Today’s education news tends to focus on polarizing book bans and contested curriculums. Perhaps that’s why Brattleboro Union High School band director Steve Rice was surprised by what sparked when he announced this year’s student musical would be the seemingly crowd-pleasing “Fiddler on the Roof.”
Rice saw the curtain-raising song, “Tradition,” as a nod to the school’s half-century of annual productions. Its plot about an early 1900s Jewish community embattled by conflict and change mirrors current headlines about antisemitism and Russian aggression. And its presentation just before the teacher’s coming retirement would bookend a 35-year career that began with the same show.
Students, however, read the script’s first words and related.
“A fiddler on the roof?” the lead character says. “Sounds crazy, no?”
In a state where Jews account for only 1.2% of the population, students had their own question: Is tackling a script inspired by century-old Yiddish stories “cultural appropriation”?
Enter the rabbis from the local Chabad Jewish Center and Brattleboro Area Jewish Community. Accepting a school invitation, they’ve helped transform the inquiries into a teachable moment just in time for the musical’s debut this week.
“If people don’t know much about a different culture, they can be afraid of it,” Chabad Rabbi Avrohom Raskin said in an interview. “We spoke a lot about the idea that the play could be a catalyst to open up a conversation.”
Rice, who led the school band at President Barack Obama’s 2009 inaugural parade, already faced a host of other challenges when planning for the musical. The teacher has watched student participation in extracurriculars drop over the decades, with those who audition favoring current scores like “Hamilton” over show tunes from their grandparents’ past.
“Fiddler on the Roof” opened in 1964, when the cast album — featuring such classics as “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” and “Sunrise, Sunset” — could be heard only on vinyl and AM radio.
Yet settle in for the story of a turn-of-the-20th-century Jewish father trying to maintain his family in changing times and you see why the piece remains “among the best known, most popular and most staged shows,” The New York Times wrote upon a recent Broadway revival.
“This is an example of a show,” Rice said, “that is right in the heart of the musical theater canon and yet still has relevance.”
That the action is set in a village near what is now the war-torn Ukrainian capital of Kyiv only adds to its pertinence. Even so, students questioned not only whether the production was cultural appropriation, but also if it would spur antisemitism and accurately depict religious rituals.
“People worried there was going to be misrepresentation,” ninth-grader Lila Armour-Jones said.
And so English teacher Rebekah Kersten, who’s directing the 35-member cast and crew as Rice conducts the 15-piece orchestra, reached out to local Jewish leaders.
“I knew I would need their support to make sure we portrayed characters, customs, traditions and ceremonies as accurately as possible,” Kersten wrote in a resulting newspaper column.
The rabbis reassured students the production wasn’t appropriation. One pointed to the 2019 documentary “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles,” which captures past and present staging by everyone from Black and Puerto Rican students in Brooklyn to an all-Asian cast in Tokyo.
The Jewish Community then welcomed students to attend a Shabbat (Sabbath) service. There, everyone hummed religious melodies and “Fiddler on the Roof” songs as they ceremonially washed hands before blessing and sharing challah bread.
After, Rabbi Amita Jarmon offered a cast member the chance to hold a Torah scroll handwritten with the five books of Moses. The teenager, sensing the text’s figurative and literal weight, voiced reservations — especially after learning anyone who drops it must fast for days.
That’s when everyone circled to cradle the scroll together.
(And the rabbi crouched underneath, just in case.)
“I love experiencing the Torah and Judaism through the eyes of people who know little or nothing about it and who are comfortable with their beginners’ minds,” Jarmon went on to write in her weblog. “It’s human nature to enjoy sharing what we love with interested people who have not been exposed to that ‘something’ before.”
That’s why teachers do what they do, Rice said. For Brattleboro’s 2016 production of the rock opera “Rent,” educators invited social workers to explain the show’s depiction of the 1980s dawning of AIDS — a disease the young cast didn’t understand was once a death sentence rather than a treatable condition.
This year’s community outreach, the school knows, is itself a tradition.
Vermont may have a small percentage of Jews, but it boasts more than 20 rabbi- and lay-led groups in a dozen locations, according to Jewish Communities of Vermont.
The faith boasts many well-known Vermonters, including ice cream icons Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, U.S. Rep. Becca Balint, former governors Madeleine Kunin and Peter Shumlin, Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman and Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger.
While most of the Brattleboro cast were raised in other religions, Armour-Jones is one of three Jewish students acting as a peasant milkman’s eldest daughters. She and fellow ninth-graders Isabella May and Abby Sharff appreciate the chance to depict the life of a spirited family.
“It’s such an amazing, positive way to show Jewish culture,” May said.
The Jewish Community agrees. It’s advertising a Shabbat service on Saturday, followed by a catered lunch of borscht, kugel and knishes and a crosstown pilgrimage to the musical’s matinee.
“Fiddler on the Roof” is set for Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m. and Saturday at 2 p.m. at the Brattleboro Union High School auditorium, with $10 tickets ($6 for seniors) sold at the door.
Waiting in the wings, students are ready to share what they’ve learned.
“There’s a line between appropriation and appreciation,” Sharff said. “This experience has brought up a lot of conversation. It’s an important story to be told.”