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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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Selective Outrage and the Silence Over Iran’s Dead
Iranian demonstrators gather in a street during anti-regime protests in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
In recent weeks, thousands of Iranian citizens have been killed amid widespread internal unrest. Some casualty reports even reach into the tens of thousands.
Iranian men and women took to the streets to protest economic collapse, systemic repression, and a theocratic regime that has ruled through fear for more than four decades. They were met with bullets, mass arrests, torture, and executions. Yet beyond fleeting mentions and buried headlines, much of the international media has chosen to look away.
At the same time, global attention remains overwhelmingly fixated on Israel and the Palestinians. News panels, campus demonstrations, activist campaigns, and social media feeds are saturated with outrage directed almost exclusively at the Jewish State. This contrast is not accidental. It reflects a deeper moral and structural failure in modern journalism and activism.
The most common explanation offered for the lack of coverage is access. Iran is a closed dictatorship. Foreign journalists are monitored, restricted, expelled, or imprisoned. The regime routinely shuts down the Internet, blocks social media platforms, and intimidates the families of victims. Casualty figures are deliberately obscured, and firsthand reporting is dangerous.
But access alone does not explain the silence.
History shows that journalists have reported from some of the most inaccessible and hostile environments on earth. Syria, North Korea, Sudan, and Afghanistan have all received sustained attention despite severe limitations. When there is genuine interest, creative reporting follows.
In the case of Iran, the problem is not merely a lack of footage. It is a lack of will.
Israel presents the opposite reality. It is one of the most scrutinized countries in the world. It allows foreign media full access, maintains a free press, hosts outspoken human rights organizations, and operates under an independent judiciary and parliamentary oversight. Journalists can move freely, challenge officials, and broadcast live from conflict zones.
When Israel defends itself after a massacre multiple times worse than the 9/11 attacks, every action is framed as a potential crime. When Iran kills its own citizens, it is described in sanitized language as unrest, crackdowns, or internal affairs.
This is not moral consistency. It is moral evasion.
Much of the international focus on the Palestinian cause relies on a simplistic and emotionally comfortable narrative. It divides the world into oppressor and oppressed, strong and weak, villain and victim. It requires little historical context and no serious engagement with internal problems, extremist violence, or rejectionism. It also offers a familiar and ideologically convenient antagonist: the Jewish State.
Iranian protesters disrupt this narrative. Their existence exposes an inconvenient truth that many commentators prefer to ignore — that the greatest source of suffering in the Middle East is not Israel, but authoritarian Islamist regimes that brutalize their own populations. The Iranian protestors undermine the claim that Israel is the region’s central moral problem, and they challenge the ideological frameworks upon which entire activist ecosystems are built.
That is precisely why they are ignored.
There is also a strategic dimension to this silence. The Iranian regime has spent decades exporting violence while redirecting global attention outward. Through proxy terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, and through relentless anti-Israel propaganda, Tehran ensures that outrage is focused anywhere but inward. Every international campaign condemning Israel serves as a distraction from executions, torture chambers, mass arrests, and the killing of dissenters.
Western protest culture plays an enabling role. Modern activism often favors symbolism over substance and slogans over substance. It gravitates towards causes that fit fashionable ideological molds. Iranian dissidents who oppose Islamist extremism, reject antisemitism, and openly criticize Western hypocrisy do not fit neatly into those frameworks. As a result, they are ignored.
Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth is that Jewish suffering is endlessly contextualized, while Jewish self defense is reflexively condemned. That is why Israel is treated differently than the Iranian protest movement.
Thousands of dead Iranians should shake the conscience of the world. The fact that it does not should alarm anyone who still believes in universal human rights. Outrage cannot be selective. Journalism cannot be ideological. And moral concern cannot depend on whether a tragedy serves a preferred narrative.
Iranian lives matter, not when they are useful as political tools, but always. Until the media internalizes that truth, its credibility will continue to erode, one ignored grave at a time
Sabine Sterk is CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Syria’s Internal Unrest Is Spurred by Turkish Ambitions
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan attends a press conference with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, Oct. 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas
“The Syrian Democratic Forces’ [SDF] insistence on protecting what it has at all costs is the biggest obstacle to achieving peace and stability in Syria.”
