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Florida school board cancels Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent,’ a ‘queer Jewish love story’ about a censored Yiddish play
(JTA) — In 1923 in New York, a Yiddish play that featured the first lesbian scene on a Broadway stage was censored for being indecent. In 2023 in Florida, a play about the first play has been canceled for the same reason.
For many involved in the new play, including its Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish playwright and the Florida high schooler cast in a lead role, the déjà vu is alarming.
“The 100-year anniversary of Sholem Asch’s ‘God of Vengeance’ being shut down on Broadway is the same week that our production of ‘Indecent’ would have opened,” said Madeline Scotti, the student who first drew attention on Instagram to the censorship by her local school board of the “queer Jewish love story” in which Scotti had been cast. “One hundred years — 100 years — and we are still fighting the same injustices that Sholem Asch and his company did.”
Scotti is a student at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, where students had been planning to perform Paula Vogel’s “Indecent” this spring — until officials told them on Thursday, the first day of rehearsals, that their show could not go on. Scotti attributed the censorship to Florida’s new law limiting classroom instruction and discussion about sexual orientation and gender identity — what opponents call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Vogel said she, too, was first concerned about homophobia — then added other worries as she heard from people in Jacksonville.
“Parents who live in the community have written to me and said, ‘There is rising antisemitism in our community,’” Vogel told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday. “I very much think that what the school board may not be able to express is their concern about presenting a play that shows how censorship is the first step to the Holocaust.”
Vogel’s 2015 play is about the 1923 Broadway debut of “God of Vengeance,” a play written in Yiddish by Sholem Asch that includes perhaps the first romantic kiss between two women on an American stage. In “Indecent,” the actresses who play the lesbian characters in the Asch play are depicted as lovers off stage. The plot picks up after “God of Vengeance” is shuttered and its cast briefly imprisoned over obscenity charges. “Indecent” follows the stage manager who returns to Eastern Europe, disheartened by what happened in America, and is ultimately murdered by the Nazis.
Students at Douglas Anderson all had permission to act in “Indecent,” and they had put on other shows portraying sexuality in the past: “Chicago” last year, and “Rent” before that. But conditions in the state changed last year when Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, signed the Parental Rights in Education Law into effect, stoking fear among LGBTQ teachers and students and causing school districts to alter policies.
The board in Duval County has defended the law, drawing a lawsuit from parents and advocates over what they said was its enforcement and arguing in court last fall that the district should be allowed to implement the law while litigation pends.
“Tonight during rehearsal our company was notified that the school board is shutting us down not because of but related to the ideals stated in the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” Scotti said in the video. “‘Indecent’ is a story about how detrimental censorship is, about how its damaging effects can ruin a nation and a community. I don’t need to point out the irony.”
Duval County Public Schools officials denied that the decision to cancel the production had anything to do with the law.
“‘Indecent’ contains adult sexual dialog that is inappropriate for student cast members and student audiences,” the district said in a statement. “It’s that simple. The decision has no relevance to any legislation but is rather a function of our responsibilities to ensure students engage in educational activities appropriate for their age.”
Vogel said she believes the show’s contents are appropriate for teenage audiences — and that she would have permitted changes to the show’s display of sexuality. She volunteered that a school production of “Indecent” could feature the two women holding hands, rather than kissing, in a tweak she likened to removing profanities from some of her other award-winning works. “The judgment by the board that this is too mature for high school students is absolute nonsense,” she said.
The censorship in Jacksonville is the latest in a string of incidents in which works with Jewish themes or about the Holocaust have been ensnared in efforts to limit schoolchildren’s exposure to ideas that some parents oppose.
School reading materials are under increasing scrutiny amid conservative parent groups’ pressure to remove ideas they define as “critical race theory” and “gender ideology.” Books about Jews have gotten caught in the dragnet, including in a Tennessee district that removed the Holocaust memoir “Maus” from its curriculum, a Texas district that briefly removed an adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary and a Missouri district that briefly removed history books about the Holocaust.
Florida is a front line in this new culture war. In Walton County, in the state’s Panhandle, the children’s book “Purim Superhero” was among dozens of titles removed from shelves last year in response to parents’ protests; its main character has two fathers. And the Duval County district kept a diversity-themed collection of children’s books that included a book about Shabbat from students for more than a year. Two candidates supported by the local chapter of Moms for Liberty, a group leading the censorship push, won spots on Duval County’s seven-member school board in November.
Florida has also recently emerged as a hotbed of white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity. The Anti-Defamation League issued a report last year raising alarms about extremist activity in the state — and that was before the leader of the Goyim Defense League, a prominent antisemitic group, moved there from California. The group played a role in broadcasting “Kanye is right” at a college football game in Jacksonville in October, referring to the artist Kanye West’s antisemitic comments. It is also behind the distribution of antisemitic propaganda, often in plastic bags placed under rocks at private homes, around the country and locally.
