Uncategorized
How the late actor Topol turned Tevye into a Zionist
(JTA) — If you were born anytime before, say, 1975, you might remember Israel not as a source of angst and tension among American Jews but as a cause for celebration. In the 1960s and ’70s, most Jews embraced as gospel the heroic version of Israel’s founding depicted in Leon Uris’ 1958 novel “Exodus” and the 1960 movie version. The1961 Broadway musical “Milk and Honey,” about American tourists set loose in Israel, ran for over 500 performances. And that was before Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War turned even fence-sitting suburban Jews into passionate Zionists.
That was the mood when the film version of “Fiddler on the Roof” came out in 1971. The musical had already been a smash hit on Broadway, riding a wave of nostalgia by Jewish audiences and an embrace of ethnic particularism by the mainstream. The part of Tevye, the put-upon patriarch of a Jewish family in a “small village in Russia,” was originated on Broadway by Zero Mostel, a Brooklyn-born actor who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home. Ashkenazi American Jews tended to think of “Fiddler” as family history — what Alisa Solomon, author of the 2013 book “Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof,” describes as the “Jewish American origin story.”
But Mostel didn’t star in the film, which landed in theaters while the afterglow of Israel’s victory in its second major war of survival had yet to fade. Famously – or notoriously – the part went to Chaim Topol, a young Israeli actor unknown outside of Israel except for his turns in the London productions of “Fiddler.” With an Israeli in the lead, a musical about the perils and dilemmas of Diaspora became a film about Zionism. When Topol played Tevye in London, Solomon writes,“‘Fiddler’ became a site for celebration, drawing Jews as well as gentiles to the theater — some for repeat viewings — to bask in Jewish perseverance and to pay homage to Jewish survival. The show didn’t change, but the atmosphere around it did.”
Topol died this week at 87, still best known as Tevye, and his death reminded me of the ways “Fiddler” is — and isn’t — Zionist. When Tevye and his fellow villagers are forced out of Anatevke by the czarist police, they head for New York, Chicago and Krakow. Only Yente, the matchmaker, declares that she is going to the “Holy Land.” Perchik, the presumably socialist revolutionary who marries one of Tevye’s daughters, wants to transform Russian society and doesn’t say a word about the political Zionists who sought to create a workers’ utopia in Palestine.
“There is nothing explicitly or even to my mind implicitly Zionist about it,” Solomon told me a few years back. And yet, she said, “any story of Jewish persecution becomes from a Zionist perspective a Zionist story.”
When the Israeli Mission to the United Nations hosted a performance of the Broadway revival of “Fiddler” in 2016, that was certainly the perspective of then-Ambassador Dani Danon. Watching the musical, he said, he couldn’t help thinking, “What if they had a place to go [and the Jews of Anatevke could] live as a free people in their own land? The whole play could have been quite different.”
Israelis always had a complicated relationship with “Fiddler,” Solomon told me. The first Hebrew production was brought to Israel in 1965 by impresario Giora Godik. American Jews were enthralled by its resurrection of Yiddishkeit, the Ashkenazi folk culture that their parents and grandparents had left behind and the Holocaust had all but erased. Israelis were less inclined to celebrate the “Old Country.”
“Israelis were — what? — not exactly ashamed or hostile, but the Zionist enterprise was about moving away from that to become ‘muscle Jews,’ and even denouncing the stereotype of the pasty, weakling Eastern European Jews,” said Solomon, warning that she was generalizing.
That notion of the “muscle Jew” is echoed in a review of Topol’s performance by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael, who wrote that he is “a rough presence, masculine, with burly, raw strength, but also sensual and warm. He’s a poor man but he’s not a little man, he’s a big man brought low — a man of Old Testament size brought down by the circumstances of oppression.”
From left: Maria Karnilova, Tanya Everett, Zero Mostel, Julia Migenes and Joanna Merlin backstage at opening night of “Fiddler on the Roof” at the Imperial Theater in New York City, Sept. 22, 1964. (AP/Courtesy of Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films)
Mostel, by contrast, was plump, sweaty and vaudevillian — a very different kind of masculinity. The congrast between the two Tevyes shows up in, of all places, a parody of “Fiddler” in Mad magazine. In that 1976 comic, Mostel’s Tevye is reimagined as a neurotic, nouveau riche suburban American Jew with a comb-over, spoiled hippy children and a “spendthrift” wife; Topol’s Tevye arrives in a dream to blame his descendants for turning their backs on tradition and turning America into a shallow, consumerist wasteland. A kibbutznik couldn’t have said (or sung) it better.
