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This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either
There’s an FAQ on the website of the London theater where the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre of Melbourne’s production of Yentl is running through April 16. The very first item reads:
Is this a stage version of the 1983 musical film starring Barbara Streisand?
No — the London production of Yentl is a play. It is a new adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 short story,“ Yentl the Yeshiva Boy“ — just like the Streisand film was at the time.
This explanation does more than relieve box office staff of the tedious duty of informing Mrs. Lipschitz and Mrs. Rosenblatt from the sisterhood that no, they shouldn’t come expecting to sing along to “Papa, Can You Hear Me.” It argues that this theatrical “reimagining” (to use Kadimah’s own term) of Yentl is no less authentically Singerian than the musical. It also hints at how Kadimah prevailed, against considerable odds, in adapting a story whose rights Streisand still owns and fiercely guards.
As Gary Abrahams, Kadimah’s executive director and the director of the production, recently told the Jewish Telegraph, Singer’s estate gave him their approval on the condition that it be a Yiddish language, non-musical production. The London transplant, which comes on the heels of earlier stagings in Melbourne and Sydney, is enjoying a six-week run at the Marylebone Theatre, which is housed inside of an anthroposophical center. Both the limited duration of the run and the Off West End venue were critical to securing the Singer estate’s approval.
Kadimah’s production, a bilingual Yiddish-English chamber piece that has gained a certain notoriety for featuring male and female nudity, is the latest chapter in the long and unruly afterlife of Singer’s deceptively simple tale.
In “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which first appeared, in English translation, in Commentary in September 1962, a rabbi’s daughter, shut out from the Talmud learning reserved for men, cuts her hair, dons male clothing, changes her name to Anshel, finds a chavrusa, the heartbroken Avigdor, and enters a yeshiva. But Singer’s tale is considerably stranger than both that simple summary and Streisand’s popular version suggest.
Yentl is not simply a tale of female exclusion and feminist defiance. It is also a story of impersonation, erotic confusion, spiritual hunger and metaphysical trespass. Yentl does not cross one line and stop there. Once she begins living as Anshel, all the categories meant to keep life orderly — male and female, study and desire, law and transgression — begin to blur.
That instability may explain why Yentl has proved so durable. Before Streisand made it famous on screen, Singer had already adapted it for the stage in the mid-1970s together with Leah Napolin. The show opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974 and transferred to Broadway the next year, with Tovah Feldshuh in the title role.
“As a play it is altogether too anecdotal,” wrote Clive Barnes in the 1974 Times review. “The storyline wanders on and on like a river through a landscape, but the landscape happens to be worth looking at.” Napolin, who died in 2018 (and who claimed that Singer didn’t write a single word of the script) suggested that the second wave feminism of the time made the story and its themes feel relevant to contemporary audiences.
“This dark little gender-bending tale had an impact on many people who identified, as I did, with the heroine’s struggle to reinvent herself, to redefine herself,” Napolin once told an interviewer.
Half a century later, Kadimah’s Yentl leans heavily, and not always successfully, into our contemporary discourse about sex and gender. The story reemerges in a markedly — and overtly — queerer form than in previous versions.
Streisand’s film absorbed the title character so completely into her own star persona that for many people Yentl is now synonymous with Babs, not Singer. Her approach is expansive where Singer is compressed, ardent where he is dry-eyed, and schmaltzy where he is severe. Streisand gave the story glamor, emotional clarity and uplift. It also tilted the material away from Singer’s sharper ambiguities and toward the all-American theme of becoming oneself. The film, which Streisand also directed, produced and co-wrote, even ends with Yentl aboard a ship bound for America! (In Singer, Yentl simply ups and vanishes, an ending that has been interpreted as a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew).
Yet Streisand’s victory over the material came with at an expense. As Linda Besner notes in an essay on Singer and Streisand and published in the Canadian arts review Arcade, the film’s feminist reclamation of Yentl also trims away some of the story’s deepest instability. Singer’s Yentl tells Avigdor, “I’m neither one nor the other,” and the story allows a degree of erotic and ontological confusion that the film flattens into a drama of self-realization.
