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In a new opera, Tevye’s forgotten daughter takes the spotlight
For most, the story of Tevye the milkman is tumble-down, work-a-day Anatevka — and it’s a man’s world.
That the Sholem Aleichem stories situated the philosopher dairy deliverer outside of a shtetl, and even that he had two daughters beyond Hodl, Tseytl and Khava, is known to Yiddishists, but may be more obscure to musical theater fans.
Composer Alex Weiser and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s new opera, Tevye’s Daughters, which will have a concert performance March 19 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, is inspired by the story of Tevye’s second-youngest daughter Sphrintse, who took her own life after the failure of an arranged marriage.
Weiser, whose operas include a portrait of Theodor Herzl’s marital squabbles and the battle over a Yiddish dictionary, knew he was reckoning with a titan of American Jewish identity when he picked this material. That’s part of why he and Fleischmann were drawn to it.
“Fiddler itself is really in the popular imagination on the one hand,” Weiser said in a Zoom interview. On the other hand, as Tevye would say, the lesser known stories are ripe for exploration. Weiser and Fleischmann hope audiences will walk in with a certain familiarity, but come away recognizing something more nuanced.
Key to Weiser and Fleischman’s approach is a framing device of their own invention. Tseytl, Khava and Beylke recall the story of their sister’s death decades later, as old women in a cabin in the Catskills in 1964. That memory parallels the journey of Rose, Tseytl’s social justice-minded granddaughter, who marched on Washington to protest segregation and is breaking off her engagement after falling in love with a woman. (The actor who plays Rose doubles as Sphrintse; the older women also play their younger selves.)
“In a way, Sholem Aleichem’s story of Sphrintse is a kind of suppressed memory, culturally, for all of us,” said Weiser. “So we kind of dramatize that by having the sisters also kind of suppress this memory.”
What’s novel about Fleischman’s libretto is the way it shifts focus. It’s called Tevye’s Daughters, but Tevye is only a bumbling bit part, whereas in the Sholem Aleichem stories, he was the sole — and certainly unreliable — narrator. The plot, and the score, reflect the underexamined role of women.
On three occasions, his daughters interrupt a potential monologue to say “it’s not your story to tell.”
In writing the libretto, Fleischmann, who has written operas based on surrealists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore and an adaptation of a story by Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, looked to the work of Yiddish poets like Kadia Molodowsky. The opera features songs underscoring women-led rituals like braiding challah and lighting shabbos candles. Centrally, it makes use of tkhines, private Yiddish prayers written for women who may not have known Hebrew.
“The sound of those prayers becomes something that’s really at the heart of the opera,” said Fleischmann, noting how the text was drawn from the archives at the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, where Weiser is the director of public programming. “We had a lot of languages to draw from that were completely our own.”
Instead of a klezmer sound — or the American Songbook stylings of Fiddler composer Jerry Bock — Weiser’s music is more typically operatic (though there are clarinets). A vibraphone is used for the 1964 scenes and there are moments of solo violin that tip their hat to Fiddler, while not being of it.
The sonic quality, which pulses like water on the lake where Sphrintse drowned, hints at a hidden narrative. In the opera, Tevye’s daughter Beylke, who decides to stay single, is understood to be gay. Fleischmann and Weiser found interviews in the archives with women born around the time of Beylke, in shtetlach, explaining growing up queer in a rigid milieu governed by tradition.
For Fleischmann, writing these characters reminded her of her immigrant father, and how his “history of exile and resettling” carried through to the political involvement of the younger generation.
At a time of ICE raids, the opera, while it concerns a different community of immigrants, and a different time of political protest, is rooted in a past that feels familiar.
“We can talk today about how it speaks to a resurgence of activism,” said Fleischmann. “How are we going to move forward in the world if we don’t take up arms or use our voices?”
The opera argues that it is the very voices from history that were traditionally silenced that can speak the loudest to us now.
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Ukraine reburies Nazi collaborator with state honors, drawing Israeli condemnation
(JTA) — Israel criticized Ukraine Monday after President Volodymyr Zelensky gave full state honors to a Ukrainian nationalist leader who was part of a movement that collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.
During a reburial ceremony on Sunday, Zelensky described Andriy Melnyk and his wife, Sofia Fedak-Melnyk, as “iconic Ukrainians of the 20th century who are deeply respected,” according to The New York Times.
Melnyk led one of the factions of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists during its collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II. Though the Ukrainian organization shared a mutual opposition to Soviet rule with the Nazis, it also promoted antisemitic rhetoric and some of its members participated in the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust. Melnyk initially sought cooperation with Nazi Germany but was later detained by the Nazis as relations with Ukrainian nationalist groups deteriorated.
The ceremony marked the latest flashpoint in a longstanding dispute over Ukraine’s commemoration of World War II-era nationalist figures linked to Nazi collaboration. In 2018, the country designated the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera as a holiday, and in 2017, a statue was unveiled honoring a nationalist leader whose regime killed tens of thousands of Jews in pogroms during the Russian Revolution.
The remains of Melnyk and his wife were exhumed from Luxembourg last week and then transported to Ukraine for reburial at Kyiv’s National Military Memorial, which opened last year for soldiers killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Glory to every Ukrainian hero! Glory to all our Ukrainian warriors! Glory to our people!,” Zelensky, who is Jewish, wrote in a post on X marking the ceremony, adding that he was “grateful to everyone who has worked to make such returns of great Ukrainian figures possible and to give the Ukrainian People their own pantheon of heroes.”
