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For theatergoers at Broadway’s recent spate of Jewish shows, attendance is a form of witness
(JTA) — Jewish stories have had top billing on Broadway this season — and Jewish audiences have been flocking to the theater.
Audiences have lined up to see Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” the multigenerational saga of a Jewish family in Vienna, and the devastating consequences of the Holocaust upon its ranks. They have packed the house for “Parade,” a musical retelling of the infamous antisemitic show trial and subsequent lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. And just off Broadway, “The Wanderers” (which closed April 2) invited us into the slowly disintegrating marriage of two secular Jews born to mothers who dramatically left the Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a show replete with intergenerational trauma and a pervasive sense of ennui.
None of these shows offers a particularly lighthearted evening at the theater. So why have they proven so popular? Critics have penned countless reviews of the three plays, analyzing the quality of the productions, the scripts, scores, performances of principal actors, set and design. But for our new book exploring what audiences learn about Judaism from Jewish cultural arts, my colleague Sharon Avni and I have been interviewing audience members after seeing “Leopoldstadt,” “Parade” and “The Wanderers.” We are interested in turning the spotlight away from the stage and onto the seats: What do audiences make of all this? What do they learn?
Take “Leopoldstadt,” for example, a drama so full of characters that when it left London for its Broadway run the production team added a family tree to the Playbill so that theatergoers could follow along. “Leopoldstadt” offers its audience a whistle-stop introduction to modern European Jewish history. In somewhat pedantic fashion, the family debates issues of the day that include Zionism, art, philosophy, intermarriage and, in a searing final scene, the memory of the Holocaust.
For some of the theatergoers that we interviewed, “Leopoldstadt” was powerful precisely because it packed so much Jewish history into its two-hour run time. It offered a basic literacy course in European Judaism, one they thought everyone needed to learn. Others, however, thought that this primer of Jewish history was really written for novice audiences — perhaps non-Jews, or assimilated Jews with half-remembered Jewish heritage, like Stoppard himself. “I don’t know who this play is for,” one interviewee told us. “But it’s not me. I know all this already.”
Brandon Uranowitz, left, who plays a Holocaust survivor, confronts Arty Froushan as a young writer discovering his Jewish roots, in the Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” (Joan Marcus)
Other interviewees thought the power of “Leopoldstadt” lay not in its history lessons, but in its ability to use the past to illuminate contemporary realities. I spoke at length with a woman who had been struggling with antisemitism at work. Some of her colleagues had been sharing social media posts filled with lazy caricatures of Jews as avaricious capitalists. Upon seeing “Leopoldstadt,” she realized that these vile messages mirrored Nazi rhetoric in the 1930s, convincing her that antisemitism in contemporary America had reached just as dangerous a threshold as beheld European Jews on the eve of the Shoah.
We heard similar sentiments about the prescience of history to alert us to the specter of antisemitism today from audiences who saw “Parade.” Recalling a scene where the cast members wave Confederate flags during the titular parade celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, Jewish audiences recalled feeling especially attuned to Jewish precarity when the theater burst into applause at the end of the musical number. “Why were we clapping Confederate flags?” one of our interviewees said. “I’ve lived in the South, and as a Jew I know that when you see Confederate flags it is not a safe space for us.”
“Parade” dramatizes the popular frenzy that surrounded the trial of Leo Frank, a Yankee as well as a Jew, who was scapegoated for the murder of a young Southern girl. Jewish audience members that we interviewed told us that the play powerfully illustrated how crowds could be manipulated into demonizing minorities, comparing the situation in early 20th century Marietta to the alt-right of today, and the rise of antisemitism in contemporary America.
What we ultimately discovered, however, was that audience perceptions of the Jewish themes and characters in these productions were as varied as audiences themselves. Inevitably, they tell us more about the individual than the performance. Yet the fact that American Jews have flocked to these three shows — a secular pilgrimage of sorts — also illustrates the power and the peril of public Jewish storytelling. For audience members at “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,” especially, attending these performances was not merely an entertaining evening at the theater. It was a form of witnessing. There was very little to be surprised by in these plays, after all. The inevitable happens: The Holocaust destroys Jewish life in Europe, Leo Frank is convicted and lynched. Jewish audiences know to expect this. They know there will be no happy ending. In the secular cultural equivalent to saying Kaddish for the dead, Jewish audiences perform their respect to Jewish memory by showing up, and by paying hundreds of dollars for the good seats.
The peril of these performances, however, is that audiences learn little about antisemitism in reality. The victims of the Nazis and the Southern Jews of Marietta would tell us that they could never have predicted what was to happen. Yet in “Parade” and “Leopoldstadt” audiences are asked to grapple with the naivete of characters who believe that everything will be all right, even as audiences themselves know that it will not. By learning Jewish history on Broadway, audiences are paradoxically able to distance themselves from it, simply by knowing too much.