Vogel said she saw a clear echo of what happened with Asch’s play in 1923, when the play was censored amid an atmosphere of rising antisemitism in the United States. (The rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in New York City, concerned that the play could cast Jews in a negative light at a time when non-Jews were organizing antisemitic campaigns, reportedly sounded the alarm to authorities; the play was later banned in London, too.)
She said is planning a response beyond the encouraging message she left on Scotti’s Instagram post and the exhortation to Douglas Anderson’s principal that she tweeted. (“Why cancel Indecent rather than structuring post-play discussions?” she wrote. “It is a unique way to look at the Holocaust as well as gender and censorship and antisemitism.”) But the antisemitic activity in Jacksonville, Vogel said, has made her cautious about sharing details of who she is working with locally.
“I don’t want to name anybody because I don’t want anyone having more rocks with [antisemitic] literature in their driveway,” she said. “I want to talk in a group with the students, but I don’t want to jeopardize them. … I don’t want to trigger some wackadoo.”
Vogel said she had spent the weekend Zooming and speaking with members of the original cast of “Indecent,” who worked together for several years as the play made its way from a small stage to Broadway, where it won the Tony Award for best play of 2015. On Monday, she said she hoped to offer the school’s principal “a modest little proposal”: to travel to Jacksonville along with Rebecca Taichman, the play’s original director, to present “Indecent” to the students who were barred from staging it themselves and to a community that could benefit from a hard conversation.
“We know this historically: The first step towards totalitarianism is censorship of the arts. It’s burning books. It’s closing down theaters. … In all societies as we go towards fascism, the arts are labeled as degenerate,” Vogel said. “That’s the conversation we need to be having.”
Vogel said her response was informed by her decades as a teacher; she was a professor for many years at Brown University and then moved to Yale, where she was chair of the playwriting department at the vaunted Yale School of Drama.
“I have one response as a Jewish artist. I have another response as an educator,” Vogel said. “And right now it’s the educator who is coming forward.”
The principal of Douglas Anderson School of the Arts told students last week that “Indecent” would be replaced by a different play, Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull.” But some of the student actors may have other plans.
“The support from the Broadway theatre community feels like we have found our own mishpoche,” Scotti posted on Instagram on Sunday, using the Yiddish word for “family.”
Scotti added, “I am delighted to say that we have something in the works. The company is meeting and discussing as you’re seeing this. From ashes we rise!”
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The post Florida school board cancels Paula Vogel’s ‘Indecent,’ a ‘queer Jewish love story’ about a censored Yiddish play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Iranian Regime Uses HispanTV to Spread Antisemitic Propaganda Across Latin America, ADL Warns
Iranians attend an anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Iran, April 19, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As the Iranian regime escalates its campaign of disinformation against Israel, Tehran is now flooding Latin America with antisemitic propaganda and pro-terrorist messaging, using outlets such as HispanTV to reach millions of Spanish-speaking audiences and reshape public perceptions in the region.
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report detailing a dramatic rise over the past two years in antisemitic and anti-Israel content on HispanTV, the Spanish-language network run by the Iranian regime as part of its coordinated disinformation campaign across Latin America.
With the capacity to reach nearly 600 million Spanish speakers through satellite, cable, livestreaming, and social media, ADL characterizes HispanTV, which launched in 2012, as “the world’s leading platform for peddling antisemitic hate and disseminating anti-Israel prejudice and incitement across Latin America and the wider Spanish-speaking world.”
According to the report, HispanTV consistently disseminates content that reinforces long-standing antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish influence, spreads conspiracy theories, fuels the demonization of Israel, and glorifies Iranian-backed terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
The study notes that the network’s hateful content has escalated sharply over the past two years, especially in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“HispanTV consistently frames Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks as legitimate and praiseworthy acts of resistance worthy of celebration,” the report says. “This reframing is essential to the channel’s ideological project, converting mass violence into a foundational myth of liberation.”
Across its broadcasts, HispanTV portrays Jews and Zionism as “an omnipresent, evil force” manipulating governments through a coordinated malicious scheme, reinforcing deeply entrenched antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish influence and power.
The report also finds that another central theme in the network’s coverage is the glorification of terrorist groups, depicting them as “extraordinary examples of heroism and bravery,” celebrating attacks that killed civilians, and vowing continued violence until the “complete annihilation of the occupants” — an apparent reference to Israel.
“The Iranian regime’s media outlet is spreading classic antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-Israel propaganda to potentially millions of people across Latin America and beyond, making the Islamic Republic a destabilizing force not only in the Middle East, but across the Spanish-speaking world,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.
“With antisemitism already at historic levels globally, Tehran is funding a massive media propaganda operation that is priming the pump for spreading antisemitism and hate against Israel and Jews the world over,” he continued.
While systematically undermining Israel’s right to exist — depicting the Jewish state as a “colonial,” “genocidal,” and “terrorist” project — HispanTV presents the Iranian regime as a principled alternative to Western democracies and positions Tehran as the leader of the “Axis of Resistance,” according to the ADL’s newly released report.
