Illustration by DenBerg
Editor’s note: This page has been removed from our website because it did not meet our editorial standards. Published on Sept. 22, 2023, the 50th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Fiddler on the Roof, it was a graphic-novel style piece combining drawings of many of the people involved in that production with facts, descriptions and quotations from them that were unattributed.
We discovered after publication that virtually all of the written material had previously appeared in other places. The main sources appear to have been this article in the Los Angeles Times, which Barbara Isenberg adapted from her 2013 book, Tradition!: The Highly Improbable, Ultimately Triumphant Broadway-to-Hollywood Story of Fiddler on the Roof, The World’s Most Beloved Musical; Alisa Solomon’s book Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof, also from 2014; and the 2020 PBS documentary Miracle of Miracles.
Following journalistic best practices, the Forward has a policy not to remove pages from our website. But we made an exception in this case because the nature of the piece and the volume of the uncredited material made it impossible to properly correct the record with integrity. We regret having published it.
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