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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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‘Shameful’: California Jewish Advocacy Group Denounces Challenge to K-12 Antisemitism Law
Students from Encinal High School and St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda, California, participating in anti-Israel demonstration on Jan 26. 2024: Photo: Michael Ho Wai Lee / SOPA Images via Reuters Connect
A California state legislator has introduced a bill aimed at gutting a recently passed K-12 antisemitism law (AB 715), which strengthened civil rights protections for Jewish students amid a pandemic of bullying, harassment, and extreme anti-Zionist activity in public schools.
Robert Garcia, a Democrat and member of the California State Assembly, introduced the measure — Assembly Bill (AB) 2159 — on Wednesday, and it has already amassed support from a number of groups which have opposed the Jewish community’s efforts to address antisemitism in education.
In October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law which requires the state to establish a new Office for Civil Rights for monitoring antisemitism in public schools at a time of rising anti-Jewish hatred across the US. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the bill confronted Newsom, a Democrat rumored to be interested in running for US president in 2028, with a politically fraught decision, as it aims to limit the extent to which the state’s ideologically charged ethnic studies curricula, supported by progressives and many Democrats, may plant anti-Zionist viewpoints into the minds of the 5.8 million students educated in its public schools.
Newsom, who has since endorsed the false charge that Israel is an “apartheid” state, approved the measure amid these cross currents, paving the way for state officials to proceed with establishing an Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator, setting parameters within which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be equitably discussed, and potentially barring antisemitic materials from reaching the classroom.
“Specifically, this bill removes reference to a definition of antisemitism that could include criticism of Israeli government policy, requires the Antisemitism Prevention Coordinator to be selected through an unbiased, merit-based civil service process, and removes vague and subjective language that exposes schools and teachers to discrimination complaints,” Garcia’s new bill says.
Garcia is a former trustee of the Etiwanda School District, located in the southern region of state, which has already been the subject of a civil rights complaint alleging harrowing incidents of “vicious antisemitism” in which a 12-year-old Jewish girl was flogged with a stick, told to “shut your Jewish ass up,” and teased with jokes about Adolf Hitler. During the period of the alleged abuse the girl’s bullies stated that it would not have occurred were she non-Jewish. According to the complaint, filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law in March 2025, the school district never punished her tormenters despite receiving a torrent of complaints.
“It is shameful that Assemblymember Garcia not only introduced a bill that would harm Jewish students, but ‘worked closely’ on it with organizations that have promoted or enabled antisemitism,” StandWithUs, a California-based Jewish advocacy group, said in a statement denouncing the measure.”
The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the far-left Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the California Faculty Association, and the California Labor Federation were among the groups specifically called out by StandWithUs.
“All legislators should reject efforts by these groups to influence policy on the state of California,” StandWithUs continued. “The assemblymember should apologize and withdraw AB 2159, which is a transparent ploy to prevent extremists from being held accountable for spreading hate in K-12 schools.”
Garcia is not alone in attempting to effectively overturn the K-12 antisemitism law. California Middle school teacher Andrea Prichett, joined by the Los Angeles Educators for Palestine group, challenged it in a lawsuit last year, arguing that it violates the First Amendment, was “hastily written,” and “singled out” anti-Zionist viewpoints for punishment. A federal judge, Noël Wise, appointed by former US President Joe Biden, struck down the complaint, noting that teachers working as government employees do not enjoy unfettered free speech. In her ruling, Wise stated that while teachers may comment on matters of public interest, previous jurisprudence prohibits their uttering statements which obstruct government’s “legitimate interests.”
She continued, “As public school education belongs to the government, the government may regulate Teacher Plaintiffs [sic] speech to accord with the government’s education goals. It is of no significance that the curricula and the attendant speech required to teach it may advance a single viewpoint to the exclusion of another.”
Another lawsuit was filed in November by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), whose national legal director, Jenin Younes, has said on social media that Jews “fake…hate crimes” and endorsed claims that “Zionists” control the media and played a role in assassinating former US President John F. Kennedy.
