October 30, 2022

There is no small amount of irony in Tom Stoppard’s latest play, “Leopoldstadt,” dazzling audiences on Broadway at the same time when America’s streets are convulsing in antisemitic mayhem.

After all, Stoppard, one of the world’s finest dramatists, has for the entirety of his career been a closeted Jew. And not just any Jew, but one of the fortunate ones who, as a small boy, actually survived the Holocaust.

Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia as Tomáš Sträussler. His family managed to escape the encircling Nazis, although his father was eventually killed. His mother would marry a British, non-Jewish military officer in India who brought his new family to England. That’s when Tomáš became Tom and adopted his step-father’s surname.

Stoppard mastered the language of his new country, wrote widely and wittily about weighty themes in a career that landed him on the shortlist of England’s theatrical royalty. He would eventually be knighted. Not bad for someone whose childhood was darkened by the monstrous events that resulted in the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry.

“Leopoldstadt” is a fictional account of what happened to Stoppard’s entire Jewish family. Most were killed in death camps.

After a long and distinguished career writing award-winning plays and screenplays, none of which revealed any tribal connection to the ancient Hebrews, Stoppard arrived at a point where he would train his considerable dramatic gifts in exploring the buried story that, psychologically, might have shaped him most. All that British schooling and literary fame had left something very precious unsaid and undone.

And it arrives at a propitious moment on America’s finest stage. “Leopoldstadt” should be required viewing for Kanye West and Kyrie Irving and the woke mobs who had never heard of Kristallnacht and who believe that Jews, throughout the ages, have led charmed, white-privileged lives. Their ignorance, or plain antisemitism, is astounding. Jews involved in the slave trade? When did they have time for that, folded in between the expulsions, Inquisitions, pogroms and genocide?

With this new wave of antisemitism becoming so fashionably mainstream and unapologetically visible, far too many have forgotten that Jews were always first among equals in deserving the special protection of minority status. “Leopoldstadt” is an astonishing tutorial on how deceptive perceived privilege can be.

The play unfolds over half a century. The Jewish family at the center of the story plunges from lavishly wealthy, cultured, cosmopolitan Jews to a decimated family tree stump. All that’s left are three scattered cousins and fractured memories.

Stoppard sets the play in Vienna so as to allow the adults in the opening scene to boast how much influence Jews have had on Austrian culture, and how successfully Jews have assimilated and have been embraced by Austrian society. Indeed, the curtain opens to a massive Christmas tree that upstages the large cast of Jewish parents and children.

Twice characters say: “We Jews worship culture.” They see it as an inoculant. Obviously they have never heard of the cancellation culture of these days.

Another thematic reason for Austria as set piece is that a fellow Austrian Jew, Theodor Herzl, had just written a book about how the Jews of Europe should leave and start their own country. What a laughable idea, they think. Another Jew from Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud, is introducing a new field of medicine—one of the mind—once more demonstrating to the world the intellectual agility of the Jewish people. What would Austrian society do without its Jews? Apparently, the Mayor of Vienna is a major Jew-hater, but, honestly, what does that have to do with them?

Later in the play one of those same characters confesses, “All that culture did not save us from barbarism.”

“Leopoldstadt” is both a metaphor and object lesson for Jews who deceive themselves into believing that once they graduate from the lowly streets of ghettos, they will be forever welcome in high society.

“Leopoldstadt” is both a metaphor and object lesson for Jews who deceive themselves into believing that once they graduate from the lowly streets of ghettos, they will be forever welcome in high society.

For the poignant reminder of this misperception, Stoppard should be congratulated yet again. After all, he is not alone among Jewish-British playwrights who Anglicized their names and strategically left any trace of their secret identities out of their dramas. Toward the end of “Leopoldstadt,” the character who represents Stoppard himself as a young writer remarks on his Jewishness as nothing more than “an ironic fact.”

There are many such writers in England. British stages have hosted scores of plays by Jewish dramatists who never came close to making such an admission: Harold Pinter (in the first draft the “The Homecoming,” the family was Jewish), Peter Shaffer, Alfred Sutro, Arnold Wesker, Ronald Harwood (“Taking Sides,” an exception), Peter Barnes and Patrick Marber (who directed “Leopoldstadt,” and has written one Jewish play entitled, “Howard Katz.”) Together they comprise a canon of Jew-less storytelling.

The British are known for having a stiff upper lip. British Jews, apparently, go one step farther: keeping their entire mouths shut. Perhaps it’s because Jews were officially expelled from England in the 13th century, which left a legacy of provisional residency—gentlemanly and ladylike manners always expected, Queen and country come first, bags are always packed, just in case.

It was the rare British Jew for whom Jewishness was part of the mystique. Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli converted to Christianity. Mendoza the Jew, who boxed in the late-18th century, was perhaps the first professional athlete to market his name—and nickname. Harold Abrahams, the world’s fastest man during the 1924 Olympic Games, despite his Cambridge pedigree, never actually outran the prejudice that drove him.

Until now, in what may become his last play, Stoppard never dwelled on his past. The scope of his loss and degree of Jewish ties took decades to materialize as art. All along the tragedy of his parents and many uncles, aunts and cousins was rich with dramatic possibility and catharsis. Even England could not contain such emotion.

And it has arrived at the right time—for Stoppard, and for Jews living in a world eerily reminiscent of those foreboding days when actual Leopoldstadts provided no shelter from dark clouds and hard rain.

