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



opinion
Holocaust Remembrance and
Inexcusable Hyperbole
Ruthie Blum
D uring his Holocaust Remembrance Day speech
on April 17 at Yad Vashem, Israeli President
Isaac Herzog admonished the public never
to invoke the genocide of the Jews in any context
other than the Shoah itself. This was a not-so-veiled
reference to a practice that’s become frighteningly
commonplace in the politically polarized country.

“The Nazi abomination is an unprecedented evil,
unique by any measure,” he said. “We must remember,
repeat and emphasize again and again: These, and only
these, are Nazis. This, and only this, is the Holocaust.

Even when we are in the midst of fierce disagreements
on our destiny, calling, faith and values, we must be
careful about and guard against making any compari-
son, any analogy, to the Holocaust and the Nazis.”
He went on to remind the citizens of Israel that
the “Nazi monster” didn’t distinguish between one
member of the tribe or another, regardless of their
“views, beliefs or lifestyles.” Indeed, he stressed, such
“nuances” were utterly meaningless to those who set
out to annihilate every last Jew.

“For them,” he pointed out, “we were one people,
scattered and separated among all the nations, with
one sentence: death. And our victory over them, as well,
which takes place every day, is a victory of one people.”
He concluded: “We are currently celebrating 75 years
of Israeli independence — 75 years of victory during
which the Jewish and democratic state of Israel and
its [proud] society are standing up and declaring to the
Can’t Forget
Continued from page 13
being spoken. I eyeballed Germans on the street and
asked myself: How old are they? Did they commit heinous
crimes against my family and my people?
By 2018, when I dedicated a Stolpersteine in my
maternal grandmother’s memory, my judgmental
attitudes and harsh feelings had softened. Maybe I
realized that 75 years later, the ordinary citizen on the
street could not be held responsible for the carnage of
the Holocaust. Also, working with non-Jewish German
volunteers in planning the ceremony showed me their
humanity, sensitivity and outright remorse for Nazism’s
impact on my family and their German state.

My visit in February shed further light on my
evolving relationship with Germany and Germans.

Today’s Germany is doing teshuva, or repentance,
Nazi monster and those who, even in this generation,
are following in its path: ‘You cannot defeat us, because
we are brothers and sisters; yes, siblings who know how
to argue and dispute, but never hate one another, are
never enemies.’ We are one people and we will remain
one people, united not only by a painful history but also
by a shared destiny and a hopeful future.”
It was an appropriate message with just the right
tone. As is the case with all such pleas, however, the
people who most needed to hear and heed it either
weren’t listening or didn’t think it applied to them.

Indeed, within minutes, Herzog’s social media feed
was filled with nasty remarks from both sides of the
spectrum. Supporters of the government accused him of
abetting the opposition to thwart judicial reforms.

Members of the protest movement were more vitriolic.

“I’m ashamed that you’re the president of my
country,” tweeted one respondent. “You have nothing
to say about the pure evil [Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu] that’s trying to destroy the country just to
get out of going to jail.”
Another, writing “Yair Golan was right,” posted an
article from 2016 about the then-deputy chief of staff
of the Israel Defense Forces, who took the opportunity
of Holocaust Remembrance Day to caution against the
country’s own “seeds of intolerance, violence, self-de-
struction and moral deterioration.”
Yet another argued, “Make no mistake; the compari-
son [of the current government] to the rise of the Third
Reich is absolutely spot on!”
So much for Herzog’s words about Jewish unity,
delivered at the World Holocaust Remembrance Center
in Jerusalem. Simultaneously, at a Tel Aviv synagogue
service marking the somber event, MK Boaz Bismuth
from Netanyahu’s Likud Party was heckled loudly as
he attempted to express a similar sentiment about
brotherhood. Shouting one of the key chants at anti-government
rallies (“shame, shame, shame”) and ordering him to
leave, many congregants wouldn’t let him speak. Some
attendees yelled at them to stop harassing their guest.

Faced with the altercation that was threatening to turn
physically violent, Bismuth exited the premises.

“When your daily job is to corrode the remains of
Israeli statehood, and then you appear at a Holocaust
Remembrance Day ceremony and pretend to repre-
sent something, don’t be surprised when you’re thrown
out on your butt,” tweeted Raanan Shaked, an editor at
the Hebrew daily Yedioth Ahronoth.

This type of hyperbole, along with the very compari-
sons and analogies that Herzog insisted rightly should
be taboo, is not only now the norm; its spewers refuse
to refrain from employing it even while the country
mourns the 6 million who didn’t live to see the birth of
the Jewish state and honors the survivors of the unfath-
omable atrocity.

It’s as inexcusable as any form of Holocaust denial.

Shame on any Israeli who engages in it. ■
by strengthening democracy, creating an inclusionary
society, responding resolutely to far-right extremism,
educating its young about the Holocaust, offering
sanctuary to Jews fleeing Russia and Ukraine and being
a true friend to the state of Israel.

My relationship became much more nuanced upon
learning that Germany was once home to five generations
of my family, as far back as 1760, in the small town of
Grobzig where Matthias Nathan Meyerstein was born.

On our visit to its mid-17th-century Jewish cemetery,
I gazed incredulously at the graves of Meyersteins. I
saw schutzbriefen, documents issued by the reigning
duke, that assured my ancestors protection, commercial
privileges and religious rights.

Before my retirement, I never knew that Grobzig or
Leipzig or other towns were in my family’s history. This
discovery led to one conclusion: Unquestionably, 1933
to 1945 was a tragic anomaly in human history and
especially Jewish history. However, I must also gratefully
acknowledge the Germany that sustained my family for
over 300 years, and Jewish communal life for 1,700 years.

Nazi Germany’s ill-treatment and intolerance of “the
other” still affects me today as I mourn my relatives’
death. On the other hand, I feel heartened by this
sentiment written by a non-Jewish German who funded
research about my family: “For me, as I am part of this
country and its history, it will be a never-ending task
to find ways to deal with this horrible past and most
importantly, never to forget,” she wrote.

Navigating this complex relationship with Germany
and Germans is intellectually and emotionally messy for
Jews. My engagement with “the other,” however, has
been profoundly satisfying. ■
Ruthie Blum is a Tel Aviv-based columnist and
commentator. She writes and lectures on Israeli
politics and culture, as well as on U.S.-Israel
relations. Rabbi Michael Meyerstein is a retired Conservative
rabbi and a former professional fundraiser.

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