Kadimah’s production, adapted by Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas, starts from dissatisfaction with that inheritance. Hearst has said the team wanted to get back to the story’s darker, more transgressive roots. In an interview with The Times of London, Abrahams said he had been struck by how unlike the movie Singer’s story really was, and described the original as a work about spirituality, identity, gender, sexuality, as well as plain old sex.
Those ambitions are evident from the outset. This is not a shy Yentl. It foregrounds the body, goes hard on the story’s sexual unease and sharpens its queer implications. Amy Hack is alluringly androgynous in the title role, both attracted by and attractive to Avigdor and Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford in a very stiff performance), Avigdor’s erstwhile fiancée, who Yentl marries in bad faith. As in the film, she casts a prurient gaze at the bathing Avigdor (Ashley Margolis bares all onstage, one-upping Mandy Patinkin, whose naked tush is one of the film’s most memorable sights). Singer’s story can accommodate plenty of sexual discomfort and frustration, but Abrahams’ production lays it on too thick. Did he really need to make Avigdor a mikveh peeper?
The production also never settles on a convincing tone and register. The one-set production, with its vaguely Expressionist look, goes for too much shtetl schlock. The acting keeps sliding between modes without enough control to make the shifts meaningful: naturalistic for a few minutes, then suddenly pitched into something like Yiddish melodrama. Additionally, there isn’t any discernible logic to why certain passages are spoken in English while others are in Yiddish (with subtitles projected onto the set). The result is less daring than uncertain. No performance fully steadies the evening, although Evelyn Krape comes the closest. As the spectral “Figure,” she hovers, narrates, inhabits minor roles and hangs over the proceedings like a comic dybbuk. The device of a spectral conferencier does not entirely cohere, but Krape — hammy in a grotesque-vulgar-goofy way — almost pulls it off.
Kadimah’s production was lauded in Melbourne and Sydney but has met with a very different reception in London, which is, of course, a no-nonsense theater town. Despite the tepid and sometimes outright negative reviews (“Even with nude scenes, this is a schlep,” The Times of London’s critic wrote), the Thursday evening performance I attended was nearly full. And, the mostly grey-haired audience members, several of whom I recognized, from a nearby kosher deli where I wolfed down a pastrami sandwich before the show, were enthusiastic. A Yiddish Yentl in London now is enough of an event to draw not only the usual suspects but the theatrically adventurous — and, no doubt, some Streisand fans who should know to check their expectations at the door.
Kadimah Yiddish Theater, which recently passed its centenary, is, by some counts, Australia’s oldest theater company. This Yentl might well be the biggest hit they’ve had in their long history. Despite its shortcomings — and there any many, both in concept and execution — the production shows that the company understands the need to strive for more than nostalgia and sentimentality, à la Streisand, and to be a little impious and even impish.
Today’s most interesting Yiddish theater (and also film, to an extent) inscribes itself within tradition while treating that heritage as unstable, literate and vulgar. That is what makes the Yiddish work of another Australian director, Barrie Kosky, so refreshing and bracingly alive.
Earlier this season, Kosky directed K., a “Talmudic vaudeville” inspired by Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Berliner Ensemble. In interviews, Kosky has spoke of the polyglot, code-switching, cross-dressing Yiddish theater that formed part of Kafka’s world. His haunting and unsettling production moves between German, Hebrew and Yiddish (including a gorgeous translation of Schumann’s Dicherliebe into mamaloschen) and injects intellectual seriousness with showbiz energy.
There’s another reason I bring up Kosky, a prolific, influential, and deeply Jewish theater and opera director. In summer 2027, he will present a fresh musical version of Yentl at the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, created together with Lisa Kron (the Tony-winning writer and lyricist of Broadway’s Fun Home) and Adam Benzwi, one of the director’s regular musical collaborators in Berlin. According to Bard’s announcement, Benzwi’s score will draw on American and European Yiddish theater, music hall and Hasidic choral traditions. That sounds less like an attempt to strip Yentl back to some pristine original than like an effort to push through the whole layered history of the piece and make something gloriously heterodox.
