New Article: “Fiddler on the Roof” as the American Jewish Rorschach Test
David Shasha
“Fiddler on the Roof” as the American Jewish Rorschach Test
Let it first be said that the 1971 movie version of the Broadway musical “Fiddler on the Roof” starred the Israeli actor Chaim Topol as Tevye:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiddler_on_the_Roof_(film)#Cast
Let it then be said that years earlier the same Chaim Topol starred in the Israeli racist landmark “Sallah Shabbati” which marked Arab Jews as lazy, ignorant, and corrupt:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/t4IyE96qZd4/m/mTc9Bbv3yrkJ
It is a very significant ethno-cultural juxtaposition, given how Ashkenazim continue to complain about the place of their culture in the current Jewish discourse, which they control, as I remarked in my discussion on Mikhail Krutikov’s pathetic whining about The New Jewish Canon:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/EreW7uWzKms
I do not think it possible that any Jewish discussion of “Fiddler” would ever make the connection between Topol’s two iconic performances; one degrading Arab Jews and their cultural heritage, the other injecting a form of Zionist machismo into the Eastern European Shtetl:
https://www.thejc.com/culture/film/why-we-still-love-fiddler-on-the-roof-1.494247
As he has admitted:
“This may be true, I suppose,” Topol responded to me via email. “When I started playing Tevye on stage [in London] in 1965, a mere 20 years had passed from the end of World War Two and the Holocaust. As an Israeli who had been born and raised in Israel and served in the IDF, I probably brought some of the Sabra roughness to the role.”
It is thus interesting to note that Sholem Aleichem, the creator of Tevye, was a Yiddish Modernist whose attitude towards “tradition” was more complex than what the anemic “Fiddler” might indicate:
https://forward.com/culture/188007/will-the-real-sholem-aleichem-please-stand-up/
It is the mark of an anxious writer who sought to narrate a hellish vision of a world in collapse in a satirical manner:
In the “Tevye” stories, Sholem Aleichem’s character is aware that he is being used for material, and he is sensitive about his portrayal. A few times he asks the author not to write about him, and if he does write something, to leave out his name. Today, in contrast, it’s Sholem Aleichem who is on the receiving end of the fame reflected by his character, and more because of Tevye’s appearance on Broadway than because of his role in Yiddish fiction.
For those who have never read Aleichem’s original stories, I strongly recommend them as a corrective to the “Fiddler” idea of Anatevka as a bizarrely comforting form of Shtetl Porn:
His iconoclastic legacy is embodied by the great American Jewish authors Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth:
https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/04/yiddishists200904
It is a transgressive literary tradition that often met with the disapproval of the staid and conservative Jewish community:
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/influence-of-isaac-bashevis-singer/
Just two years prior to the opening of “Fiddler,” Roth made his infamous appearance at Yeshiva University:
https://blogs.yu.edu/library/2018/05/23/philip-roth-at-yeshiva-university-1962/
It has become an iconic moment in American Jewish culture:
In 1962, while appearing on a panel at Yeshiva University, Mr. Roth was so denounced, for that story [“Defender of the Faith”] especially, that he resolved never to write about Jews again. He quickly changed his mind.
“My humiliation before the Yeshiva belligerents — indeed, the angry Jewish
resistance that I aroused virtually from the start — was the luckiest break I
could have had,” he later wrote. “I was branded.”
It should thus be remembered that “Fiddler” acted as an important intervention in what was then a very contentious American Jewish culture, rooted in the various tensions embodied in these literary figures.
Alisa Solomon has discussed the issue of Aleichem and American Jews in her book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of “Fiddler on the Roof”:
https://www.amazon.com/Wonder-Wonders-Cultural-History-Fiddler/dp/0805092609
As The Forward review of the book asserts:
Even if you agree that “Fiddler” was a masterpiece, however, Solomon doesn’t really give its critics their due. As she readily states, the popularity of “Fiddler” “burdened it with extra-theatrical responsibilities,” including the task of representing American Jewry’s Eastern European past. In response, Solomon argues that expecting a Broadway musical to realistically portray a historical place is ridiculous. “Musicals always unfold in fake places,” she writes. “No one looks for documentary realism in the New York City of ‘Guys and Dolls’ or ‘West Side Story.’” But she concedes that audiences did look to “Fiddler” for documentary witness, just as they had looked to the works of Sholem Aleichem himself. This was especially true after of the Holocaust, when there was no longer an Old World to go back to. When the Butwins’ volume of translations was published just a year after the war, Ben Hecht, in his New York Times review, called it “the epitaph of a vanished world and an almost vanished people.” Even Molly Picon, the Yiddish actress who played Yente in the 1971 film version of “Fiddler,” claimed: “This is like a document of historical significance… It’s part of a world that’s gone.”