Composer Jerry Bock, lyricist Sheldon Harnick and book writer Joseph Stein set out to write a hit musical, not a political statement. But others have always shaped “Fiddler” to their needs.
In the original script, Yente tells Tevye’s wife Golde, “I’m going to the Holy Land to help our people increase and multiply. It’s my mission.” In a 2004 Broadway revival, staged in the middle of the second intifada, the “increase and multiply” line was excised. In a review of Solomon’s “Wonder of Wonders,” Edward Shapiro conjectured that the producers of the revival didn’t want Yente to be seen as “a soldier in the demographic war between Jews and Arabs.”
Topol himself connected “Fiddler” to Israel as part of one long thread that led from Masada — the Judean fortress where rebellious Jewish forces fell to the Romans in the first century CE — through Russia and eventually to Tel Aviv. “My grandfather was a sort of Tevye, and my father was a son of Tevye,” Topol told The New York Times in 1971. “My grandfather was a Russian Jew and my father was born in Russia, south of Kiev. So I knew of the big disappointment with the [Russian] Revolution, and the Dreyfus trial in France, and the man with the little mustache on his upper lip, the creation of the state of Israel and ‘Masada will never fall again.’ It’s the grandchildren now who say that. It’s all one line — it comes from Masada 2,000 years ago, and this Tevye of mine already carries in him the chromosomes of those grandchildren.”
The recent all-Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” — a Yiddish translation of an English-language musical based on English translations of Yiddish short stories — readjusted that valence, returning “Fiddler” solidly to the Old Country. It arrived at a time when surveys suggested that Jews 50 and older are much more emotionally attached to Israel than are younger Jews. For decades, “Exodus”-style devotion to Israel and its close corollary — Holocaust remembrance — were the essence of American Jewish identity. Among younger generations with no first-hand memories of its founding or victory in the 1967 war, that automatic connection faded.
Meanwhile, as Israeli politics have shifted well to the right, engaged liberal Jews have rediscovered the allure of pre-Holocaust, pre-1948, decidedly leftist Eastern European Jewish culture. A left-wing magazine like Jewish Currents looks to the socialist politics and anti-Zionism of the Jewish Labor Bund; symposiums on Yiddish-speaking anarchists and Yiddish-language classes draw surprisingly young audiences. A Yiddish “Fiddler” fits this nostalgia for the shtetl (as does the “Fiddler” homage in the brand-new “History of the World, Part II,” which celebrates the real-life radical Fanny Kaplan, a Ukrainian Jew who tried to assassinate Lenin).
Topol’s Tevye was an Israeli Tevye: young, manly, with a Hebrew accent. Mostel’s Tevye was an American Tevye: heimish, New York-y, steeped in Yiddishkeit. It’s a testament to the show’s enduring appeal — and the multitudes contained within Jewish identity — that both performances are beloved.
—
The post How the late actor Topol turned Tevye into a Zionist appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Recognizing Shabbat Is Not Establishing a Religion
Shabbat candles. Photo: Olaf.herfurth via Wikimedia Commons.
The backlash to President Trump’s “Shabbat 250” proclamation reveals something deeper than disagreement over a single president or a single ceremonial gesture. It reveals how uneasy a slice of American Jewish leadership has become with the public acknowledgment of a tradition that helped shape America’s moral vocabulary.
The timing matters. Since October 7th, antisemitism has surged on a scale unfamiliar to most American Jews living today – across college campuses, in major cities, on social media, in synagogue parking lots that now require armed guards and entrances fitted with metal detectors. Against that backdrop, a sitting president has used a White House proclamation to honor a core Jewish practice, to invoke George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, and to name Haym Salomon – the Jewish immigrant financier who helped fund the Revolution – as a model of Jewish American patriotism. One might have expected the organized Jewish community to receive that gesture with something closer to unanimity. Instead, the response has split.
As eJewishPhilanthropy recently reported, the divide ran along predictable lines. Orthodox and politically conservative organizations – Chabad communities, Agudath Israel, the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, Young Jewish Conservatives – embraced the proclamation immediately. Progressive institutions and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs raised church-state concerns. The fault line itself is worth noticing. It tracks, with unsettling precision, which segments of American Jewry still feel confident about Jewish practice in public and which have grown uneasy when Jewish tradition appears outside the synagogue.
The critics’ anxieties are not frivolous. Jewish history is full of governments that used religion coercively and turned on the minorities they once flattered. American Jews were right to be cautious about religious majoritarianism in the past, and a cautious American Jewish political tradition has long taken that lesson seriously. But caution becomes distortion when even symbolic recognition of Jewish practice is treated as a constitutional threat.
