opinion
Laura Yares
J ewish stories have had
top billing on Broadway
this season — and Jewish
audiences have flocked to the
theater. Audiences have lined up to see Tom Stoppard’s
“Leopoldstadt,” the multigenerational saga of a Jewish
family in Vienna, and the devastating consequences of
the Holocaust upon its ranks. They have packed the
house for “Parade,” a musical retelling of the infamous
antisemitic show trial and subsequent lynching of
Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915. And just off
Broadway, “The Wanderers” (which closed April 2)
invited us into the slowly disintegrating marriage of two
secular Jews born to mothers who dramatically left the
Satmar sect of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a show replete
with intergenerational trauma and a pervasive sense
of ennui.

None of these shows offers a particularly light-
hearted evening at the theater. So why have they
proven so popular? Critics have penned countless
reviews of the three plays, analyzing the quality of
the productions, the scripts, scores, performances of
principal actors, set and design. But for our new book
exploring what audiences learn about Judaism from
Jewish cultural arts, my colleague Sharon Avni and
I have been interviewing audience members after
seeing “Leopoldstadt,” “Parade” and “The Wanderers.”
We are interested in turning the spotlight away from the
stage and onto the seats: What do audiences make of
all this? What do they learn?
Take “Leopoldstadt,” for example, a drama so full of
characters that when it left London for its Broadway run
the production team added a family tree to the Playbill
so that theatergoers could follow along. “Leopoldstadt”
offers its audience a whistle-stop introduction to
modern European Jewish history. In somewhat pedan-
tic fashion, the family debates issues of the day that
include Zionism, art, philosophy, intermarriage and, in a
searing final scene, the memory of the Holocaust.

For some of the theatergoers that we interviewed,
“Leopoldstadt” was powerful precisely because it
packed so much Jewish history into its two-hour run
time. It offered a basic literacy course in European
Judaism, one they thought everyone needed to learn.

Others, however, thought that this primer of Jewish
history was really written for novice audiences —
perhaps non-Jews, or assimilated Jews with half-re-
membered Jewish heritage, like Stoppard himself. “I
14 APRIL 20, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
don’t know who this play is
for,” one interviewee told us.

“But it’s not me. I know all this
already.” Other interviewees thought
the power of “Leopoldstadt”
lay not in its history lessons,
but in its ability to use the
past to illuminate contem-
porary realities. I spoke at
length with a woman who had
been struggling with antisem-
itism at work. Some of her
colleagues had been sharing
social media posts filled with
lazy caricatures of Jews as
avaricious capitalists. Upon seeing “Leopoldstadt,”
she realized that these vile messages mirrored Nazi
rhetoric in the 1930s, convincing her that antisemitism
in contemporary America had reached just as danger-
ous a threshold as beheld European Jews on the eve
of the Shoah.

We heard similar sentiments about the prescience
of history to alert us to the specter of antisemitism
today from audiences who saw “Parade.” Recalling
a scene where the cast members wave Confederate
flags during the titular parade celebrating Confederate
Memorial Day, Jewish audiences recalled feeling
especially attuned to Jewish precarity when the theater
burst into applause at the end of the musical number.

“Why were we clapping Confederate flags?” one of our
interviewees said. “I’ve lived in the South and, as a Jew,
I know that when you see Confederate flags it is not a
safe space for us.”
“Parade” dramatizes the popular frenzy that
surrounded the trial of Leo Frank, a Yankee as well
as a Jew, who was scapegoated for the murder of a
young Southern girl. Jewish audience members that
we interviewed told us that the play powerfully illus-
trated how crowds could be manipulated into demon-
izing minorities, comparing the situation in early 20th
century Marietta to the alt-right of today, and the rise of
antisemitism in contemporary America.

What we ultimately discovered, however, was that
audience perceptions of the Jewish themes and
characters in these productions were as varied as
audiences themselves. Inevitably, they tell us more
about the individual than the performance. Yet the fact
that American Jews have flocked to these three shows
— a secular pilgrimage of sorts — also illustrates the
power and the peril of public Jewish storytelling. For
audience members at “Leopoldstadt” and “Parade,”
especially, attending these performances was not
merely an entertaining evening at the theater. It was a
form of witnessing. There was very little to be surprised
by in these plays, after all. The inevitable happens: The
Holocaust destroys Jewish life in Europe; Leo Frank
is convicted and lynched. Jewish audiences know to
expect this. They know there will be no happy ending.

In the secular cultural equivalent to saying Kaddish
for the dead, Jewish audiences perform their respect
to Jewish memory by showing up, and by paying
hundreds of dollars for the good seats.

The peril of these performances, however, is that
audiences learn little about antisemitism in reality. The
victims of the Nazis and the Southern Jews of Marietta
would tell us that they could never have predicted what
was to happen. Yet in “Parade” and “Leopoldstadt”
audiences are asked to grapple with the naivete of
characters who believe that everything will be all right,
even as audiences themselves know that it will not.

By learning Jewish history on Broadway, audiences
are paradoxically able to distance themselves from it,
simply by knowing too much.

In the final scene of “Leopoldstadt,” Leo, the charac-
ter loosely based on Stoppard himself, is berated by a
long-lost relative for his ignorance of his family’s story.

“You live as if without history,” the relative tells Leo. “As
if you throw no shadow behind you.” Audiences, at that
moment, are invited to pat themselves on the back for
coming to see the show, and for choosing to acknowl-
edge the shadows of their own Jewish histories. The
cold hard reality, however, is that a shadow can only
ever be a fuzzy outline of the truth. ■
Laura Yares is an assistant professor in the
Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State
University. ©Playbill Inc./JTA illustration by Mollie Suss
For Theatergoers at Broadway’s Spate of
Jewish Shows, Attendance a Form of Witness