An Old Film Through New Lenses

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While channel surfing the other night K and I came across "Fiddler on the Roof." As you may know, this movie is set in Ukraine in 1903-1906, when Ukraine was part of Imperial Russia. This is a particularly interesting time in world history, though mostly ignored by people in the United States. When I was a young man I did not watch "Fiddler on the Roof" because I thought it would be a boring movie with lots of singing and dancing and romance and guys fiddling on roofs. With all I have learned in the past several years, I watched it tonight through a very different set of lenses. I watched it with an understanding of the times that made the events of the movie much more poignant and meaningful than they might have been. K asked me if Jews were really that mistreated in Czarist Russian in those times. I told her what we saw in the movie was mild compared to the real thing. Hitler and the Nazis are justifiably vilified for their treatment of the Jews, but the Czar, and after him, the Communists, could have given Hitler lessons on how to persecute people, Jewish and otherwise. Now we have someone seeking the highest office in our country whose rhetoric seems to echo some of those same sentiments, only toward a different group of people. Do you think it possible that pogroms against Muslims in the US could ever occur?