That’s what Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan said in early January, blaming Syria’s Kurdish-led SDF for some of the bloodiest fighting that Aleppo has seen since Bashar al-Assad’s fall.
But before Washington accepts Ankara’s indictment, it should ask a simpler question: why would Syrian Kurds compromise their political future when Turkey itself refuses to compromise with its Kurdish population at home?
Foreign Minister Fidan made Turkey’s position explicit in a recent television interview: Kurdish groups “only change [their] position when [they] face force. They either have to see force or face the threat of force,” he said. But this isn’t frustrated rhetoric — it’s Turkish doctrine. And recent fighting shows what that doctrine produces.
Beginning on January 6, 2025, Syrian government forces — backed by Turkish-aligned factions — established a template in Aleppo: evacuation orders, artillery strikes, and forced displacement. Over 140,000 civilians subsequently fled Aleppo. The “ceasefire” offered no protections — only withdrawal.
Damascus then replicated the model across northeast Syria. Within two weeks, Syrian forces took Deir Hafer, Tabqa, Raqqa, and Deir al-Zor, as SDF units retreated and Arab tribal allies defected. By January 21, the SDF had lost nearly half its territory and accepted a ceasefire that amounts to capitulation: individual integration into Syrian forces with none of the autonomy protections it had sought.
In other words: disarm first, trust later, rights never.
This is precisely the model Turkey has applied at home. In February 2025, PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan — whose group is a US-designated terrorist organization — called for the group’s disbandment after four decades of conflict. By July, PKK fighters symbolically burned weapons in what they called “a step of goodwill.” Turkish military operations continued throughout — because for Ankara, negotiated settlement is insufficient. Only total victory will do.
Syrian Kurds have watched this closely. They have also watched Turkey’s record in Syria itself. In 2018, Operation Olive Branch displaced at least 150,000 people from Afrin; in 2019, Operation Peace Spring killed hundreds of civilians and drew credible accusations of ethnic cleansing and summary executions. When Turkish President Erdoğan threatened military action in 2019, Washington urged restraint. Turkey invaded anyway.
Now Fidan issues the same threats — and expects different results. He accuses the SDF of “maximalist attitudes” and “deceptive moves,” while demanding immediate, unconditional surrender. He warns that Kurdish resistance will push Turkey to use force. He has already delivered: Turkish drones have hit SDF positions on multiple occasions during the recent fighting, signaling Ankara’s willingness to back up threats with force.
This is not just a Kurdish problem. It threatens core US interests.
Washington’s Syria policy rests on preventing a jihadist resurgence, blocking Iranian expansion, and safeguarding Israel’s security. Each is threatened by Turkey’s coercive approach to Kurdish integration. Marginalized communities without legal protections become fertile ground for extremist recruitment. The collapse of Kurdish autonomy also weakens one of the last effective counter-ISIS buffers in the country. And assaults on minority communities — including the Druze — increase domestic pressure on Israel to intervene, raising the risk of escalation the United States has worked to prevent.
Turkey, meanwhile, gains leverage at America’s expense. By casting itself as the architect of Syria’s “reunification,” Ankara elevates its regional standing while embedding its proxies inside the Syrian security apparatus. Washington, by contrast, is reduced to issuing ceasefire calls while Syria’s post-war order is being written without it.
There is still time to change course — but only if the United States stops outsourcing Syria’s political settlement to Ankara.
Washington retains leverage through its military presence, sanctions relief, reconstruction assistance, and diplomatic recognition. It should use that leverage to establish transparent, enforceable frameworks for minority integration — with international monitoring and public guarantees, not closed-door capitulation pushed for by Turkey.
First, the United States should demand formal negotiations between Damascus and Syria’s minority representatives, under international auspices — with public terms and third-party monitoring.
Second, continued American sanctions relief and reconstruction funds must be tied to measurable benchmarks: minority protections enshrined in law, parliamentary oversight of integration, and independent accountability mechanisms.
