feature
How I
the Late
Actor Topol
f you were born anytime before, say, 1975, you might
remember Israel not as a source of angst and tension
among American Jews but as a cause for celebration. In
the 1960s and ’70s, most Jews embraced as gospel the heroic
version of Israel’s founding depicted in Leon Uris’ 1958 novel
“Exodus” and the 1960 movie version. The 1961 Broadway
musical “Milk and Honey,” about American tourists set loose
in Israel, ran for over 500 performances. And that was before
Israel’s lightning victory in the Six-Day War turned even
fence-sitting suburban Jews into passionate Zionists.

Turned Tevye
Into a
Zionist Andrew Silow-Carroll | JTA
18 MARCH 16, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
That was the mood when the fi lm ver-
sion of “Fiddler on the Roof” came out
in 1971. The musical had already been
a smash hit on Broadway, riding a wave
of nostalgia by Jewish audiences and
an embrace of ethnic particularism by
the mainstream. The part of Tevye, the
put-upon patriarch of a Jewish family
in a “small village in Russia,” was orig-
inated on Broadway by Zero Mostel,
a Brooklyn-born actor who grew up in
a Yiddish-speaking home. Ashkenazi
American Jews tended to think of
“Fiddler” as family history — what Alisa
Solomon, author of the 2013 book
“Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History
of Fiddler on the Roof,” describes as the
“Jewish American origin story.”
But Mostel didn’t star in the fi lm, which
landed in theaters while the afterglow of
Israel’s victory in its second major war of
survival had yet to fade. Famously — or
notoriously — the part went to Chaim
Topol, a young Israeli actor unknown
outside of Israel except for his turns in
the London productions of “Fiddler.”
With an Israeli in the lead, a musical
about the perils and dilemmas of
Diaspora became a fi lm about Zionism.

When Topol played Tevye in London,
Solomon writes,“‘Fiddler’ became a site
for celebration, drawing Jews as well
as gentiles to the theater — some for
repeat viewings — to bask in Jewish
perseverance and to pay homage to
Jewish survival. The show didn’t change,
but the atmosphere around it did.”
Topol died last week at 87, still best
known as Tevye, and his death reminded
me of the ways “Fiddler” is — and isn’t
— Zionist. When Tevye and his fellow
villagers are forced out of Anatevke
by the czarist police, they head for
New York, Chicago and Krakow. Only
Yente, the matchmaker, declares that
she is going to the “Holy Land.” Perchik,
the presumably socialist revolutionary
who marries one of Tevye’s daughters,
wants to transform Russian society and
doesn’t say a word about the political
Zionists who sought to create a workers’
utopia in Palestine.

“There is nothing explicitly or even
to my mind implicitly Zionist about it,”
Solomon told me a few years back.

And yet, she said, “any story of Jewish
persecution becomes from a Zionist
perspective a Zionist story.”
When the Israeli Mission to the United
Nations hosted a performance of the
Broadway revival of “Fiddler” in 2016,
that was certainly the perspective of
then-Ambassador Dani Danon. Watching
the musical, he said, he couldn’t help
thinking, “What if they had a place to
go [and the Jews of Anatevke could]
live as a free people in their own land?
The whole play could have been quite
diff erent.”
Israelis always had a complicated
relationship with “Fiddler,” Solomon told
me. The fi rst Hebrew production was