“It’s dawning on me recently how insane it is I just accept that I’m subservient to them,” Younes wrote.
In a statement announcing its lawsuit, the ADC argued that Arabs are victims of discrimination and said that the California law amounts to a hijacking of American policy by Israel, an argument advanced by neo-Nazis, including Nicholas Fuentes, and commentators who promote their views such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — both of whom claim that proliferating antisemitism is an exercise of free speech.
In Wednesday’s statement, StandWithUs said that if the latest assault on AB 715 succeeds it would “harm the Jewish community and public trust in California’s education system.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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US CENTCOM Chief Says Iran Attacking Civilian Sites as Regime Grows Increasingly Desperate
US Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Admiral Brad Cooper speaks to Iran International’s Samira Gharaei, March 22, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Iran has increasingly targeted civilian sites across the Middle East out of “desperation” as the regime’s internal cohesion and military capabilities crumble amid intensifying pressure from the US-Israeli campaign, according to the head of US Central Command (CENTCOM).
In his first one-on-one interview since the outbreak of war with Iran late last month, Admiral Brad Cooper told Iran International on Sunday that, “in the last couple weeks,” Tehran has carried out more than 300 strikes on civilian, non-military sites, describing the pattern as a shift driven by battlefield setbacks.
“They’re operating in a sign of desperation” Cooper said, arguing that Iran’s ability to sustain large-scale offensive operations has diminished under sustained US and Israeli strikes. Cooper added that Tehran’s rapidly degrading military capabilities have pushed the regime to begin targeting civilian infrastructure and residential communities.
US and Israeli officials have said the initial days of the conflict, which began on Feb. 28, were marked by coordinated barrages of drones and missiles. Those Iranian attacks, however, have now given way to smaller, less intense launches, a change they attribute to deteriorating Iranian capabilities.
“At the beginning of the conflict, you saw large volumes in the dozens of drones and missiles. You no longer see that. It’s all one or two at a time,” Cooper said.
Iran, however, has vowed to continue its military operations against Israel and the US, while also targeting Gulf countries.
Meanwhile, concerns are growing over the security of the Strait of Hormuz, a critical global shipping route through which about a fifth of the world’s oil flows. According to Cooper, the waterway remains technically open but commercial traffic has dropped sharply as vessels avoid the area due to Iranian drone and missile activity.
“The Strait of Hormuz is physically open to transit,” he said. “The reason ships are not transiting right now is because the Islamic Republic is shooting at them with drones and missiles.”
The United States and its allies have stepped up efforts to secure the corridor, part of what Cooper described as the “largest umbrella of air defense in the Middle East history.”
The conflict has also raised fears of broader escalation. US officials had previously warned that additional strikes could target key Iranian infrastructure, while Tehran has threatened retaliation against regional energy and water facilities.
However, US President Donald Trump stated on Truth Social Monday that he and Iranian leaders had “VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.” Trump added that due to the purported success of the meetings, he has “INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD.”
Iranian officials declined any dialogue with Trump, claiming that the president had “retreated” from his military posture “out of fear of Iran’s response.”
The statement came after Trump threatened on Saturday to “obliterate” the country’s energy infrastructure if the regime did not agree to an ultimatum to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Iran said it would retaliate to such an attack by targeting critical infrastructure across the Middle East.
Some analysts have speculated that Trump’s apparent shift in tone was a way to buy time to make preparations for the next US military moves.
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UK Art Exhibit Condemned for Displaying Drawings With Antisemitic Tropes ‘Worse Than Nazi Propaganda’
Demonstrators hold Israeli and British flags outside the Law Courts, during a march against antisemitism, after an increase in the UK, during a temporary truce between the Palestinian Islamist terrorists Hamas and Israel, in London, Britain, Nov. 26, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Susannah Ireland
An art exhibition that opened this weekend in Margate, a seaside town in England, features nearly 100 drawings that promote antisemitic tropes, feature swastikas, target Jewish or Israeli individuals, and deny violence that took place during the Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Drawings Against Genocide” at the Joseph Wales Studios will be open until March 29 and is organized by the groups Art for a Free Palestine and Thanet for Palestine. The artist behind the drawings is Matthew Collings, a 70-year-old writer and former art critic who has been openly critical of Israel. There are roughly 100 drawings in the exhibit critical of Israel, Jews, the “Israeli lobby,” and more, according to Art for a Free Palestine.
