A 'Parade' of Anti-Semites on Broadway
There’s a moment in Parade, the musical revival that opened last week on Broadway, that encapsulates the show’s subversiveness. It’s also the moment that seals the demise of the drama’s protagonist, Leo Frank.
Frank, played by Ben Platt, is on trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who was found dead in the Atlanta factory where he served as superintendent in 1913. (The plot is based on a true story.) A nerdy northern Jew in Georgia, Frank is an easy target for the ire of the public and the prosecution. In a taut and tense courtroom scene, he is implicated by a succession of coached but compelling witnesses. The most damning testimony comes from a janitor, Jim Conley (Alex Joseph Grayson), who claims that the Jew stereotypically attempted to buy his silence, recalling Frank’s words in a sinister song:
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As Conley concludes this recollection with a rousing refrain of “That’s what he said,” the chorus behind him thunders, “Hang him! Hang the Jew!” It’s a showstopper. Audience members have already seen how Conley was coerced into contriving this story by the ambitious prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey (Paul Alexander Nolan). But faced with the emotional power of Grayson’s performance, the nearly 1,000 people at the preview I attended could not help but do what felt right in the moment: applaud.
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Now as then, anti-Jewish prejudice proliferates because it fulfills profound but unstated needs in those attracted to its addled ideas. It is easier to blame an ailing economy on the Rothschilds, a failed marriage on the Jews, a flawed foreign policy on the Jewish lobby, or unchecked American police violence on the Jewish state than it is to look within at the internal causes of these calamities. Now as then, we face a rise in conspiratorial grievance, which inevitably falls upon imagined Jewish culprits. As Parade’s continued significance demonstrates, the siren song of anti-Semitism never stopped and never lost its appeal. The fact that some no longer tune it out and seek to confront it is a form of progress. The real test, however, is whether we can write better songs that give voice to Jews not just as they are envisaged by their despisers, but as they truly are.
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