Cabaret star Joel Grey has compared President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming second administration to the incipient Nazi regime dramatized in the popular Broadway musical and its movie adaptation. The actor is even suggesting that Jews in the United States are now in danger despite Trump’s proven pro-Israel record.
In a New York Times op-ed published Sunday, Joel Grey attempted to whip up fear and anxiety over Trump by likening him to Germany’s Third Reich.
“The recent election of Donald Trump to a second term has left many Americans, particularly those who fought so hard against the forces of authoritarianism and hate, feeling drained and disillusioned,” he wrote.
“Cabaret” debuted in 1966, portraying “a decadent society willfully ignorant of its own demise,” writes Joel Grey, who won a Tony and an Oscar for his role. Its warnings of “the dangers of apathy and the perils of looking away” are newly relevant.
— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) November 24, 2024
Read: https://t.co/v9p3LSmC5H
“There’s a sense that we have seen this show before, that we know how it ends, and that we’re powerless to stop it. Or worse, a sense that even though we are facing dark times they won’t really affect our own day-to-day lives — echoing the tragically shortsighted assessment of so many European Jews in the 1920s and ’30s.”
Cabaret is set in Berlin several years prior to World War II as the Nazi party was beginning its rise to power. In the musical, Grey played the emcee of the Kit Kat Klub where debauchery served as an escape from the political realities of Weimar Germany.
“We have indeed seen this show before, and I fear we do know how it ends,” the actor wrote in his Times op-ed. “It’s understandable to want to retreat, to find solace where we can, but we cannot afford to look away.”
As Breitbart News reported, President-elect Donald Trump won more than 40 percent of the Jewish vote in several states, breaking through a seemingly insurmountable barrier on the strength of his support for Israel and his proven commitment to fighting antisemitism.
In New York, Trump won a historic share of the Jewish vote, with polling showing his support among Jewish voters in the traditionally Democratic stronghold soaring to 43 percent.
Grey’s op-ed made no mention of the surge in antisemitism in Democrat-controlled U.S. cities and universities following the October 7 Hamas massacre of Israelis. Anti-Israel activists made numerous threats and acts of intimidation toward Jewish students.
Since his first run for the White House, the left has tried to smear Trump as a bigot, a racist, and the second-coming of Adolf Hitler. But their claims — propagated in large part by The Atlantic magazine — no longer ring true to American voters, who know from Trump’s first term that he is none of these things.
In his victory on November 5, Trump saw historic gains among minority voters, especially with Latinos. He also doubled his support among young black men.
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