. launches attacks on Iran as negotiations over a peace deal drag out
(JTA) — The United States announced it had launched defensive strikes on Monday in Southern Iran, targeting Iranian missile sites and boats it believed were placing mines.
The move threatens to derail an already fragile ceasefire between the United States, Iran and Israel aimed at giving the U.S. and Iran space to hammer out a deal to end the hostilities. It also comes as U.S. President Donald Trump told several Muslim allies participating in consultations over a deal that they should normalize relations with Israel in exchange for the U.S. inking the agreement.
U.S. Central Command Spokesperson Navy Capt. Tim Hawkin said in a statement issued Monday that strike targets “included missile launch sites and Iranian boats attempting to emplace mines.”
He added that U.S. forces “conducted self-defense strikes … to protect our troops from threats posed by Iranian forces,” and that CENTCOM “continues to defend our forces while using restraint during the ongoing ceasefire.”
The attacks were conducted in the port city of Bandar Abbas around the strait of Hormuz, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, as cited by CNN.
The strikes came just 24 hours after President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he had instructed his representatives to “not rush into a deal,” stressing that “time is on our side.” Trump emphasized in the message that Iran “cannot develop or procure a Nuclear Weapon,” a key aim of the American military effort but one the president had not referred to in comments over the weekend that a deal was close.
Trump noted in another post Sunday that the deal was not yet “fully negotiated,” but that if he makes a deal with Iran it “will be a good and proper one,” and that he does not “make bad deals.”
Trump’s comments came as several GOP voices have expressed concerns about a deal he said Saturday was “largely negotiated.” Trump’s posts Sunday came after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) posted on X that the reported terms of the agreement would be a “disastrous mistake.”
Trump also stated on Truth Social Monday that Muslim countries should “mandatorily” sign on to the Abraham Accords as part of any agreement to end the war between Iran and Israel.
He named Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt and Jordan, though he said it might be possible for a couple to be exempted.
Following the U.S. strikes on Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters in India Tuesday that the Strait of Hormuz has to be open, “one way or the other,” and that negotiations with Iran could “take a few days.”
Meanwhile, several media outlets reported that Iran announced Tuesday that it had executed Gholamreza Khani Shekerab for alleged espionage and intelligence cooperation with Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A stronger shekel has become a pressing problem for Americans building lives in Israel
(JTA) — Yisrael HaBahiyir saved for more than a year to make his dream of moving to Israel come true.
But just weeks after leaving upstate New York, where he had been managing operations for a synagogue, he got a cruel reality check when he transferred his rent money from his American bank account to Western Union to pay his Tel Aviv landlord.
“I sent the same amount I normally transfer and went to pick it up. It was about 300 shekels short. I said something to the cashier, like, ‘I think you gave me the wrong rate,’” HaBahiyir recalled. “That’s when I realized the shekel was strengthening.”
It’s an experience that Americans in Israel — and Israelis who depend on American dollars — are increasingly facing, as the Israeli shekel has strengthened to near-record highs. While the currency’s strength has been good news to many Israelis who worried that years of war would harm the economy, it is having wide-ranging and often challenging ramifications for immigrants and Israeli nonprofits.
Many Americans who move to Israel have chosen to keep some or all of their assets in dollars, whether to hedge against shekel volatility, maintain financial ties to the United States or preserve flexibility should they ever return.
When the dollar is relatively strong compared to the shekel, as was the case for much of the past decade, that arrangement is advantageous. Assets held in dollars go further in an Israeli economy priced in shekels, giving American immigrants greater purchasing power for everyday expenses.
But now, with the shekel trading at less than three to a dollar, its most favorable rate in three decades, anyone trying to make a life in Israel using U.S. dollars is feeling the squeeze.
“Before, $1,500 would get me close to 6,000 shekels and cover my bills,” said Lauren Adilav, who works as a freelance editor for American authors. “I’m relying on money from the U.S. to cover my rent. If the shekel gets any stronger, I don’t know if I can.”
The exchange rate isn’t just punishing Americans in Israel. It’s also putting extreme pressure on the many Israeli charities and organizations that depend on donations from Jews abroad. Aish Hatorah, the Orthodox outreach organization based in Jerusalem, announced last month that it had laid off several employees and twice delayed salary payments to staff amid funding shortfalls driven largely by the strengthening shekel.
Leket Israel, the food rescue organization, has also felt the pressure. Its founder, Joseph Gitler, said the shift had made clear that Israeli nonprofits can no longer rely solely on overseas support. Shmulie Russel, director of Makom LaLelev, told JTA that his nonprofit, which provides direct aid to those recovering from addiction, is facing a similar financial crunch and might soon be forced to find ways to cut expenses.