The debate also wasn’t just about whether “Fiddler” got the details of the shtetl right — it was a fight over the soul of America Jewish culture. Here, Solomon and “Fiddler” critics aren’t so much in disagreement as they occupy different points of view. Solomon, coming after the fact, looks at the Jewish reaction from a detached perspective, observing it as an anthropological reality rather than a position to be argued with. For critics like [Irving] Howe, who were writing contemporaneously and from within the Jewish sphere, the audience was an object of criticism as much as the musical itself. Part of the triumph of “Fiddler,” according to Solomon, was its embrace by a community that had spent decades denying, ignoring or otherwise trying to cover up its immigrant past. The musical, in her reading, provided a way for them to reengage with that past on comfortable and even celebratory terms. But for critics who had been decrying the same tendency for decades, the moment was less a triumph than a compounding of tragedy. When the Jewish community finally decided to remember its heritage, it turned to a Broadway musical that, in Solomon’s own view, shouldn’t have been counted on to represent a real place. It may have been a great show, but it could hardly replace thousands of years of history.
By contrast, I have no idea how “Sallah Shabbati” was received by American Jews, though it did garner an Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe award:
https://israeled.org/sallah-shabbati/
Its author Ephraim Kishon was recently feted by none other than Tikvah Tablet Liel Leibovitz, who apparently does not feel bothered by his nebulous racism:
It is thus interesting to note how “Fiddler” plays against “Sallah,” and how Aleichem’s complex attitude towards tradition and modernity functions in the context of contemporary Jewish discourse.
PBS is currently broadcasting an installment of their “Great Performances” series called “Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles” that further complicates this picture:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/fiddler-a-miracle-of-miracles-about/12054/
It is available for on-line viewing until the middle of December:
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/fiddler-a-miracle-of-miracles-full-episode-ic6gkb/12176/
In the 1960s “Fiddler” became an emblem of Jewish Upward Mobility, as the Broadway success functioned as a status symbol as well as a prime piece of nostalgia:
https://www.jewishexponent.com/2018/10/21/fiddler-on-the-roof-academy-of-music/
The documentary contains a sharp riposte to the vulgar nostalgia-mongering from Fran Lebowitz, acting her usual crusty contrarian self, as she calls out the fraud of the cult of the past.
But rather than focus on the differences between the musical production and its literary source, the documentary, pace Solomon’s book, presents yet another iteration in the seemingly endless Rorschach responses of American Jews to the show.
It is worthwhile to note that Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The Sound of Music” premiered on Broadway in 1959, just five years before “Fiddler”:
https://www.playbill.com/article/look-back-at-the-original-broadway-production-of-the-sound-of-music
I have written positively about “Sound” in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/qA3PANvM3XI/m/BtVIAw7BBAAJ
The two musicals present different aspects of the European Jewish tragedy, one dealing with the Shtetl and Russian pogroms, the other with the Nazi scourge. It is of course telling that “Sound” dealt with Hitler by using an Aryan family of cute children and a wacky singing nun and not by presenting actual Jews.
But over time, the sturdy songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein have taken on canonical status, while “Fiddler” has increasingly become just more Ashkenazi schmaltz.
It is therefore critical for American Jewish ethnocentrists to find new ways to promote “Fiddler,” as the tired nostalgia for Anatevka gets caught up in the new PC Cancel Culture.
And it is here that the documentary’s creators Max Lewkowicz and Valerie Thomas set out to transform “Fiddler” into a hip form of multiculturalism that speaks to the universal human condition of persecuted refugees.
To this end, the documentary prominently deploys the dodgy Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose “Hamilton” has also sought to incorporate a very complicated sense of ethnicity into its narrative, as it proudly basks in its huge crossover success:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/01/lin-manuel-miranda-ancestry-hamilton-mexico-texas
One of the most striking set-pieces in the documentary is Miranda’s joyous wedding video “performance” of “L’Chaim”:
https://www.popsugar.com/latina/Lin-Manuel-Miranda-Singing-His-Wife-Wedding-41642196
It is indeed quite strange to see a Hispanic Christian man channel his inner Tevye in this way.
Though perhaps not so strange when we consider his relatively privileged upbringing and education:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin-Manuel_Miranda#Early_life
He has long been connected to the Jews:
And as has now become common, the Jews have sought to see themselves in the blockbuster hit play:
https://www.kveller.com/13-jewish-facts-about-hamilton-that-will-make-you-smile/
The often-unhinged radical writer Ishmael Reed has gone after Miranda and his musical in no uncertain terms, again and again:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/15/hamilton-and-the-negro-whisperers-mirandas-consumer-fraud/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/12/counterpunch-on-stage-the-haunting-of-lin-manuel-miranda/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/07/13/lin-manuel-mirandas-perry-mason-moment/
The slickly-choregraphed “L’Chaim” wedding video reminded me of what the radical group JFREJ did with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who actually claims to have Sephardic ancestry:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/XpXkpgpZCNo/m/Uf4K2tKjCAAJ
Even more to the point, it reminded me of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ affinity for Barbara Tuchman and her Zionist-inflected histories:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-by-the-book.html
It is where Zionist racism and Black Separatism come together:
We can see it in Liel Leibovitz paean to Jordan Peele’s “Get Out”:
https://groups.google.com/g/davidshasha/c/IF6-vLJ1dvg/m/vx56NcU-BwAJ
American Jews in the 1960s were struggling to process where they had come from and where they were going, and used “Fiddler” as a means to identify their concerns and anxieties in the collective climb up the bourgeois ladder. It was all about trying to figure out what life in Suburbia meant, and how the “Old Country” functioned in the new existential taxonomy.