The Iranian network also depicts Jews and Israelis as “operating a highly organized global disinformation apparatus designed to deceive the world and justify genocide,” minimizing or outright denying the reality of antisemitism.
The ADL argues that the lack of decisive action by governments, international bodies, and corporations has allowed the Islamic regime to leverage HispanTV to disseminate its hateful conspiracies around the globe.
“If this threat is not seriously addressed, the result will likely be the radicalization of Spanish-speaking audiences across Latin America and beyond,” the report says.
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US Justice Department Launches Investigation Into Antisemitism at Lincoln Memorial University Medical School
US Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, US, Aug. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) in Tennessee for allegedly having “engaged in discrimination against its Jewish students” over several years, the agency announced last week.
The investigation, which will receive support from the US Department of Health and Human Services, was prompted by complaints that high-level officials at the LMU DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine “intentionally” prevented Jewish students from finishing final exams — an action that could lead to academic failure as well as squandering tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees.
According to WBIR-TV, a local news outlet based in the city of Knoxville, LMU enacted a new policy which proscribed granting students exam exemptions based on their observing religious holidays. Two Orthodox Jewish students studying medicine are known to have been disproportionately impacted by the dictate, and, according to Rabbi Yossi Wilhelm of Chabad of Knoxville, their qualifications for becoming doctors were allegedly called into doubt by a college official who implied that religious observance is disqualifying.
“This Department of Justice is fiercely committed to shutting down the concerning outbreak of antisemitism that has been spreading on college campuses since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, said on Friday when the investigation was announced. “When colleges and universities single Jewish students out for adverse treatment, they are in clear violation of our civil rights laws and of this nation’s promise of equal opportunity for all Americans.”
Paula Stannard, director of the civil rights office of the Department of Health and Human Services, added, “All students should be free to learn and train in environments free from discrimination. Antisemitism has no place in our nation’s educational or medical training institutions, and OCR [the Office of Civil Rights] will work to ensure that federal civil rights laws are fully enforced.”
In a statement to The Algemeiner, Lincoln Memorial University denied discriminating against anyone, citing its “belief that every single person, regardless of race, situation, or background, deserves the right to a quality educational experience.”
It continued, “We would never intentionally discriminate against any member of our community, and we do not believe we did so as has been alleged in the concerns under investigation by the Department of Justice. Educating our future leaders is why we exist. Any decision that is made is always with the goal of providing the best education for each and every student.”
Antisemitism in academic medical centers located on college campuses is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department in May.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said in a statement at the time. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study includes survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
The study is not StandWithUs’s first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In December 2024, the Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims.
The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”
The issue is currently being investigated by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, with a focus on the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.
“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed,” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Captain of Israeli Olympic Bobsled Team Responds to Swiss Commentator’s Claims He ‘Supports Genocide in Gaza’
Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics – Bobsleigh – 2-man Heat 2 – Cortina Sliding Centre, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – February 16, 2026. Adam Edelman of Israel and Menachem Chen of Israel react after their run. Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
The captain of Israel’s bobsled team competing in the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics in Italy has responded to remarks made by a commentator on the Swiss network Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) who claimed the athlete should have been banned from the Olympics because of his “support of the genocide in Gaza.”
Commentator Stefan Renna made the remarks as Adam Edelman, an American-Israeli, and his teammate Menachem Chen performed their two-man bobsleigh run on Monday, in which they finished in last place. Renna said on air that Edelman is a “self-defined ‘Zionist to the core’” who had posted “several messages on social media in support of the genocide in Gaza.” The commentator also claimed Edelman had poked fun at a “Free Palestine” demonstration.
Renna further commented that Edelman had “said the Israeli military intervention was, I quote, ‘the most morally justified war in history.’” He also said Edelman should have been barred from the Milan-Cortina Games just like the International Olympic Committee banned Russian athletes if they made comments in support of the war that started after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “This just goes to show that sport is obviously eminently political,” Renna told viewers.
A clip featuring the commentary was removed from the RTS website on Monday night because it was not “appropriate” for a sports broadcast, a spokesperson for the network told Deadline.
Edelman took to social media to respond to the RTS clip and the comments made about him.
“I am aware of the diatribe the commentator directed towards the Israeli bobsled team on the Swiss Olympic broadcast today,” he wrote on Monday. “I can’t help but notice the contrast: Shul Runnings [the team’s nickname] is a team of 6 proud Israelis who’ve made it to the Olympic stage. No coach with us. No big program. Just a dream, grit, and unyielding pride in who we represent. Working together towards such an incredible goal and crushing it. Because that’s what Israelis do. I don’t think it’s possible to witness that and give credence to this commentary.”
Edelman also reposted a comment from US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who said the RTS broadcast was “beyond disgusting” and that the “Jew-hating” Swiss commentator “spewed bigotry and bile” as the Israeli team competed.
The Israeli bobsled team is competing in the final two-man run on Tuesday and the four-man run later this week.