The reburial was quickly decried by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, which wrote in a post on X that it was “deeply troubled by such national commemorations, which come at the expense of historical truth and the memory of Holocaust victims.”
“Honoring the leader of a movement that supported and collaborated with Nazi Germany during the persecution and murder of millions of Jews undermines the moral integrity essential to Holocaust remembrance,” the post read.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry wrote on X that there is “no place for ignoring historical truth and the memory of the victims murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.”
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Trump administration again sues UCLA over antisemitism, alleging ‘hostile educational environment’
(JTA) — The U.S. Department of Justice sued the University of California for the second time this year over allegations of an antisemitic campus environment at UCLA, claiming the school “was deliberately indifferent to the suffering of its Jewish and Israeli students” after Oct. 7.
The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday, claims UCLA violated the students’ civil rights by failing to intervene during pro-Palestinian encampment activity in early 2024. It follows an earlier suit that focused on the university’s treatment of its Jewish and Israeli employees, and comes 10 days after the university unveiled its own “Initiative to Combat Antisemitism.”
“Earlier this year, we sued UCLA for subjecting its Jewish and Israeli employees to an antisemitic hostile work environment,” assistant U.S. attorney general Harmeet Dhillon said in a press release. “Now, the Department of Justice calls UCLA to account for its toleration of the equally appalling hostile educational environment against its Jewish and Israeli students.”
Requests for comment to the Justice Department and UCLA were not immediately returned.
The new suit draws on widely reported accounts of UCLA’s campus environment in spring 2024, when protesters in pro-Palestinian encampments clashed with pro-Israel counter-protesters, sparking violence and turmoil. The failure to protect Jewish students violated their Title VI civil rights, attorneys said.
Citing the report of UCLA’s own task force on antisemitism, published in response to the 2024 campus upheaval, the suit states, “UCLA’s leadership apparently preferred a do-nothing ‘de-escalation strategy’ to protecting their Jewish and Israeli students from an angry mob organized by peers armed with tasers, lumber, and a sword.”
The Justice Department is seeking several redress measures, including the return of all federal grants made to UCLA “during the time of UCLA’s noncompliance with Title VI.” The school had previously resolved several Title VI antisemitism cases under the Biden administration, and also reached a $6.13 million settlement with Jewish groups in a private suit related to the spring 2024 incidents on campus — a case cited in DOJ’s new lawsuit.
The Trump administration has sought to make a particular example of UCLA in its aggressive approach to campus antisemitism. Officials had sought to levy fines in excess of $1 billion against the public university for its alleged failure to protect Jewish and Israeli students, until a federal judge intervened. Several DOJ lawyers have left the department over its UCLA investigation, telling reporters the case was “fraudulent,” a “sham” and driven by pressure to “find” evidence to support further legal action against UCLA.
In addition, some of the most violent clashes on the campuses included perpetrators on both sides of the conflict, leading some members of the UCLA Jewish community to complain that pro-Israel counter-protesters ultimately undercut the Jewish students’ legitimate grievances regarding the harassment they had been facing inside the campus gates.
And the campus environment for Jews remains tense. Last month, the UCLA student senate condemned a campus visit by a freed Israeli hostage, drawing blowback from a university regent.
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Jewish leaders say Belgium’s prosecution of circumcision is antisemitic
(JTA) — Dozens of European Jewish leaders, joined by Israeli and American diplomats, decried Antwerp prosecutors who plan to charge two Jewish men with performing illegal circumcisions.
In an open letter on Tuesday to European and Belgian officials, 45 communal and religious Jewish leaders accused the Antwerp Public Prosecutor’s Office of “effectively criminalizing the act of circumcision” and infringing on religious freedom.
Earlier this month, Belgian prosecutors announced their recommendation to refer two mohels, or ritual circumcisers, to the criminal court following investigations into alleged illegal circumcisions.
In Belgium, the law requires all circumcisions to be performed by licensed medical professionals. The two men would be charged with intentional assault or battery against minors and the unlawful practice of medicine.
The European Jewish leaders responded that prosecuting mohels was “antisemitic in nature, reminiscent of efforts taken in Europe against Jewish practice prior to the Second World War.”
They said the potential prosecutions sent a message that “Jews are no longer welcome in Belgium” and “Belgian Jews are now second class citizens with limited rights.” Their appeal was led by the chairman of the European Jewish Association, Rabbi Menachem Margolin.
Israeli and U.S. officials have also accused Belgium of targeting Jews for practicing their faith.
Gideon Saar, Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, called the prosecutors’ decision a “scarlet letter on Belgian society.” He was joined by the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Bill White, who said on X that Belgium “will be thought of now as anti Semitic by world.”
Belgium’s foreign minister fired back that it was “inappropriate to publicly criticize a country and tarnish its image simply because you disagree with judicial proceedings.”
“I recall that the proceedings in question were initiated by representatives of the Jewish community themselves,” said Maxime Prévot. “To portray those as a country’s desire to undermine the religious freedom of Jews is defamatory.”
The mohels were first investigated after complaints lodged by Moshe Aryeh Friedman, an Antwerp rabbi. He alleged in 2023 that six local mohels practiced metzitzah b’peh, in which the circumciser cleans the circumcision wound with oral suction. Over the past two decades, several infants in New York City were infected with herpes as a result of the practice.
The letter from European Jewish leaders did not address Friedman’s claims.
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