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A High School Banned Swastikas From a Staging of ‘The Producers.’ Tablet to the Rescue!

Dear Students: Your teachers are dumb. Let us send you some cool, totally authentic-looking Nazi costumes.

by
Liel Leibovitz
March 16, 2016
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Dear Students of Tappan Zee High School, New York:

So you want to put on a production of The Producers, huh? We get it! It’s a great musical, very funny, and—given another unlikely joke currently climbing in the polls in this country and threatening to become president—very timely. Good for you guys!

We did read recently, however, that your school won’t permit you to put swastikas on stage this Friday. Why? Because, thus sprach South Orangetown Superintendent Bob Pritchard, “there is no context in a public high school where a swastika is appropriate.”

No context! Not, say, a history book? Not a documentary film about the terrors of the Third Reich? Not a really entertaining play about how stupidity and greed and a mild infatuation with strongmen in uniform can lead to disaster? You don’t have to be a superintendent, or even a regular intendent, to know that this is a deeply silly and slightly terrifying concept. If you can’t be expected to discern context from context, then the education you’ve been getting at the South Orangetown school district is, to use a highly academic term, total bullshit.

And so, dear students, because we love and support you—and because it’s almost Purim, the Jewish holiday of dress-up—we’d like to buy you real, fancy, and shiny Nazi uniforms for your play, complete with gorgeous Broadway-grade red, white, and black swastika armbands, so that you can play out “Spring Time for Hitler” with confidence and style.

Send us your address, and we’ll send over the goods, along with a note that will say, “with best wishes, from the Jews.”

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and a host of its weekly culture podcast Unorthodox and daily Talmud podcast Take One. He is the editor of Zionism: The Tablet Guide.