The Fiddler And The Self-Hating Jew
“Right at the moment when I felt the least aligned with Judaism, I was cast in the most Jewish musical in existence.”
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
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Tevye the Dairyman’s Seventh Daughter
i. Tevye Comes to Brooklyn My dad and I read Sholem Aleichem when I’m young. He has a copy of Tevye the Dairyman and the Railroad Stories, but we stick to Tevye. We sit on the couch and he reads out loud to me. I grow up on Aleichem, not Fiddler on the Roof; my…
The Myth of the Cultural Jew
In high school, my friends and I dubbed our childhood neighborhood “The Shtetl.” Though we didn’t boast Yiddish names or a pushy matchmaker, like in the shtetls our grandparents grew up in, our shtetl, with its disproportionately high concentration of Jews, nevertheless rivaled its prior European counterparts in its sense of community and strong commitment…
Tevye at Temple Sinai: Past as Prologue in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’
Recently, I participated in one of our people’s most sacred customs: I went to see Fiddler on the Roof. I was psyched. Fiddler has been a part of my life from time immemorial (meaning, I literally cannot remember a time when I did not know it nearly word for word). I’ve seen the movie countless…
Romancing the Sephardi
There’s been a bit of news about Sephardim lately. Although the attempt began a few years ago, the Spanish government recently announced a more concerned effort at paving the way for Sephardim – ancestors of those Jews expelled in the Inquisition of the 15th century – to acquire Spanish citizenship. The ways of determining who…
Jews & musical theater: 2 great tastes that taste great together! [Seriously Stereotyped]
It’s official: “Funny Girl,” the musical semi-biography based on the life of Fanny Brice, will not be coming to Broadway anytime soon. According to Dave Itzkoff of The New York Times, the production is having “economic difficulties.” News of this tragedy made several excited yentas planning their mid-winter Broadway trip plotz. Thousands of gay Jewish…