In the final scene of “Leopoldstadt,” Leo, the character loosely based on Stoppard himself, is berated by a long-lost relative for his ignorance of his family’s story. “You live as if without history,” the relative tells Leo. “As if you throw no shadow behind you.” Audiences, at that moment, are invited to pat themselves on the back for coming to see the show, and for choosing to acknowledge the shadows of their own Jewish histories. The cold hard reality, however, is that a shadow can only ever be a fuzzy outline of the truth.
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What pledges Eisenkot and Netanayhu need to break to become PM
(JTA) —
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent Gadi Eisenkot will have to break their promises to their constituents if they want to form and lead Israel’s next government.
Their potential political allies will have to do the same.
Netanyahu’s Likud and Eisenkot’s Yashar party both garnered more votes than any of the other nine parties that met the threshold to join the next parliament.
Netanyahu and the bloc of parties that ideologically align with him, however, secured only 53 of the 61 seats needed for a governing majority in the 120-seat Knesset. The Eisenkot bloc won 48.
For Eisenkot, three divisive issues are likely to dominate the debate and force some politicians to renege on campaign pledges: aligning with Arab parties, mandatory military service for Haredi men and a unity government with Netanyahu.
Support from the Arab parties
Eisenkot’s bloc includes four Jewish Israeli parties, referred to as Zionist parties: his own party Yashar, B’Yachad led by former prime ministers Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, Israel Beytenu led by Avigdor Liberman, and the Democrats led by Yair Golan.
Eisenkot could easily become prime minister with a 67-seat coalition if he added the Arab parties, Ra’am with 8 seats and the Joint List with 11. But that is far from straightforward. Three of the bloc’s four parties — Yashar, B’Yachad and Israel Beytenu — explicitly pledged not to form a government with the Arab parties. And relying on their support would face an additional legitimacy hurdle given Netanyahu’s advantage among Jewish voters.
Eisenkot himself has repeatedly and unequivocally said he does not intend to form a government with the Arab parties. During the campaign, he set four conditions for joining his government, including a commitment to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and to the values of the Declaration of Independence, mandatory military or national service, and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization.
In an interview with Channel 12 News in late September, Eisenkot, a former IDF chief of staff, said the Arab parties did not meet his conditions and therefore would not be part of the government.
On election night and since then, he has continued to speak of a coalition with Jewish Zionist parties.
Naftali Bennett, the former prime minister who relied on the support of the Ra’am party in 2021, when he and Lapid formed their coalition, also ruled out sitting in a government with the Arab parties. Liberman, whose party won seven seats, said he would form a coalition made up of “Zionist parties only.” Only Golan spoke prior to the election of sitting with Arab parties and has since the election called on the other three parties in his bloc to do so.
One attempt to circumvent the issue would be for Eisenkot to form a minority government that would depend on votes from Ra’am and the Joint List from outside the coalition. A more solid version of that game plan would be a coalition that included Ra’am but relied on the Joint List from outside the government. However, this option is also likely to face significant political and public opposition.
The Joint List stated in an official declaration following the election that it was willing to engage in “political cooperation to bring down Netanyahu’s government,” but it did not publicly clarify whether, and under what conditions, it would support a government led by Gadi Eisenkot. Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas said in an interview with Channel 12 News on the eve of the election: “I will know how to bring a government to the Knesset.”
The draft issue
Without the Arab parties’ support, the change bloc could theoretically turn to the 13 seats held by the ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, to form a government.
All four parties in the bloc made ending the ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service a central campaign issue. Cooperation with those parties would amount to breaking an explicit campaign promise.
Shas and UTJ have similarly promised their Haredi constituents that they would not allow for forced conscription.
A unity government with Netanyahu
With the path to a government that excludes Netanyahu looking tenuous at best, the change bloc’s alternative would be to join Netanyahu in a national unity government.
But that, too, would represent a flagrant breach of its campaign pledges. The one clear binding principle of these four parties is their goal of unseating Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, whom they have said poses an existential threat to the country.
In a late-October radio interview, Eisenkot said, “I unequivocally commit that I will not sit under Netanyahu, not even in a rotation,” in which he and Netanyahu would share the prime ministership. Bennett said in a radio interview, “I am not going to sit under him because he is the person destroying the State of Israel.” Liberman wrote on X two weeks ago, “With Netanyahu — even if the world turns upside down, we will not sit with him under any circumstances.” Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, said, “We will not sit with Netanyahu and his partners. Period.”
The challenge for Netanyahu
On the other side, Netanyahu also has no clear path to forming a government. The parties in his coalition defied expectations by winning 53 seats, but securing the eight additional seats needed for a majority appears out of reach. Netanyahu deployed the prospect of the Arab parties in the coalition as a cudgel to bash the opposition during the campaign. In a speech on the eve of the election, Netanyahu called cooperation with those parties “a disgrace.”