In that context the radical ideas about Jewish culture presented by a very different type of Jew like Aleichem were not much to the point. The idea was to luxuriate in a hit Broadway production with all its glitzy trappings, which had the additional advantage of doubling as a guilt-washing trip to a past that was more imagined than real.
But these days the problematics of the American Jewish community are very different.
So, “Fiddler: Miracle of Miracles” sets out to highlight the 1960s Civil Rights and Anti-War connections, and place a great deal of emphasis on the very tortured Jewish soul of Jerome Robbins:
https://www.jewishlives.org/books/jeromerobbins
Robbins was a cantankerous genius who had issues with his Homosexuality, which inexorably led him into a McCarthyite corner:
http://todayinclh.com/?event=dancer-jerome-robbins-names-names-before-huac
It caused great tension with “Fiddler” star Zero Mostel, who was a blacklisted actor and uncooperative HUAC witness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Mostel#Blacklist_years_and_HUAC_testimony
The Gay issue sort of came full circle when Harvey Fierstein played Tevye in a revival back in 2005:
The documentary prominently references Tevye and Golde’s “abundant” sex life, and highlights the Feminist aspect of the daughters; themes that were not very likely uppermost in the minds of the show’s original audience.
Perhaps even more intriguing are the sporadic views of the 2019 Yiddish revival, which effectively reverses the original linguistic and conceptual trajectory of the play:
Though the documentary neglects to recount how the reactionary religious values of the Shtetl, parodied by the secularist Aleichem, have been reconstructed in the contemporary Haredi communities in America and Israel:
https://apnews.com/article/c8299a53c284445494c0a25e9ccd80f6
While Yiddish has found new life at the margins of American Jewish life with institutions like Aaron Lansky’s Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts; the stridently ethnocentric elitism of Tikvah Tablet’s Rokhl Kafrissen; and The Forward’s aggressive resurrection of a Yiddish edition in its on-line platform, the Haredi revolution seeks to return the language to its Medieval, pre-Modern roots:
Complaints that schools like Eisen’s run by New York’s strictly observant Hasidic Jews barely teach English, math, science or social studies have fueled a movement to demand stricter oversight by state and local educational authorities. Critics plan to file a lawsuit on Monday in federal court, seeking to stop the state from enforcing legislation that was intended to shield the schools, called yeshivas, from some government oversight.
The Haredi revolution presents us with an inversion of “Fiddler” values and a firm rejection of Aleichem’s Yiddish Modernism:
For boys in the Hasidic yeshiva system, the emphasis is on studying religious texts. Classes are taught in Yiddish, the language spoken in most Hasidic homes. Secular subjects are relegated to the end of the long school day, when the boys are restless and inattentive, critics say.
Finally, the documentary makes a big deal over the many international productions of “Fiddler,” most notably in Japan:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/a-fiddler-in-tokyo
And in the age of Black Lives Matter, we see the controversial production in a Brownsville junior high school during the famous Teachers’ Strike of 1969, in the midst of acrimonious tensions between Blacks and Jews:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/tracing-tevyes-cultural-footprint/
At the same time that the Jewish community is struggling with its own Whiteness and toxic racism, “Fiddler” comes to the rescue by becoming a form of Identity Politics that can also serve the cause of cultural diversity and Liberal values.
Problem solved!
But as I was watching the documentary, I could not stop thinking of Topol’s Sallah Shabbati and of the far richer thematic and historical understanding of Sholem Aleichem and his brash Yiddish Modernism.
In the final assessment, the cultural inflections of “Fiddler” continue to empower Ashkenazi Judaism, as it stands over and above the purported “primitive barbarity” of the Arab Jewish heritage. Zionism has become the primary filter through which we understand contemporary Jewish identity. It is how White Jewish Supremacy works.
So, rather than affirm the documentary’s attempt to turn Ashkenazi Jewish ethnocentrism into a diverse multiculturalism, all I could see was a desperate maneuver to duplicitously deflect from the current Jewish racism and its depredation of Sephardim, Palestinians, and other non-European ethnic groups that are inconvenient to the cause of White Jewish Supremacy.
In the end, “Fiddler on the Roof” is a depleted version of a very complex culture and a painful history, which critically serves to put into question Zionist triumphalism and the arrogance of American Jews. It continues to serve as a distorting mirror that does not own up to the internal contradictions of those Jews, whose sense of ethnocentrism marks a form of cultural elitism mired in a reductive understanding of the past and a deceptive sense of the present.
David Shasha