By this point Yentl exists not as a single work. Singer gave it severity, mischief and danger. Streisand gave it melody and yearning. Kadimah has tried, admirably if unsuccessful, to restore taboo, Yiddish abrasion and folkloric unease, sometimes vividly, sometimes crudely. Kosky may prove better placed than most to let those elements collide without trying to reconcile them too neatly.
The post This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either appeared first on The Forward.
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Anti-Israel Rep. Thomas Massie Trails in Race as New Kentucky Ad Targets Jewish Donor With Rainbow Star of David
US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A new poll is signaling growing trouble for US Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky’s Republican primary, with Trump-endorsed challenger Ed Gallrein now leading the incumbent congressman 53 percent to 45 percent among likely GOP voters in the state’s 4th Congressional District.
The poll comes as Massie faces intensifying backlash over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent.
The ad characterizes Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and features a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image while attacking Gallrein’s allies.
NEW: Take a look at this #KY04 ad called “LGBTQ Mafia” from a PAC affiliated w/ Jan. 6 rioter Derrick Evans.
It depicts Jewish donor Paul Singer with an unexplained rainbow Star of David.
More on this insane, now record-breaking $25 million primary: https://t.co/iT3YN8wYEz pic.twitter.com/0YIRYmaJwL
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) May 11, 2026
Critics condemned the imagery as antisemitic, arguing it invoked longstanding tropes about Jewish financial influence and used Jewish symbolism in a way designed to inflame cultural resentment. Many social media users accused the ad of crossing a red line at a time when antisemitic incidents in the United States remain elevated following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The Kentucky ad was paid for by Hold the Line PAC — a group backing Massie that is “focused on Religious Liberty, 2A, and Restoring Election Integrity,” according to its website — not Massie’s official campaign.
The race has drawn national attention, with more than $25 million spent on ads, the most ever in a House primary election, according to AdImpact.
Outside groups have poured millions of dollars into the campaign, Because Kentucky’s 4th District is overwhelmingly Republican, the GOP primary is widely expected to determine who will ultimately hold the seat. According to data sourced from the Federal Election Commission (FEC), Massie has only garnered roughly $70,000 from in-state donors, compared to over $1.1 million from out-of-state, a whopping 94 percent of his total donations.
The latest survey showing Massie trailing was conducted on May 12 by Quantus Insights. It marks one of the clearest signs yet that US President Donald Trump’s endorsement may be reshaping the race in Gallrein’s favor. The Kentucky primary has rapidly evolved into one of the most closely watched Republican intraparty battles of the 2026 election cycle, drawing national attention over divisions surrounding Israel, antisemitism, and ideological loyalty within the GOP.
Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican known for frequently breaking with party leadership, has a long track-record of voting against sending aid to all foreign countries, including Israel. Although he has received substantial criticism over his voting record, Massie has argued that his positions do not reflect an animus against the Jewish state but are reflective of his staunch fiscal conservatism. He has also condemned Israel’s military operations in Gaza and Lebanon, arguing that the Jewish state has targeted civilian infrastructure and should not receive assistance from the US.
Critics contend his voting record and anti-Israel rhetoric have increasingly isolated him from the Republican mainstream, particularly on issues involving Israel and national security. Skeptics also claim that Massie’s criticisms of Israel are devoid of nuance, oftentimes omitting Hamas’s tendency to use human shields, repurpose civilian infrastructure for military purposes, and intercept trucks intended to distribute food.
The race has become a major test of Trump’s continued influence over Republican primaries. Trump has repeatedly criticized Massie in recent months before formally endorsing Gallrein, framing the contest as a battle between party unity and ideological obstructionism.
“We got to get rid of this loser. This guy is bad,” Trump said at a March rally in Hebron, Kentucky. “He’s disloyal to the Republican Party. He’s disloyal to the people of Kentucky, and most importantly, he is disloyal to the United States of America. And he’s got to be voted out of office as soon as possible.”
Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL officer, has sought to position himself as a firmly pro-Israel conservative aligned with Trump’s “America First” coalition. His campaign has emphasized strong US-Israel relations, expanded security cooperation, and staunch support for the Jewish state following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.
Political analysts say the outcome could reverberate far beyond Kentucky, shaping how Republican lawmakers navigate issues surrounding Israel, antisemitism, and loyalty to Trump heading into the 2026 midterm elections.
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Jewish Teens in France Tell US Ambassador About Enduring Antisemitism in Schools
Members of French Cteen chapters meet with United States Ambassador to France Charles Kushner and his wife Seryl on Monday, May 4, 2026. They discussed their experiences with antisemitism and what keeps them motivated. Photo: US Embassy in France
Nine members of the Chabad youth group CTeen France met last week with US Ambassador to France Charles Kushner to discuss their experiences of antisemitism in the years since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, a massacre which left nearly 1,200 people dead and led to a surge in hate crimes targeting Jews around the world.
Following an invitation, the youth aged 14-18 visited the ambassador’s official residence at rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris for a two-hour discussion also attended by Kushner’s wife Seryl. Rabbi Mendy Mottal, CTeen’s director, and his wife Chaya also participated.
One member of the group, 18-year-old Younes, declined when offered a letter from the embassy to explain his absence from school. He explained that he did not want anyone at his school to discover he was Jewish, that only his best friend knew the secret of his true identity.
Another student, Salomé, described living 90 minutes south of Paris in Orléans and not knowing any other Jews in her region until the launch of a CTeen group. “All week at school I’m just waiting for the moment when I can see my Jewish friends,” she told the ambassador.
“These are teens who walk into their public school every morning knowing they may be the only Jew in their classroom,” said Rabbi Mendy Kotlarsky, chairman of CTeen International.
Discussing the meeting on X, Kushner wrote, “I love seeing motivated young leaders! CTeen is developing youth across France and focusing, like me, on countering antisemitism by combatting all forms of hatred in our communities.”
The teenagers received a tour of the ambassador’s residence and enjoyed Kosher refreshments before receiving two gifts: a kippah custom-made for the embassy and an embassy medal.
“These are teens regularly experiencing antisemitism on the front line,” Mottal said. “The ambassador was very moved by them and how they spoke. Frankly, so was I.” He described how Kushner “wanted to know what actually happens in the hallways, what they feel when they walk into a classroom knowing they might be the only Jews in the room.”
Kushner stated during the meeting that he intended the gathering to be the start of his collaborations with the CTeen group and that combating antisemitism in France had become a top priority.
“The fact that the ambassador sits with them, listens to their stories, and acknowledges the weight they carry on their shoulders — that means something profound to these young people,” Kotlarsky said.
The students’ fears align with survey responses from Jews in France and Europe. A 2026 Jewish Agency report found 78 percent of French Jews expressed feelings of fear in their country while 43 percent of European Jews surveyed said they experienced antisemitism in the last year either themselves or through a member of their family.
Last year authorities in France documented 1,320 antisemitic incidents recorded nationwide, a fall of 16 percent from the previous year’s high of 1,570. While Jews make up less than one percent of the French population — totaling 500,000 to amount to Europe’s highest Jewish population — they account for 53 percent of hate crime victims. French officials warned that the numbers were certainly undercounts of the actual number of incidents.
Last month, lawmaker Caroline Yadan put forward legislation to expand penalties for antisemitic speech. Dubbed the “Yadan law,” the proposed measure would ban “implicit” justifications of terrorism, advocacy for obliterating any state recognized by France, and comparing Israel to Nazi Germany. The bill’s supporters chose to withdraw the plan on April 16 after determining they were unlikely to succeed.
The centrist party Ensemble pour la République (EPR) blamed the leftist La France Insoumise (LFI) party for allegedly obstructing the bill’s progression.