Third, Washington must make clear that Turkish military intervention — direct or through proxies — will trigger consequences under existing authorities, including Executive Order 13894, which targets actions threatening Syria’s territorial integrity.
Most critically, the United States must reject the premise that Kurdish communities can be bombed into accepting promises their neighbors have already broken. Fidan says Kurdish groups only understand force. But history suggests Turkey only understands leverage. Washington still has it — and should use it now, while integration is still being implemented, before Fidan’s doctrine of force becomes Syria’s permanent reality.
Jonah Brody is a policy analyst at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA).
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The Digital War Against the Jewish Community Is Raging, Perhaps Worse Than Ever
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
On Monday, the remains of Ran Gvili — a young Israeli police officer killed during the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks — were finally recovered from a cemetery in northern Gaza. With his return, the hostage crisis effectively came to an end. There are no more Israeli hostages in Gaza.
This final milestone received far less international media coverage than the release of the last living hostages in October 2025, an event that had a noticeable impact on the digital landscape. As we found in a student-driven project at the Social Media & Hate Research Lab at Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, antisemitism dipped on X and TikTok the day those living hostages were released. But the respite was short-lived.
Social media has become a toxic environment for Jews. The sheer volume of hateful commentary on anything Jewish — from current events to the Holocaust — is staggering. But to view these platforms as merely “loud” is to miss the more dangerous reality: social media is today’s primary tool for disseminating antisemitism and, increasingly, for mobilizing it.
Our research shows that social media is being used to politicize antisemitism and coordinate action across ideological boundaries. What often appears as a spontaneous burst of passion — such as student activism on campus — is frequently the result of a highly networked digital infrastructure.
In our lab’s study on the “Rhetoric of Resistance,” we tracked the online networking of anti-Israel campus groups across the United States. The findings are a wake-up call for university administrators and policymakers: these groups are not operating in isolation. They have built a wide network of off-campus organizations and individuals, allowing them to synchronize messaging and amplify radicalized narratives at an unprecedented scale.
We are seeing a shift toward language that mirrors the rhetoric of designated terrorist organizations. Slogans that deny a people’s right to exist or that justify violence are no longer fringe; they have been moved into the mainstream of campus discourse through coordinated digital amplification, often expressed in snippets, coded phrases such as talk about “Jewish power,” “Zionist evilness,” or even slogans such as “Free Palestine,” which has become a battle cry.
One of the most troubling patterns our student coders identified is how specific types of political commentary function as “gateways.” While many users believe they are simply criticizing a government’s policy, our data shows that totalizing, categorical condemnations — framing an entire nation as “genocidal” or a “terrorist state” — are most strongly associated with antisemitism. In contrast, humanitarian-focused themes, such as the suffering of individual Palestinians, showed a much less consistent association with anti-Jewish hate speech.
Our central finding is nuanced and confirms other studies: negative views of Israel and antisemitism are strongly correlated. Approximately half of the posts we analyzed that expressed negative views of Israel were antisemitic, while posts with positive views showed zero antisemitism. The students’ diligent coding work allows us to demonstrate empirically how criticism can create a permissive environment for antisemitism without every post necessarily crossing the line into hate speech.
However, in the vast majority of the most vitriolic posts, the content was not just “anti-Israel”; it was fundamentally anti-Jewish, utilizing collective blame and dehumanizing language. This creates a “permissive environment” where hate speech is sanitized as political advocacy, making it difficult for platforms — and even trained human moderators — to draw the line.
The one-day dip in antisemitism we observed during the 2025 hostage release proves that the digital climate is sensitive to reality and human empathy. However, the immediate “snap-back” to hostility suggests that the underlying machinery of mobilization is always running.
If we are to protect the integrity of our campuses and our public discourse, we must confront the reality that some digital activism is designed not to persuade, but to ostracize and radicalize. We must support the right to vigorous political debate while refusing to tolerate the coordinated degradation of Jewish identity. The hostage crisis has ended, but the digital war against Jewish life continues. Recognizing the tools of this mobilization is the first step toward stopping it.
The author is the Director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program and Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University.