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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.
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Jewish Democratic support weakened slightly in midterms, survey finds
(JTA) — Democrats lost a small amount of Jewish support overall in the midterm elections, even as an overwhelming majority of Jews voted for the party, according to the results of a new survey published Tuesday.
The poll also found that significant shares of both Jewish Democratic and Jewish Republican voters believe their respective parties have become too accepting of antisemitism.
The survey from the Jewish Electorate Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that often works with Democrats, was the latest data pointing to simmering Jewish discomfort with the majority of the community’s longtime electoral home — even as actual voting patterns have remained largely consistent. Conducted by research firm The Mellman Group, the survey polled 800 national Jewish registered voters online from Oct. 29-Nov. 6, including both early and day-of voters.
The data “reveal warning signs for both political parties” in their relationship to Jews, institute chair Barbara Goldberg told reporters in a briefing.
Researchers found that 69% of Jewish respondents voted for Democrats, a six-point drop from the 2024 election. There was a 3.5% margin of error.
That drop occurred even as several other groups that have consistently voted for Democrats increased their shares in 2026, including voters under 45, voters of color, women and white, college-educated voters.
In the run-up to what would become a historic “blue wave” election, the Jewish vote – a reliably Democratic bloc — received particular attention as several high-profile candidates, including Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, broke with longtime party consensus on Israel or otherwise unnerved the Jewish community throughout the campaign. Studies of Jewish voting attitudes published since Election Night, which have also included polls from the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and the pro-Israel group The Jewish Majority, have found that the Jewish party-line vote was largely unchanged despite those reservations.
While the Jewish Electorate Institute did not isolate any polling on Jews in Michigan specifically, it did poll all Jews about their views on El-Sayed and found that his favorability in the group had climbed since September. He is now viewed favorably by 44% of all Jews and 59% of Jewish Democrats, the survey found, with 40% of the former group and 25% of the latter viewing him unfavorably — giving the senator-elect a net favorability rating in both camps. The same polling also found that 41% of Jewish voters view pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC favorably, and 35% unfavorably.
The survey also found that 36% of Jewish Democratic voters expressed concern about the direction of the party, agreeing with the statement that it has become “too accepting of antisemitic rhetoric within the Party.” One in four Jewish Republicans believed their party was becoming too friendly to white nationalists and the far right.
“The one place both parties are having problems is on rising antisemitism,” Michael Bloomfield, managing director of the Mellman Group who oversaw the survey, told reporters. The questions about antisemitism within the party had not been asked in previous election surveys conducted by the Mellman Group.
In addition, 28% of Jewish Democratic voters said they voted for candidates whose views on Israel caused them concern, saying that other issues outweighed those reservations. One in six Jewish Republicans said they did the same.
In results that echoed an earlier survey put out by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, 14% of Jewish Democrats said supporting Israel was one of the most important factors in their vote. A higher share of the Jewish Electorate Institute respondents, 27%, said fighting antisemitism was one of their most important issues, while preserving democracy was the top concern.
The Jewish Republican voters surveyed ranked fighting antisemitism as their top concern, and support for Israel as among their top concerns.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democratic support weakened slightly in midterms, survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Museum cancels Dutch synagogue’s tricentennial celebration over Israel tensions
(JTA) — An exhibition honoring the nearly 300-year-old Amersfoort Synagogue was supposed to be a celebration of Jewish life in Amersfoot, a small city in the central Netherlands.
Instead, Dutch Jews say, it could become the latest casualty of anti-Israel cancel culture that has targeted Jews in the Diaspora.
The city’s mayor in the last week has scrambled to save a planned exhibit on the synagogue after it was canceled, but so far has not been able to guarantee that it will open as planned early next year.
On Nov. 4, Paul Baltus, the director of Amersfoort in C, an organization that oversees the Museum Amersfoort and several of the city’s other cultural institutions, said he was canceling the upcoming synagogue exhibition due to “pressure,” an apparent reference to possible confrontations by pro-Palestinian activists.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have held dozens of demonstrations in the Netherlands since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. On Nov. 8, tens of thousands of people gathered in Amsterdam to demand that the Dutch government impose stricter sanctions on Israel.
