The current rage for killing Nazis on screen—as exemplified by the Ed Zwick feature Defiance, and last month’s Inglourious Basterds—has made its way to the stage with The Retributionists, an off-Broadway play that opened in New York Monday. This time, the action unfolds after the war is over, when a band of former partisan fighters ...

This year’s New York International Fringe Festival, which opened Friday and runs through the end of the month, offers several explicitly Jewish-themed offerings. Among them are a one-woman show about a Viennese modern dancer who fled the Nazis, a musical about the Baal Shem Tov, a comedy about college friends spending their junior year abroad in Israel, and a satire about leftist Jewish academics. (We missed Jesus Ride, a one man-show about a secular Jewish dude who takes a job designing a motion simulation ride about Jesus’ life and, in preparation, sees 33 movies about Mr. Christ.) Here are Tablet Magazine’s brief reviews.

Fiddler on the Roof, the Bock-Harnick musical based on Sholom Aleichem’s stories of life in the Russian shtetl, opened on Broadway in September, 1964, with Zero Mostel in the central role of Tevye the Milkman. But the Israeli actor Chaim Topol—usually billed mononymically, as Topol—has become perhaps even more associated with the character. Topol, then 31 years old, starred in Fiddler’s 1967 West End debut; he starred in Norman Jewison’s 1971 film version; and he’s played the character around the world—by his account, more than 2,500 times. Now 73, he’s yeidel-deideling his way up the West Coast of the United States, part of a two-year Fiddler tour that’s being billed as Topol’s farewell. He spoke to Tablet Magazine from the rooftop restaurant at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, where he stayed during a recent, sold-out run at L.A.’s Pantages Theater, about Tevye, Israel, and whether this is really his last hurrah.

In the YouTube trailer for a new play running at a small theater in New York, an unseen interviewer asks people in a park whether they’ve heard of “the soap myth.” Most of them look befuddled, but some eventually realize that the question refers to the belief that the Nazis made soap from human corpses. But the last interviewee, a yarmulke-wearing old man with a pinched, angry face, is different.

From Meyn Yiddishe Mame (1930) to Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Jewish mothers have so frequently been portrayed on the page and onscreen as larger-than-life characters—spewing out affection, anxiety, guilt, and criticism onto their children like fire hoses—that it is not a particular surprise to encounter one, in Daniel Burman’s debut play, Las Llaves de Abajo (The Keys for Downstairs), so huge that she must be represented, at once, by three actresses.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag, which opened last night at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York, recounts an imagined meeting between two giants of the American songbook: Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. The two were famous and successful in the same pre-World War I period—Berlin starting his career; Joplin late in his—and though they were both living and working in New York, there’s no record they ever met. Playwright Mark Saltzman spoke to Tablet about his play, Tin Pan Alley, and the Jews who invented it.

Berlin’s Neue Synagoge—begun in 1859, set ablaze on Kristallnacht, and loving restored to at least some of its former glory in the 1990s—has already seen its share of history. But there will be a bit of new history in the onion-domed building on Saturday, when Israeli-born choreographer Nir de Volff premieres Action!, the first dance performance ever held in its confines.