Latest Articles

Not O.K.!
A perverse Broadway revival of a classic American musical imposes brutal interpretations.

April 19, 2019  •  City Journal

Would you attend a revival of a musical that sets The Sound of Music in Auschwitz? How about setting The King and I on the Bataan Death March? Mary Poppins on Mars, anyone? Broadway has lots of bad ideas. The current revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma!, the iconic American musical, is another. It's not easy to turn an American classic about the joy of beautiful mornings and corn as high as an elephant's eye in a land of open skies and endless promise into an attack on American gun culture, sexual politics, class discrimination, and a corrupt system of justice, but yippee-oh-ki-yay, director Daniel Fish's revival—or, more accurately, his reinvention—has done just that.

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"The Lehman Trilogy": Can a Jewish immigrant family embody the American dream?

April 17, 2019  •  Tablet

The Lehman Trilogy is the hottest play in town—required viewing for the financial and theatrically minded cognoscenti, the new Hamilton for wealthy New York hipsters. A ticket that originally sold at $95 at the Park Avenue Armory now goes for $1,200 on StubHub, if you can nab one.

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Reflecting on Notre Dame and the Twin Towers
What the two catastrophes have in common, and don't

April 17, 2019  •  New York Daily News

On television Monday, Jean-François Colosimo, a French historian of religion, described the burning of Notre Dame as "images of the end of the world." New Yorkers, too, know that feeling, at least those of us who watched the Twin Towers burn almost 18 years ago.

Of course the national calamities differ. The Notre Dame fire was an accident, not arson, not terrorism. In both Paris and New York, firefighters fought heroically. But in Paris, nobody died. Only one of the 400 who battled the massive blaze was seriously injured.

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Guarding the Faithful

March 22, 2019  •  City Journal

New York may be tough, but its houses of worship are the softest of soft terrorist targets. Even before last Friday's mosque attacks in New Zealand, the New York Police Department and other law enforcement officials had taken steps to enhance security around the city's daunting number of religious institutions: more than 250 mosques, 2,000 churches, 4,000 informal places of Christian worship, 1,000 synagogues, many Buddhist, Hindu,and Sikh temples, and major religious shrines, schools, and community centers. Moments after a lone gunman killed 50 people and wounded an equal number at two mosques during the heavily attended weekly Jumu'ah prayers last Friday in Christchurch, the NYPD mobilized to protect Muslim institutions and non-Muslim places of worship from copycat attacks and calls for revenge from al-Qaida, the Islamic State, and other extremist groups. What New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern called one of her country's "darkest days" quickly became one of the NYPD's busiest.

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Democrats need to oust anti-Semite Ilhan Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee

March 5, 2019  •  The New York Post

Democratic leaders will put forward a vote on the House floor Wednesday to denounce anti-Semitism in the wake of Rep. Ilhan Omar's latest inflammatory remarks about Jewish support for Israel. But it's unlikely that Omar will pay a real price for her bigotry.

Speaking about Israel and the Palestinians last week at a panel at Busboys & Poets, a "community-gathering space" in Washington, Omar (D-Minn.) demanded the right to "talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country."

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Books by Judith Miller