Background.

Fiddler on the Roof is based on Tevye (or Tevye the Dairyman) and his Daughters, a
series of stories by Sholem Aleichem that he wrote in Yiddish between 1894 and 1914 about Jewish
life in a village in the Pale of Settlement of Imperial Russia at the turn of the 20th century. (wiki)

The Fiddler on the Roof, the indomitable spirit of the Jewish people will live on in all of them. (guide
to musical theatre)

At the same time a more specific meaning, sometimes indicated by the earlier Yiddish yente,
embodies Jewish female caricature in popular media stereotypes. It is this misogynistic depiction
which repels many Jewish-American women consider the term derogatory and dismissive. The nosy
nag represents a stereotype at the intersections of gender and ethnicity specific to Jewish women
yet applicable to a broader range of people deemed inappropriately expressive or intrusive: “Don’t
be such a yenta!” Even in its extended application the Yiddish epithet still singles out Jewish
womanhood as the bad object for a broader social discipline. (yenta: the jewish)

These dreams, nurtured against Yente’s interventions, drive the musical’s story in an escalating series
of dramatic rebellions towards increasingly independent choices (yenta)

(yenta)

Fiddler’s two adult female characters, Golde and Yente, represent dual faces of Yiddish womanhood.
Both women simultaneously incorporate and displace postwar stereotypes of Jewish-American
women into the fictive space of the early twentieth century shtetl. Golde functions as a centralized
matriarch anchoring and supporting the protagonist and their family, as well as the production’s
narrative arc which was cobbled together from fragmental fiction. She orders around her family and
hen pecks her husband while keeping warm the hearth at the center of Fiddler’s domestic space.
Yente weaves between the peripheries, a liminal social figure nonetheless essential to the traditional
shtetl structure. She puts ideas in Golde’s head, circulating among households as an embodied
medium of village communications. (yenta)

YENTA (P 11-16)

But Tevye's daughters are determined to follow their own hearts, even if it means defying tradition. A
furtive feminism emerges from their desires to arrange their own matches. Each woman's struggle
with her love is emblematic of issues facing the larger community: maintaining tradition,
secularization and assimilation. (newspaper p1)

As rehearsal exercises, the director Jerome Robbins had members of the cast improvise scenes of
racial discrimination in the American South. And by sticking it to the patriarchy, Tevye's daughters
were in step with the second-wave feminism that was just beginning to hit its stride. (the spectator)
Beyond its continuing vibrant life in the theater, Fiddler, like no other musical before or since, has
seeped into the culture more widely, functioning in sometimes contradictory ways, which makes
sense, since the show’s essential gesture is dialectical: it looks backward and forward, favors both
community and individual needs, honors the particular and the universal, struggles between stasis
and change, bewails and celebrates. Tevye, the milkman hero, seems to be constantly caught in these
opposing forces and, before our eyes, weighs the arguments of every dilemma — on the one hand,
on the other hand ... (nyt Jewishness)

the Jewish American community at the time was concerned with the civil rights movement, the
Holocaust, the various wars of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, and the women’s rights movement
(Settje). Many American Jews supported activism in general during this decade, especially expressing
solidarity with groups fighting racial prejudice. On the other hand, Staub points out, they questioned
if American culture was diluting their traditional values, especially as the Soviet Union and the Six-
Day War threatened traditional Jewish communities abroad while they sat idly by (Settje, David.
“Contemplating, Asserting, Losing, and Changing Jewish Identity in the 1960s.” Rev. of The Jewish
1960s: An American Sourcebook, by Michael E. Staub. H-Net Online 2006: n. pag. Web.)

1905

(Name, YEAR: page)