The newest incarnation of Fiddler on the Roof, despite being the fifth Broadway revival to date, manages to do something fresh with its classic material, writes Terry Teachout. Yet, although something is gained in this new version, something is also lost:

[In the opening scene], as everyone starts speaking in accents indistinguishable from those you might hear on a present-day New York street corner, you get [what the director is trying to accomplish]: this is an Our Town-like Fiddler on the Roof. It’s also the most American-sounding Fiddler I’ve ever seen, and that’s the point: it is as if we are watching the Americanized descendants of the Jews of Anatevka retell the tales their great-grandparents told about shtetl life in 19th-century Russia.

This directorial twist goes a long way toward neutralizing the underlying flaw of Fiddler, which is that it takes a sentimentally optimistic view of the tragic dilemma of assimilation, [a view] that is antithetical to the biting honesty of the short stories by Sholem Aleichem on which Fiddler is based. . . .

But as the evening progressed, I realized, very much to my surprise, that I wasn’t feeling the intense emotions that by all rights ought to be stirred up by Fiddler. It is, after all, a musical about deadly serious matters, starting with the bloody pogrom that breaks up the wedding of Tevye’s daughter and ending with the forced emigration of every Jew in Anatevka. Such things ought to make us weep—and in this production, they don’t.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.