In March, Dov Maimon, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, described the ideological dynamics in local French politics today and the threat they posed against the Jewish people.
“On one side, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left party, La France Insoumise (LFI), which didn’t hold a single seat on any municipal council, has now entered hundreds of councils and captured real cities for the first time,” Maimon wrote. “On the other side, the far right took approximately 40% of the vote and clinched dozens of mayoral races.”
Maimon warned that “the center seems to have collapsed. According to current polls, Mélenchon has a real chance of reaching that final round as the standard-bearer of the left. His political movement has weaponized hostility toward Israel, and his ties to Islamist networks are well-documented.”
In March, French authorities arrested two brothers alleged to have planned an antisemitic terror attack. Investigators found a semi-automatic firearm, a bottle of acid, and an ISIS flag during a traffic stop.
Kushner is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. His son Jared is US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and serves as the Special Envoy for Peace where he has acted as a key foreign policy negotiator during the ongoing conflict with the Islamic regime in Iran.
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Long Island school district pays $125K to settle lawsuit over erased pro-Palestinian student art
(JTA) — A Long Island school district agreed to pay a $125,000 settlement to a former student whose pro-Palestinian artwork was painted over in a high school parking lot.
The lawsuit stemmed from a September 2024 incident at Half Hollow Hills High School West, which permitted seniors to decorate their campus parking spots. A Muslim-American student, who was a senior at the time, painted a watermelon featuring a keffiyeh pattern alongside her name in Arabic and the phrase “Peace be upon you” on her space.
At the time, protests against the war in Gaza were at a peak, and the watermelon and keffiyeh, the traditional Palestinian headscarf, are both widely used symbols of Palestinian solidarity. The school painted over the artwork after it drew outcry from some Jewish parents in the district, determining that it had run afoul of the district’s rules barring political designs.
“For the school district, neutrality is the single most important issue when it comes to limiting speech,” the Half Hollow Hills School District’s attorney, Jacob Feldman, said at a school board meeting at the time, according to a contemporaneous Newsday report.
The student, who has not been identified publicly, testified at that meeting last year. “I was told by my principal that the watermelon was being interpreted as antisemitic by anonymous adults,” she said, according to the Newsday footage. “I feel deeply offended that the word antisemitic was used to describe a piece of my artwork.”
In March 2025, the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations filed a lawsuit on behalf of the student alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, alleging that the district had violated her free speech rights and caused her emotional distress.
“The whitewash of Plaintiff’s pro-Palestinian speech was not to prevent substantial disruption of any school activity or threatened harm to the rights of others, as Half Hollow permitted and even amplified speech on other equally, even more, controversial issues,” the lawsuit stated, according to the Associated Press.
In court filings, Steven Stern, an attorney appointed by the district’s insurance provider, wrote that the watermelon image “symbolized anti-Semitic hate speech,” arguing that the district should be able to dictate art allowed in the parking lot.
“Any student, teacher, or member of the public could have driven into the parking lot and reasonably understood the school was endorsing a political message — or worse, anti-Semitic hate speech — by allowing it,” Stern wrote, according to Newsday.
The settlement, which was approved by the Half Hollow Hills school board at a meeting on April 21, will be paid by the district’s insurance carrier, according to Superintendent John O’Farrell.
In a statement obtained by Newsday, O’Farrell said that students were no longer allowed to paint their parking spaces “following the incident and the disruption it caused.”
The lawsuit was not the first time that the school district had courted controversy over Israel-related issues. Last year, the district drew scrutiny after a study guide distributed to some 10th graders described Zionism as “an example of extreme nationalism,” prompting condemnation from Rep. Elise Stefanik.
Christina John, a staff attorney for the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit alongside Stoll, Glickman & Bellina LLP, welcomed the outcome in a statement.
“This settlement sends a clear message that viewpoint discrimination and the censorship of Palestinian expression cannot be justified under the guise of neutrality,” John said. “No student should be interrogated, silenced, or punished for peacefully expressing their identity or solidarity with oppressed people.”
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