Despite his longtime association with Shakespeare (his first play was a retelling of “Hamlet”; his screenplay for “Shakespeare in Love” received an Oscar), Stoppard’s backstory, and the dissolution of his family, proved to be the real thing.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”

Very little media attention has been given to the fact that President Biden brought the U.S. back to the U.N. Human Rights Council (HRC), arguably the most antisemitic institution on the planet. Its latest outrage is a “Commission of Inquiry” (COI) that is so blatantly antisemitic it can best be described as a form of Inquisition in its lies and shameless mockery of human rights.

For most of the UN’s existence, one could be excused for forgetting that it emerged in 1945, out of the ashes of the Holocaust. Indeed, over the decades various Russian-Arab collusions have systematically and sadistically targeted the world’s only Jewish state, from the “Zionism is racism” calumny to the disproportionate condemnations. But now we’ve reached a new low.

Last Thursday, the COI announced it will investigate the allegation that Israel is an “apartheid state.” The ongoing investigation was set up by the HRC following last year’s 11-day battle between Israel and Gaza terrorists. To no one’s surprise, it has focused nearly exclusively on Israel. The COI’s announcement follows the release of its second report, which called on the UN Security Council to end Israel’s “permanent occupation” and urged UN member states to prosecute Israeli officials.

Navi Pillay, a former UN human rights chief who chairs the COI, called apartheid “a manifestation of the occupation.” “We’re focusing on the root cause which is the occupation and part of it lies in apartheid,” Pillay said. “That’s the beauty of this open-ended mandate, it gives us the scope.”

Beauty is not a word that typically comes to mind when thinking about the UN. Nor is truth or justice.

Let’s start with the so-called “Human Rights” Council, whose members include China, Libya, Somalia, and Sudan. Where, one wonders, is Iran and North Korea?

And then we have the three members of the COI. The commissioners “were chosen precisely because they abhor the Jewish State,” said Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan at a press conference held by StandWithUs Thursday morning. “Each of them had declared Israel guilty of the very crimes they were charged with investigating—before they began,” echoed Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.

UN Watch has documented multiple instances of Pillay accusing Israel of apartheid; some as recently as 2020.She’s also used the phrase “the extremist Israel lobby” and supports the BDS movement. In July, Commission member Miloon Kothari made comments about the undue influence of a so-called “Jewish lobby” on the media. He has also questioned why Israel was in the UN.  In June, Member Chris Sidoti from Australia dismissed all Jewish victims with the retort: “Accusations of anti-Semitism are thrown around like rice at a wedding.”

Then there’s the “inquiry” itself. The COI called for submissions on “systematic discrimination and repression” and “underlying root causes,” but then sent “the submissions that challenged the prearranged endgame directly to the trash,” said Bayefksy.

In an “unprecedented response in the history of the UN human rights system,” Bayefsky said, the Touro Institute and a group of eminent research centers submitted more than 5 million unique submissions of dissent. “And yet Pillay openly told the press in June she hadn’t seen them and dismissively labeled them as ‘all pro-Israel.’  In today’s report, there are dozens of references to non-UN organizations – every one of them trash-talks Israel. Not one participating so-called ‘pro-Israel’ NGO sees the light of day.”

The 28-page report is “sprinkled with a series of highlighted quotations from Palestinians in Hebron,” writes Bayefsky. “One contains a blood libel about Jews arriving in Palestinian homes in the middle of the night and threatening to burn the human beings inside. Another claims that Jews are child molesters intent on feeling the breasts of Palestinian girls.”

As Carly Gammill, director of the SWU Center for Combating Antisemitism, put it: “Israel is even somehow responsible for the violence that Palestinian men choose to perpetrate against Palestinian women. Do Navi Pillay and her fellow commissioners also blame the honor killings and second-class citizenship of Palestinian women on Israelis? And why stop there? By the Commission’s logic, it would also need to blame Israel for these same tragic conditions in other Middle East countries, like Saudi Arabia and Iran.”

The COI has called for Israel to immediately withdraw from the West Bank, while making no demands of the Palestinians. Indeed, notably absent from the report are any mention of Hamas, terror rockets, or terrorism. “The inquisitors advocate that Israelis be hunted down, prosecuted, and jailed for crimes against humanity,” writes Bayefsky. “They couldn’t name a single Palestinian crime worth prosecuting.”

“The shameless prejudice exhibited in the report is shocking,” she adds, “even by U.N. standards. The Summary brazenly announces that it is only about ‘the human rights implications for Palestinians.’” Apparently, Jews, according to the HRC, aren’t worthy of human rights.

President Trump withdrew from the HRC in 2018, largely due to its systemic discrimination against Israel. Biden brought the U.S. back last year, continuing to provide significant funding for the UN and the HRC. In June, Senators Tim Scott (R-SC) and Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced the Commission of Inquiry Elimination Act to withhold U.S. funding for the HRC because of its “blatant bias against Israel.” Funding would be withheld until the Secretary of State certifies that the HRC has abolished its COI.

President Biden’s words of support for Israel are appreciated but are not enough. It’s time for the president to put his money where his mouth is and support a bipartisan initiative that establishes consequences for the most antisemitic institution on the planet. Anyone who believes in justice must urge him to do so.

“Today, it’s no longer politically correct to blame Jews for all the world’s problems, so antisemites adapt,” said Ambassador Erdan. “Rather than burning Jews at the stake, antisemites burn the Jewish state at the stake. This is exactly what [the UN] constantly does.”

Mister President, it’s your time to act and show the world that this Inquisition against Jews will not stand.

Karen Lehrman Bloch is editor in chief of White Rose Magazine.