Fiddler on the Roof
As a sentient, caring human being my life changed irreversibly on October 7th, although I didn’t realize it at the time. The genocide of the Palestinian people and the active participation of the Biden administration has colored my every waking moment. Never more so than when I attended the local high school production of Fiddler on the Roof. I couldn’t stop thinking of the modern parallels throughout the whole performance. Now I know that the decision to perform this play was made well before the tragedy of October 7th but the coincidence was overwhelming to me.
For anyone not familiar with the play, it is based on the stories of Sholom Aleichem, a Russian Jew born in the Ukraine and he wrote stories about village life and Jewish customs. The story of Fiddler takes place in 1905 in a small Jewish village of czarist Russia. The major conflict is between traditional customs and attitudes and the idea of modern progress. Tevye the main character and father of five daughters feels helpless as the traditional control of his family is taken from him by new attitudes of modernity. As many people have said the only constant in life is change and that fact makes Tevye remark that life is precarious, like “a fiddler on the roof.”
The antisemitism the Jews suffered at the hands of the Russian majority is also a major theme and that’s where the modern parallels took hold of my mind. The play ends with the Jews being expelled from their beloved village of Anatevka. Several of the villagers talked about emigrating to the United States some talked of moving to other countries but the sadness at being forced to leave their home is touching.
The obvious similarity to more current history is the Nakba of the 1947-48 which forced 750,000 Palestinians from their homes in the towns and villages of Palestine. Many were forced to flee to other countries and the survivors were rounded up in smaller and smaller ghettoes in Gaza and the West Bank. The Jews of the Ukraine, much like the Palestinians mostly lived in small towns and villages and were forced to leave their homes. The Jews suffered greatly at the hands of the Russians and many emigrated west to other countries such as Poland where they settled only to be victims of the Nazis half a century later.
One of the things that has always puzzled me about the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is that how a people who suffered so much could in such a short period of time transform themselves from the victims of persecution to the perpetrators. The treatment of the Jews in Russia and the rest of Europe has been almost exactly duplicated by the Zionists who founded the state of Israel and their descendants.
The genocide of the Palestinians did not begin on October 7th. It began with the Nakba of 1948 and has continued unabated during the ensuing decades. The history of the state of Israel is a never-ending series of atrocities against the Palestinian people. 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021. Over the years Israel has murdered tens of thousands of Palestinians. As Jewish holocaust survivor Gabor Mate has pointed out repeatedly, if you “take the worst thing you can say about Hamas, multiply it by 1,000 times and it still not meet the Israeli repression, killing and dispossession of the Palestinians.”
The trauma of the Holocaust has been passed along the generations of Jews in Israel and transformed part of Israeli society into rabid mass of genocide cheerleaders. The dissenters are attacked and ostracized by portions of Israeli society. It is important for us to remember as we protest the ongoing genocide that the state of Israel does not represent all of Judaism. There are Jews in Israel and all over the world who deplore what is happening to the Palestinians and are vocal in their opposition to genocide. If we make the mistake and believe that Israel represents all of Judaism we cross the line from legitimate horror at man’s inhumanity to man into the truly abhorrent ideology of antisemitism.
It's hard to imagine but in a way the Israelis are victims too, but not of Hamas or any other Palestinians. They are victims of their own collective psyche. The victims of a trauma so great it has turned generations of its descendants into true monsters but we must not let that bit of sympathy turn us away from truth. Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza for decades and October 7th was used as a pretense to speed up the process. Any objective reading of the history of Palestine since the 1940’s would show that the Zionist entity has always been the aggressor and that the crimes of Israel far outweigh the crimes of Hamas, the PLO, the fedayeen and any other Palestinian resistance groups COMBINED!
I was a freshman in high school the first time I watched a performance of Fiddler on the Roof at a place called the City Line Dinner Theater. To me it was a magical experience that started my lifelong love of theater. The political undertones of the play didn’t enter my consciousness at the time. My idea of the Israel Palestine conflict was shaped by the writings of Leon Uris who wrote fictional accounts of the Warsaw ghetto and the founding of the state of Israel. His writing portrayed the Palestinians as cardboard caricatures with villainous intent and the Zionists as plucky survivors of persecution of the Nazis and heroic founders of a new nation. I was just enthralled by the performance. Public high school in the early eighties encouraged participation in the arts by organizing and providing free and tickets to cultural events and like my love of literature theater became a refuge from a rough childhood and Fiddler was one of my first loves. It’s a small price to pay considering the enormous suffering of the Palestinians but I will never look at Fiddler on the Roof in the same way again. My education on Palestine which has taken place over the last ten to fifteen years has changed several beliefs that I have held for most of my life. They’ve come falling down like the proverbial fiddler off the roof.
Free Palestine-Free Palestine-Free Palestine