Theater: Getting Beyond Zero

Mostel is gone, but Fiddler on the Roof lives on in a strikingly reimagined Broadway revival

It has been a tough year for the Jews. Mel Gibson set off anti-Semitic smoke alarms with his film The Passion of the Christ. Judith Steinberg Dean let herself be trotted out before the voters just in time to see her husband's presidential campaign implode. And the first fully reconceived Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof since the 1964 original has been faulted for ethnic blandness. Writing in the Los Angeles Times before the show opened, author Thane Rosenbaum (The Golems of Gotham) criticized the show for "an absence of Jewish soul."

Well, it's true that Broadway's newest Tevye, Alfred...

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