“This is the biggest conversation happening in the Israeli NGO sector right now — how to deal with the strength of the shekel,” said Leah Aharoni, executive director of the group Our People, which helps Russian-speaking Jews immigrate to Israel. The majority of donations to Our People are made in dollars.
So far, Aharoni said, the organization has delayed making new hires. She anticipates more challenges ahead.
“It has made it absolutely impossible to plan,” she said. “This is happening across the NGO sector. We haven’t been forced to cut programs yet, but it’s only a matter of time.”
Aharoni added that she hasn’t wanted to raise the issue with her donors. “Everyone is reluctant to speak out, as donors are already feeling the fatigue of three years of war. Israel just isn’t at the top of their priorities anymore, and now we’re coming back to ask them to make up the difference,” she said. “So we cut where we can.”
The strength of the shekel has come as a surprise to many Israelis, who expected the economy to be weakened by yet another war, this time with Iran, that cratered tourism and heightened instability in daily life. Yet much of the shekel’s gain against the dollar has actually stemmed from the war, as the dollar has weakened and investors have flocked to Israel’s high-tech sector, and particularly its defense industry, which has been buoyed by the conflict.
“The high-tech industry, which historically leads growth in Israel, has been minimally hurt by the war given its reliance on international connections — and it continued to grow even in 2024, the worst year of the war,” said Michel Strawczynski, professor of economics at Hebrew University.
High-tech exports reached $78 billion in 2024, and in the first half of 2025, high-tech accounted for 57% of all Israeli exports, the highest share ever recorded.
For Adilav, who moved from Jerusalem to the West Bank to manage her costs since moving to Israel from upstate New York more than two decades ago, spending in the tech sector is cold comfort.
“The shekel being strong might be good for the 10 billionaires who dream up some app and sell it to Google for $40 billion, but it really affects the rest of us,” she said.
Exporters, meanwhile, have counter-intuitively watched their profit margins dwindle as the shekel gains. They are paid for their products in dollars, so as the shekel strengthens and the dollar weakens, they end up with fewer and fewer shekels to fund their operations and pay workers’ salaries.
The pinch is also coming for Americans who are buying Israeli real estate — a transaction that often happens “on paper,” or with Americans entering a contract to buy an apartment or home that is still being built. Those contracts rarely account for a volatile exchange rate.
“When their upcoming payment might have been 400,000 shekels, now they’re getting hit harder in dollars,” said Nachi Paris, a Jerusalem-based real estate agent who specializes in high-end properties.
Paris said contracts for apartments in development typically prohibit transfers before a buyer takes possession, leaving buyers legally obligated to spend more than they expected when they signed.
He said he believed concerns about antisemitism in the United States could drive middle-class American Jews who cannot afford second properties to make Israel their primary residence instead. But the exchange rate could be an obstacle.
“There’s a point where they can’t afford it,” Paris said. “Right now, it’s still psychological. They can still afford it, and Zionism is involved, and they want to move here, but there comes a point when you can’t afford it.”
With economists warning a stronger shekel can lead to employment drops and other negative consequences, calls have been growing on the Bank of Israel to intervene. But its options are limited, according to Strawczynski, who noted that paused rate cuts and rising inflation from oil prices and flight costs constrain the bank’s ability to act at least until the war ends.
For now, Americans in Israel are paying the price. Judy Diamond moved from New York four years ago with the goal of fully retiring from her career in finance. Not only has she set that aside as an immediate ambition, but she is trying to break her lease in the upscale Katamon neighborhood of Jerusalem because she can see that her savings, in dollars, won’t stretch as far as she anticipated.
“I just can’t afford my rent anymore,” Diamond said. “It’s keeping me up at night. It worked for three and a half years, and now the financial aspect of it has fallen apart.”
For Joel Haber, a Jerusalem-based guide who moved to Israel in 2009, the shekel’s rise has come at an especially painful time, when yet another war stopped the flow of travelers who pay hundreds of dollars for his food tours of his adopted city and its famous market.
“The battered dollar has been more of an added insult to the injury of the war,” he said.
Haber always quotes his prices in dollars, even for visitors not from the United States. “It’s a lot less scary to see a price of $300 than 900 shekels, especially for unfamiliar tourists,” he said.
Now, due to the strength of the shekel, Haber has taken what amounts to a 20% pay cut over the last year. He would like to raise his prices, but with the cost of visiting Israel already so high and a 50% reduction in tourist visits compared to 2022, Haber can’t afford to lose any more customers.
“I want to raise my prices so I can still pay my bills,” he said. “But if I look at it from the tourists’ perspective, it’s getting even more difficult for them to afford Israel. It hurts us both.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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