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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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The post How the late actor Topol turned Tevye into a Zionist appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Marking Israel’s most joyous day with anguish over the country’s future
As Israelis mark their 78th Independence Day, with Yom Ha’atzmaut beginning Tuesday evening, they face an imminent choice that cuts deeper than any single policy debate. The election that must be held by October will not be only about Iran, Hezbollah or the Palestinians — even though these issues are certainly huge. Instead, the heart of the matter is whether Israel is to remain a modern, civic state grounded in equal obligation — or whether it will slide toward a theocratic and hierarchical order in which religious authority shapes public life and the burdens of citizenship are no longer equitably shared.
Israel is by any measure a remarkable success. A small country under constant threat, it has built a dynamic economy, a powerful military, and a vibrant — if increasingly strained — democracy. Despite the past years’ wars, the per capita GDP, driven by a strong shekel, has roared past $60,000 a year, far higher than that of Germany, France or the United Kingdom.
But success can obscure underlying fractures. The wars that followed the catastrophe of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack have upended and destroyed lives, and the burdens are not shared equally. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assault on the judiciary and democratic institutions have created a devastating chasm between his remaining supporters and highly energized opponents.
But the thing that most animates opponents of the government — and every poll shows them in the majority — may be the special privileges accorded to Netanyahu’s Haredi partners, chief among them the continued draft exemption for tens of thousands of Haredi youth.
Anger over this imbalance has skyrocketed amid these years of war, which have left the Israel Defense Forces stretched perilously thin, with some Israelis serving reserve duty for more than half the year.
Three recent incidents have thrown the existential angst of this discrepancy into harsh relief.
Last week, four IDF servicewomen lit a barbecue on base on a Friday night after sundown. Within days, they were sentenced to two weeks in military prison, a sentence eventually reduced after public outcry.
Their infraction was framed not simply as a breach of discipline, but as “harming religion and Judaism.” It was Shabbat, and the act had offended the increasingly demanding religious guardians scattered throughout the military.
Around the same time, several young women finishing two years of IDF service were fined and brought before disciplinary proceedings for “immodest dress” on the very day of their discharge. Their transgression: wearing jeans and sleeveless tops as they celebrated their release, a tradition with considerable mileage for both genders. The military later acknowledged that the handling of the case deviated from its own regulations — but still docked a third of the women’s salaries.
And during the Jerusalem Marathon, held in heavy heat, male soldiers were permitted to run in shorts, while female soldiers were required to run in long pants, in line with modesty concessions that appear to have been meant to assuage city officials, many of whom are religious. The military at first issued untruthful denials, then promised an investigation. Avigdor Liberman, a leading opposition figure, condemned the order, saying that “anyone who thinks that a female soldier wearing shorts is a problem — is himself the problem.”
Sure, these are small stories. None, on their own, would define a country. But together, they tell a larger story that has become, in a national sense, the talk of the town.
It’s no coincidence that all feature women soldiers. These incidents are, in particular, an affront to a defining old story of modern Israel in which young sabra women were a point of pride. The fact that women served equally in the military, sometimes even in combat roles, set Israel clearly apart from its far less progressive Middle Eastern environs.
Now, increasingly, politicians from the religious right are starting to question whether women should serve at all — not out of any leniency, but out of a hyper-conservative notion of segregation of the genders under a religious patriarchy. It’s not exactly that Israel as a whole is moving in this direction — it is rather that the religious sector has grown brazen during the long years of Netanyahu’s coddling, especially since 2009.
All Israelis understand this. Many are scandalized. Most, I believe, are worried and unhappy. A growing minority, to be sure, is pleased. Most alarmingly, the fault lines on the issues of women’s service also align with people’s positions on the “bigger” issues. When women are increasingly subjected to one kind of double standard, and the Haredim benefit from another, questions of what kind of country Israelis are fighting for become harder to answer.
A sense that the Netanyahu government is committed to elevating the priorities of Haredim and ultranationalist but non-Haredi religious politicians has fueled anguish over this question. Many mainstream Israelis are starting to feel that the increasing effects of right-wing religious policies are making their lives impossible.
This issue — visceral though it is — is only the tip of the iceberg. A profound demographic crisis surrounding the Haredi population threatens Israel’s future. The Haredi birthrate currently comes to almost seven children per family, and the community — currently at a sixth of the population — is a serious economic drain, living on significant subsidies. As it continues to grow, the economic demands on non-Haredi Israelis of sustaining a community that does not contribute to communal defense and is seen as making exorbitant demands while contributing little will threaten the country’s continuation.
If the next government is a centrist-liberal one, it will have its hands full turning back the clock to a time when Israelis felt they could work toward a shared vision of their country’s future. Chief among the problems it will face is resolving this tension — a task that Netanyahu’s coddling of the Haredim has only made more difficult. On previous Independence Days, the atmosphere has been one of joy and hope. Not so now. Restoring optimism and unity to the country is not an impossible task, but it is one that will take laser focus and ferocious determination.
The post Marking Israel’s most joyous day with anguish over the country’s future appeared first on The Forward.
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Lena Dunham’s new memoir is the most millennial thing ever
Famesick
By Lena Dunham
Random House, 416 pages, $34
I’m still trying to figure out what to make of Lena Dunham’s new memoir, Famesick. It name-drops shamelessly; there are pointedly casual references to famous friends and acquaintances, and dishy gossip about others. It shares gory details about Dunham’s many, many hospital visits for endometriosis, broken bones, a hysterectomy and complications from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. It is at times incredibly witty and sharply observed, at others self-pityingly indulgent.