Although the museum started planning the exhibition five years ago, Baltus said in a statement, “Since then, the social climate has changed significantly. The situation in the Middle East is also having an impact on Dutch society. The public debate on this subject can be heated and, at times, lacking in nuance.”
Baltus said he is finding the “tension” surrounding the exhibition, which was slated to begin in early 2027, difficult to manage. “As a small and vulnerable organization, I do not want to expose my staff to that kind of pressure,” he said. While he acknowledged that he could hire security guards and install cameras, “the reality is that our volunteers would still have to deal with a range of reactions.”
Jewish community leaders in the Netherlands said they were shocked by the museum’s actions and called on city officials to ensure the exhibition would go on as planned.
The exhibition is one of several cultural events scheduled to mark the 300th anniversary of the Amersfoort synagogue, which opened in 1727. It is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Western Europe still in use today.
On Nov. 4, Mayor Lucas Bolsius told the City Council that the municipality would begin discussions with the museum and other stakeholders “to ensure that the exhibition can proceed.” The museum’s decision to cancel “has caused considerable pain within the Jewish community, particularly by reinforcing the feeling that its members are not welcome or even allowed to exist,” he told council members.
Following a meeting the next day, Bolsius and Baltsus jointly announced on Nov. 6 that they would work together to try to find a solution.
Over the past week, the mayor said, “helping hands have been offered from the city, central government and across the country to address organizational matters. People and organizations want to help make this exhibition possible.”
Baltus said the help being offered has alleviated some of his concerns. “With this support, we will explore the possibilities with an open mind and a positive intention, in consultation with the Jewish community.”
While Jewish leaders told Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they welcomed these efforts, they said the museum controversy is just the latest example of hostility toward Jewish historical and cultural events in the Netherlands, where anything Jewish – even a 300-year-old diaspora synagogue – is often seen as inseparable from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We are very glad the mayor intervened. Let this be an example for other authorities,” said Hans Weijel, vice chairman of the Centraal Joods Overleg (CJO), the umbrella advocacy organization that represents the interests of the Netherlands’ 40,000 Jews.
Emile Schrijver, director-general of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, which encompasses the Jewish Museum, the National Holocaust Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue and other Jewish cultural institutions, said the Museum Amersfoort had made its decision without first consulting the Jewish community or the organizations involved in the planned exhibition.
“Largely since Oct. 7, Jewish artists have had a difficult time finding a stage, and Jewish events, including cultural, can’t find a venue. Jewish events are being cancelled for no reason,” he said.
Schrijver rejected Baltus’s contention that security concerns made the museum exhibition unmanageable, given that the Jewish institutions Schrijver runs in Amsterdam frequently host events, despite pro-Palestinian demonstrations and related security concerns.
“We train our staff all the time. We deal with this every day. Yes, it’s difficult, but no, it’s not impossible,” he said.
Schrijver warned that treating Jewish cultural events as potential security problems risks pushing Jewish communities out of public life.
“The effect of this is that the normality of Jewish presence in a town is being pushed away,” he said. “Suddenly anything Jewish is considered a security hazard or prone to cause problems.”
Cultural institutions have a responsibility to distinguish between their views on Israeli government policy and the history of Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Schrijver said.
“You have to separate your private opinion from the long history of a small town in the Netherlands. What they’re effectively doing is pushing the Jewish community to the fringes of society.”
CJO’s Weijel said the Jewish community has played an important role in Amersfoort’s civic life since the mid-1600s.
“We think it is ridiculous that a museum in a city doesn’t want to have an exhibition about a 300-year-old synagogue and its history in that city. The conflict is in the Middle East, not here,” he emphasized. “If you want proof that this is antisemitism, this is the proof.”
Weijel accused Baltus of being “a coward.”
“He’s afraid something bad will happen, but if you’re that afraid, you should stay in bed.”
In his Nov. 4 statement, Baltus acknowledged the Jewish community’s disappointment and offered to contribute his museum’s “expertise and collection” of Jewish historical artifacts to an exhibition in the synagogue instead. He also offered to incorporate the synagogue’s history into the museum’s permanent exhibition on the history of Amersfoort.
For Schrijver, the Amersfoort controversy is yet another attempt to marginalize Jews in a country they have lived in for generations.
“The moment you make Jewish history dependent on what is happening in the Middle East, you are making Jewish existence conditional,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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