That may not stop him from trying to form a government with one of the Arab parties, particularly Ra’am, whose leader Mansour Abbas told Channel 12 on election night that he was speaking with politicians from both blocs.
Netanyahu during the 2022 election held talks with Abbas about forming a government.
Even if Netanyahu were to do the unthinkable and cooperate with the Arab parties, however, he would be unlikely to secure a majority. His ultra-nationalist partners, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, made clear during the campaign that such cooperation was out of the question for them.
With all apparent paths to a government blocked, forming a coalition in Israel may require a fundamental breach of campaign promises that would shake up the entire political system. The alternative is another election, which would be held if no side succeeds in forming a government.
The post What pledges Eisenkot and Netanayhu need to break to become PM appeared first on The Forward.
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The Ethan Klein YouTube cheating scandal is reigniting a debate about IDF service
The chronically online are still reeling from — and reveling in — the cheating scandal surrounding Jewish YouTubers Ethan and Hila Klein. And, after Hila’s estranged brother spoke out for the first time this week, commenters have revived a debate over the siblings’ service in the Israel Defense Forces, reflecting the ways in which shifting political trends online can impact even seemingly-unrelated stories.
Hila, an Israeli who met Ethan during his Birthright trip to Israel in 2007, posted a statement accusing Ethan of the affair on Oct. 22. The two had built a joint YouTube career in America garnering millions of subscribers to their show, the H3 Podcast. They married, had three children together and employed around a dozen people on their production crew — one of whom is alleged online to be Klein’s affair partner.
Because of the show’s Israeli connections, the Kleins’ Birthright meet-cute, and the show’s myriad other Jewish connections — the podcast employee allegedly having the affair with Ethan is also Jewish — discussions of Israeli politics have long swirled around the show. Ethan feuded with numerous other YouTubers and internet figures, including Hasan Piker, with whom he used to cohost a podcast, over the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and Israel’s war in Gaza.
In recent years, especially after Oct. 7, with pro-Palestinian sentiments increasingly dominating online, the H3 Podcast’s connection to Israel has become a central part of its identity, and drawn controversy and analysis across the internet from Piker and general viewers. Each time Israel has been brought up on the show the conversations are closely tracked and analyzed in relevant subreddits.
With the Kleins making headlines because of the affair, old Israel discourse has resurfaced surrounding the internet celebrities. Central to it is the question: what level of Israeli military service is forgivable in the eyes of the far left? As Hila routinely came under scrutiny for her service, the Kleins would point to Hila’s brother Moses Hacmon, who also served but has faced far less criticism for doing so.
Hacmon, another internet celebrity, has long been feuding with Hila and Ethan, thanks to his now-wife, infamous YouTuber Trisha Paytas. (Paytas is known for an endless string of controversies including taboo OnlyFans content and saying the n-word while singing along to a rap song, as well as being accused of physically abusing Hacmon.)
Hacmon, who moved to the U.S. in 2002 to launch his art career after finishing his IDF service, met Paytas through Ethan and Hila. The Kleins had just begun having Paytas on their show, which led to Ethan launching a new podcast, Frenemies, with Paytas. Initially, the two couples were close. But the show lasted less than a year and ended in a bitter falling-out over revenue, creative disagreements and family drama, severing ties between the two couples. Now, that conflict is finding new life as fans fight over which siblings’ IDF service was most immoral.
Scrutiny over military service
In defending Hila’s IDF service, Ethan mentioned multiple times that she worked a noncombat desk job and never hurt anyone personally.
The Kleins, who show a vindictive streak against their enemies, also often deflected criticism of Hila by pointing at Hacmon, saying he was an active combatant in the air force, and pointing angry commenters in his direction. (Hacmon and Paytas, while they have drawn their own controversies in the past, have come under less fire as of late and currently are popular in the online ecosystem.)
The Kleins said that they didn’t take issue with Hacmon’s service. But, they said on numerous episodes of the podcast, if people were upset with Hila for serving in the IDF, they should be just as upset with Hacmon.
Until this week, Hacmon hadn’t publicly spoken to or about the Kleins for five years as tensions simmered. He did not invite them to his wedding with Paytas or introduce them to the couple’s three children (who are named — actually — Elvis, Malibu Barbie and Aquaman).
But Hacmon broke his silence on Tuesday to talk about the affair. He said he felt for his sister and that his door was open to her, but added that things the couple had said about him, particularly his military service, were painful lies.
“I never graduated from flight school,” said Hacmon on his podcast with Paytas. “I never was a pilot. I’ve never been in combat. I’ve never hurt anyone. I’ve never shot a gun at anyone.”
This may sound like a petty feud over minor details; either way, both siblings served in the IDF. But it reflects the shifting tides of political trends and viewer favor online.