One drawing in the exhibit shows members of a so-called Israel lobby that is “nuts and utterly in control,” while other drawings accuse Israel of apartheid and committing a genocide against Palestinians. Several drawings feature a Nazi swastika, often alongside the flag of Israel, while one artwork in particular depicts ancient Israelites with horns. A separate piece shows two Sotheby’s auctioneers eating babies with blood dripping from their teeth and one of them is Sotheby’s French-Israeli owner Patrick Drahi. The drawing claims he is a “fanatic Zionist” who eats babies alive.
Another picture targeting an individual – the owner of @Sothebys – suggesting he eats babies alive. This sickening and medieval antisemitic hate is ok according to Kent police. pic.twitter.com/JpgiseKisD
— Stop The Hate UK (@StopTheHate_UK) March 22, 2026
Another drawing in the exhibit shows an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier spewing blood from their mouth and hands, while another shows an IDF soldier standing over a pool of blood and a human skull. A separate drawing denies that sexual violence took place during the Hamas terrorist attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while another falsely claims there is “no reliable evidence whatsoever” about some of the violence that took place during the massacre.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is depicted naked in one drawing while spewing blood from his mouth and the piece suggests that he is trying to “change reality” with hypnotism in his desire to “invade Iran.” Other drawings target the chief executive of the Jewish organization Community Security Trust, pro-Israel writer and journalist David Collier, and even film director Quentin Tarantino, who lives in Israel with his family.
“This is the recycling of classic antisemitic tropes dressed up as activism,” Collier told The Algemeiner. “When swastikas and dehumanizing imagery are normalized in an art gallery, it tells you something has gone badly wrong.”
“I am currently looking out at a UK landscape in which Jewish people are murdered while going to pray on Yom Kippur, and ambulances owned by a Jewish charity are torched,” he added. “If the government and the police do not start connecting the dots between antisemitism masquerading as pro-Palestinian activism and the real-world violence we see unfolding before us, then the situation for British Jews will only get worse.”
The Combat Antisemitism Movement said the drawings are “worse than Nazi propaganda” and feature “monstrous blood libels.” The grassroots nonprofit organization Stop the Hate UK said the drawings display the artist’s “obsessive hatred of Jews” that is “dressed up as art.”
“The artist makes sure to include lots of bank notes and blood. All the old tropes,” the group noted in a post on X. “The British Jewish community are fed up of being told this sickening hate is ok. It’s not.” Stop the Hate UK also shared on X a video of the exhibit’s alleged curator saying “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea,” a slogan that calls for the dismantling of the State of Israel and for it to be replaced by “Palestine.”
The exhibit has also been publicly condemned by the UK’s Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp and several other groups, including the Jewish Leadership Council, Labour Against Antisemitism, and Campaign Against Antisemitism in statements given to The Telegraph. The exhibit was reported to local police, but they have taken no action, and it remains open.
The Thanet district council, led by the Labour Party, was criticized for promoting the exhibition after its tourism website, Visit Thanet, provided information about its dates and venue, but the webpage has since been deleted.
Collings said in an Instagram post that the drawings are “directed against the horrific genocide against the Palestinians being perpetrated by Israel.”
Art for a Free Palestine said the exhibit “is about raising consciousness and welcoming people to learn about the UK government’s connections to the Israeli lobby and its continued manufacturing of precision weapons on UK soil that are used to target and murder civilians in Gaza.” The drawings, the group added, “teach us the way in which our politicians and mainstream media use propaganda to lie and manipulate the general public in order to cover up the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians.”