The most serious version of the objection comes from Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, who warned in the eJP piece that when church-state lines blur, “one day you’re in and the next day you could be out.” The worry deserves a real answer, not dismissal. But Spitalnick herself drew the right distinction in the same interview. A government celebration of Jewish identity and practice, she said, “is very different than trying to utilize the government to advance a specific approach to religion.”
A proclamation honoring rest, gratitude, and the Jewish American contribution to the national story falls squarely on the first side of her line. It establishes no theology. It privileges no denomination. It requires nothing of anyone. It is ceremonial recognition: the same category as presidential Hanukkah candle-lightings, Ramadan iftars, Easter messages, and Thanksgiving statements that have rolled out of the executive branch for generations. The American constitutional order does not require a public square emptied of faith; it requires a public square open to all of them. A president who honors Shabbat one season and hosts an iftar the next is not establishing a religion. He is doing what American presidents have done since Washington: recognizing that the country contains many traditions and that none of them needs to be hidden to be American.
A different objection comes from Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie of Lab/Shul, who wrote that we should observe Shabbat “not because a leader commanded it, but because our humanity demands it.” That is a theological worry, not a constitutional one, and it deserves a theological answer. Trump has commanded nothing. All he has done is acknowledge that Shabbat exists, that millions of Americans keep it, that the country is better for the practice.
One can hold separate concerns about this president’s habit of telling Jews how to be Jewish. Those are concerns about a man. They are not an argument against the proclamation. The principle would be right whether the proclamation came from this president or any other, and an American Jewish community that could only accept public recognition from presidents it liked would not be defending the Constitution. It would be practicing politics.
The deeper problem with the church-state framing is that it gets American Jewish history almost exactly backward. American Jews did not flourish because the public square was scrubbed of faith. They flourished because the public square was open to faith – to all faiths -and because the founding promise of religious liberty was extended to a people who had never before been treated as full citizens anywhere in Christendom. Washington’s letter to Touro Synagogue, which the proclamation invokes, did not promise the Newport congregation that religion would be banished from American life. It promised them that the new republic would “give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and that the children of the stock of Abraham would sit safely under their own vine and fig tree. That is not the language of secularism. It is the language of religious confidence extended to Jews as Jews.
The Jews who arrived in America did not ask for invisibility. They asked for equality, and America’s founding promise made that claim possible in a way nearly no other country had. Haym Salomon – born in Poland, jailed by the British, dead in poverty at forty-four after pouring his fortune into the Continental cause – did not finance a revolution so that his descendants could ask the public square to please not mention Jews. The American Jewish bargain has always been the opposite: be visible, be present, be unembarrassed about being Jewish in public, and the country will be the better for it. The First Amendment was designed to prevent a national church. It was never designed to scrub religion from American public life. Covenant, human dignity, moral obligation, liberty under law, the sanctity of conscience; none of it appeared from nowhere. Recognizing that inheritance is not theocracy. It is historical literacy.
It is worth saying plainly what Shabbat is, because much of the anxious commentary proceeds as though the underlying practice were a minor ritual rather than one of the central institutions of Western civilization. Shabbat is the weekly insistence that human beings are not merely productive units. It is the structural refusal to let work, commerce, and noise consume the whole of life. It builds in, by law and by habit, a day for family, for study, for rest, for gratitude and for the things that markets cannot price and bureaucracies cannot manage. The Jewish tradition holds that Shabbat sustained the Jewish people through exile, dispersion, and persecution: more than the Jews kept Shabbat, Shabbat kept the Jews.
That a weekly cessation might be good for an entire country – and not merely for Jews – is not a controversial proposition. It is one of the most quietly radical contributions the Jewish people have made to human civilization. A country drowning in screens, in noise, in the demand to be always available, might reasonably want to pause and acknowledge the institution that taught the West how to stop.
The split inside the American Jewish community over “Shabbat 250” is, in the end, a split about confidence. The progressive instinct to guard the church-state line is the right instinct, applied to the wrong case; the Jews who worry about state-favored religion are reading from the correct historical script, only on the wrong stage. The Orthodox and conservative Jews who embraced the proclamation did so because they still feel ownership over Shabbat; because the practice is theirs, lived, and they are glad to see it honored. Some progressive leaders responded with discomfort because seeing Shabbat publicly honored by political authority now feels unfamiliar, uncomfortable, perhaps even weaponizable. That asymmetry says something painful about where parts of American Jewish life now stand in relation to their own tradition.