Pro-Palestinian activism, and harsh criticism of Israel’s army in light of the war in Gaza, has become the mainstream acceptable stance online, and views are so black and white that small details can ruin an online career. Fans, hungry to cancel their enemies, scour the internet for evidence of what they consider to be a sin — for some people, even recommending the wrong book or using the wrong brand of makeup can be an indication of cancellable politics around Israel.
For many influencers, serving in the IDF at all, regardless of role, is enough for online cancellation, but since both of the siblings served, the fight boils down to details, with each sibling attempting to distance themselves from the violence as much as possible to prove that they are not the wrong kind of Jew.
Getting into the weeds on Israel
But a decade ago, this political framework had not yet taken hold of the internet, and Israel was not a pariah online — meaning that the evidence on both Hila and Hacmon’s service can get muddled, as they presented their records differently back when they seemingly thought it sounded cool to be in the army.
An interview with Hacmon published sometime circa 2015 seems to corroborate some of his most recent statement:
“I spent a year and a half in the flight school,” Hacmon said about his service in the air force. “When I left the military after three years I really wanted to catch up for that time.”
But despite his insistence that he did not see combat, in a 2021 episode of Frenemies, long before Oct. 7, Paytas seemed eager to prove her husband had been an active combatant. She bragged about Hacmon’s service in the IDF saying he deactivated bombs in Lebanon and was a “bomb specialist.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” replied Ethan.
“That’s what he did,” yelled Paytas, gesturing to Hacmon who sat silently off screen.
Hila, on the other hand, worked a desk job throughout her service and at one point was, as she described it, a secretary for a brigade that conducted military missions in Ramallah, a major city in the occupied West Bank. One night, unauthorized and acting out of curiosity, she accompanied the brigade on a mission to detain “a terrorist.” This anecdote, which she shared during a 2017 episode of the couple’s podcast, would be used against her time and time again by Piker and various critics after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza.
Viewers commenting on the siblings’ mandatory service had various takeaways.
“I don’t like either of them but you can’t call out one without the other being terrible too,” said one X user. “It’s hypocrisy.”
One commenter, coming to Hila’s defense argued: “Moses was in the IDF, just like Hila. The difference is Hila worked a desk job then asked to go out on the field ONE TIME out of curiosity. Moses worked with bombs and was actually out doing field work, as Trisha loved to brag about.”
While the exact details of each siblings’ service remains disputed, one thing is certain: the casualness with which they once discussed the IDF is gone. What used to be simple background in their personal histories — an experience most Israelis share — has become ammunition in arguments over their alleged complicity in the conflict and an opportunity for moral grandstanding.
All of this is old news, really, though; today, its main effect is drawing attention away from Ethan’s affair. The military debate and disdain many online feel for the IDF — especially in the left wing circles these four worked in — has left little sympathy for the mother of three navigating separation after a devastating affair.
The post The Ethan Klein YouTube cheating scandal is reigniting a debate about IDF service appeared first on The Forward.
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Zoom chat: Memories of Yiddish and Bund gatherings in Melbourne
אין קאַרלטאָן, אַ געגנט אין מעלבורן, האָט מען אַ מאָל געהערט ייִדיש אויף דער גאַס; געגאַנגען אויף בונדישע פֿאַרזאַמלונגען און אין ייִדישן טעאַטער, און געזונגען ייִדישע לידער.
אין אָט דער וועלט איז אויפֿגעוואַקסן דער שרײַבער אַרנאָלד זייבל, אַ קינד פֿון בונדישע אימיגראַנטן פֿון פּוילן. זונטיק, דעם 15טן נאָוועמבער, 7 אַ זייגער אין אָוונט ניו־יאָרקער צײַט, וועט אלי בענעדיקט, פֿון דער ייִדיש־ליגע, פֿירן אַ זום־שמועס מיט זייבלען וועגן זײַנע קינדער־יאָרן אין מעלבורן — דער עיקר, וועגן די ייִדישע שולן, טעאַטערס, לידער און די מענטשן וואָס האָבן געשאַפֿן יענע וועלט.
זיי וועלן אויך אַרומרעדן ווי אַזוי די זכרונות פֿון יענער וועלט לעבן ווײַטער אין זײַנע ביכער.
אַרנאָלד זייבל איז אַ שרײַבער, דערציילער און אַקטיוויסט פֿאַר מענטשנרעכט. זײַנע ביכער, וואָס זענען אויף ענגליש, באַהאַנדלען טעמעס פֿון אימיגראַציע, זכּרון און גלות. צווישן זײַנע באַקאַנטע ביכער געפֿינען זיך „קאַפֿע שעהעריזאַד“ און „בריליאַנטן און אַש“.
די אונטערנעמונג איז פֿרײַ פֿון אָפּצאָל. כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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