But what I can say for sure is that it is the most aggressively millennial thing I’ve ever read.
Dunham is — to quote one of the most iconic lines from the first season of Girls, the show that launched her, at age 24, into the public eye — if not the voice of her generation, at least “a voice of a generation.” By now, we know which one.
This inspires conflicting feelings. I, myself, am a millennial woman, so reading Famesick feels nostalgic. I recognize myself in Dunham’s turns of phrase — the “disjointed prose poetry and abstract ideas of autonomy” that she posted online in her 20s — which is no accident given that I’m certain Girls, which came out when I was a sophomore in college, molded many of my thoughts of myself and my generation and what it meant to be a woman in the early 2010s.
But the subsequent, unending, vicious discourse — critics slamming Dunham, and the show, for being too self-centered, too privileged, too white, too vapid, too sex-obsessed — shaped me just as much. If I related to Girls, and something was fundamentally problematic about it, something must also be fundamentally problematic about me.
That makes it almost physically painful to read a scene like one in which Dunham’s family gathers to support her brother’s gender affirming surgery, a moment Dunahm recalls almost entirely in terms of how it affected her. Her parents are mad at her. She packed poorly. She carries her dog with her everywhere because, Dunham writes petulantly, “she needs me,” and “nobody else does.”
Yet despite these classic Lena Dunham moments, reaction to the book has been almost unfailingly positive. People are rewatching Girls. (I am, too.) They are bemoaning the vicious commentary on Dunham’s body and weight that characterized its run, and posting snippets of its best jokes online to marvel at how witty the show was. (I agree.) The show has aged surprisingly well.
But has Dunham? Famesick feels like it should be some kind of commentary on what it means for millennials to grow up. If Girls was so keenly aware of the forces of the 2010s, shouldn’t Famesick be equally on point? Is the positive reaction to it a sign of a change in society, a softening toward our much-criticized generation?
At times, it feels like it is; Dunham looks back on her heyday during Girls with as critical an eye as her worst haters, naming her faults in the way that has always made her work special, one part wry, one part heartbreakingly honest. In a much more guarded world, where we curate our social media feeds carefully instead of tell-all blogging, her observations about herself carry more weight.
The best parts of Famesick are about Dunham’s parents, both artists. Her mother is overflowing with the kind of New York Lower East Side Jewish artist oddity that feels lost to the bowels of time — she loves psychics, yet her favorite hobby, Dunham says, is finding medical experts. Her newfound fame, she writes, had the worst impact on “the dynamics with the women I’d known my whole life — my mother chief among them, the original frenemy who all would try and emulate but none could best.”
Writing of an argument with her mother that led them to stop speaking to each other, she realizes all the different forces at play in their relationship — Laurie Simmons was an accomplished artist before she was a mother to a celebrity, and Dunham knows she struggles with being eclipsed by her daughter’s fame. “But to express any of this skillfully would only be possible with the kind of high-level, egoless communication that rarely defines the mother-daughter bond,” the actor ruefully notes; instead, they ignore each other for two weeks and Dunham gives her heartfelt speech about motherhood to a ring Simmons had lent her. It’s funny, yet full of pathos, Dunham at her best.
This feels like an observation that should be at the heart of the book, the kind of Freudian root of all of Dunham’s insecurities, pleas for attention, struggles. Yet while Dunham is good at pinpointing her flaws, and they are many, she is not always good at reflecting on them, on where they come from or how to change.
“It seems to me, looking back, that I thought the cure to such widespread disdain — some of it personal, some of it political,” Dunham writes, “was not to show less of myself, but to show more, as if revealing myself down to the guts would allow for some kind of renewed understanding.” But this, she says, she has realized was, “just begging.”
Often, it feels like the book is doing the same thing. The change from the Dunham of Girls is less in the actor than it is in the audience. Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we can finally empathize with her.
The post Lena Dunham’s new memoir is the most millennial thing ever appeared first on The Forward.
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Europe Should Focus on Own Security as Global Threats Mount, Dutch Intelligence Agency Says
Police officers stand outside a Jewish school following an explosion that caused minor damages, in Amsterdam, Netherlands, March 14, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Europe must take greater responsibility for its own security, the Dutch military intelligence agency MIVD said on Tuesday, citing pressure on long-standing Western alliances and China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The comment by MIVD Director Peter Reesink accompanied the release of its annual report for 2025.
“The international system we have relied on for decades – with institutions acting as guardians of rules and agreements – is under pressure,” Reesink said in a statement. “It is precisely in this space, where rules blur and power becomes more decisive, that threats grow. Europe must increasingly take responsibility for its own security.”
Spillover from other conflicts including the US-Venezuelan conflict and tensions in the Middle East posed threats to the Netherlands and its interests, the MIVD said in a report published on Tuesday. It also warned about the growing risks of Chinese cybersecurity attacks, which the agency expects to increase this year.
The report comes amidst heightened tensions between NATO and US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to leave the alliance due to its reluctance to join the US-Israeli war with Iran.
Reesink told journalists in The Hague that the Netherlands still has a strong relationship with the United States. At the same time, he said there is an increased push by European agencies to strengthen cooperation and rely less on what the Dutch intelligence agency called “unpredictable” politics in Washington.
“Europe needs to stand on its own two feet. That applies for the defence sector … and also for the intelligence community,” he said.
The greatest security threat to the Netherlands remains the conflict in Ukraine – Europe‘s largest since World War Two – he said, citing military cooperation between North Korea, China, Iran, and Russia.