Recognizing Shabbat is not the establishment of religion. It is the recognition of a gift; a gift this country received from the Jewish people, and a gift it is finally, in its 250th year, pausing long enough to say thank you for. At a moment when Jews on American campuses are being told they do not belong, and Jews in major cities are being assaulted for being visibly Jewish, the proclamation says something the Jewish community badly needs to hear from the highest office in the land: you are not foreign here. You built this. The country is grateful.
The answer to that gesture is not worry. It is the lighting of candles.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Uncategorized
Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development
Forward Publisher and CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen announced today that Stacey Bosworth has been selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development, beginning June 1, 2026.
Bosworth comes to the Forward from documentarian Ken Burns’ Better Angels Society, where she served as Chief Development Officer, leading donor strategy and philanthropic initiatives. Prior to that, she was the Director of Development and Co-Chief Advancement Officer at the Sundance Institute. At both Sundance and Better Angels, she worked with major donors and foundations such as the Emerson Collective, the Ford Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation and others to secure funding for stories that needed to be told.
Bosworth also served as Vice President of Advancement at MacDowell Artists Residency, where she launched a journalism fellowship fund, was the president of Aaron Consulting, supporting various nonprofit organizations in fundraising strategy, and founding executive director of the Joyful Heart Foundation.
Bosworth began her career at the Workers Circle, then located in the Forward building on 33rd Street in Manhattan. She is also on the board of The Old Stone House in Brooklyn, where she lives.
The post Stacey Bosworth selected as the Forward’s next Vice President of Development appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Despite Rule Changes, Israel Proved the Haters Wrong at Eurovision
Noam Bettan, representing Israel, performs “Michelle” during the Grand Final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, May 16, 2026. REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
The crowd in Austria booed when it was announced that Israel was in the lead, with only several countries remaining to receive audience votes, in this year’s Eurovision competition.
Noam Bettan’s song “Michelle” — in Hebrew, French, and English — was without a doubt the best song in the competition. But The New York Times had written a disgusting hit piece about how Israel spends a lot of money on its Eurovision entry, while not mentioning anything about the efforts and spending of other countries in the competition. Spain, Slovenia, Iceland, Ireland, and the Netherlands boycotted the competition.
It also made Jew-haters nervous that traditionally, the country that wins hosts Eurovision the next year — meaning that if Israel won, the competition could have come to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Ultimately, Bulgaria was the surprise winner with the nonsense song “Bangaranga!” performed in English by Dara. It’s fun in a campy way, but seems more like a sketch song from a comedy show than a song that should win Eurovision.
Bettan’s “Michelle” showed off his powerful voice, and the song got bigger and better as it went on.
I thought that Finland had the second best song after Israel, with “Liekinheitin” performed by Pete Parkkonen with Linda Lampenius on violin. The country finished sixth. Australia’s Delta Goodrem impressed with “Eclipse,” in what was the third best song of the competition, though the country was awarded fourth place.
Countries in the grand finale were awarded a jury vote (by a panel of professionals) and the televote-countries got 12 votes if they were the top vote getter from another country, with other points if they were in a country’s top 10.
Those voting on their phone or online could not vote for someone from their own country. The rules changed from last year so that each person could vote 10 times, as opposed to last year’s 20. Some critics of Israel online hoped this rule change might limit Israel’s ability to have a strong finish. There was also a “Rest of The World Vote” factored in.
Israel was in the lead with a total of 343 points, 220 from the public and 123 from the jury. With Bulgaria getting 204 jury points, the announcer noted that Bulgaria would need 140 points from the public to be the winner. It received an inexplicable 312 public votes. The jury gave France 144 points, Poland 133 points, Denmark 165 points, and Italy 134 points — which some saw as possible bias against Israel, though Australia’s 165 points and Finland’s 141 points, may have been due to the actual merit of the songs.
With rumors flying that Bulgaria can’t afford to have the Eurovision show in their country, there was speculation online asking if Israel would host it next year — but that sadly will never happen.
Even though Bettan finished second, it was a clear victory, as the song was great, and Israel thrived despite the new rule changes that were put in place because the public complained about last year’s pro-Israel results.
Will Bettan’s strong finish change anyone’s mind about Israel? One never knows exactly, but it doesn’t hurt to have a handsome amazing singer shine on the global stage.
This marks the third consecutive year that Israel has had a great song and performer, and finished in the top 5. Last year, Israel came in second with Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise.” She received 297 public votes, the most of any competitor, but only 60 jury points, the fewest of any in the top seven. In 2024, Israel finished fifth with Eden Golan’s “Hurricane.” She received 323 points from public votes, the second most in the competition, but only 50 from the jury, the lowest number of any in the top 10.
Israel finishing second for the second consecutive year once again shows a country that beats the odds and shows greatness.
The author is a writer based in New York.