A movie about how 'Fiddler on the Roof' became a movie

• Published date: 29 April 2022
• Publication title: Israel National News (Israel)

The 95-year-old Jewison has often spoken about how, when asked to helm the movie version of the popular Broadway musical about an Old World shtetl, he felt the need to sheepishly inform the producers that he was a goy

Less well known is that, following the worldwide success of the "Fiddler" movie, Jewison actually wound up embracing the Jewish faith. Though he has never spoken of formally converting, he reveals near the end of the new documentary "Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen" that, when he married his second wife Lynne St. David Jewison in 2010, the couple had a Jewish wedding — complete with a rabbi and a chuppah.

"Fiddler's Journey to the Big Screen" tells the story of how the stage musical became a beloved screen classic. (It's not to be confused with the 2019 documentary "Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles," which focused more on how the adaptation of Sholem Aleichem's Yiddish short stories made it to the stage.) Directed by Daniel Raim, an Israeli-born filmmaker who specializes in behind-the-scenes film history documentaries for the boutique arthouse label The Criterion Collection, "Fiddler's Journey" concerns itself with the details of film adaptation and the logistical challenges of recreating a convincing prewar Jewish shtetl in the former Yugoslavia.

It also focuses on the long, illustrious career of Jewison, for whom "Fiddler" became a signature film. One of the rare directors to have been nominated for an Oscar in three separate decades — his other two were for "In the Heat of the Night" (1967) and "Moonstruck" (1987) — Jewison landed the "Fiddler" job partly on the strength of his Cold War satire "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming." His commitment to verisimilitude in depicting Anatevka led him to reject the original Broadway "Fiddler" star, Zero Mostel, in favor of Israeli actor Topol. Mostel's version of the milkman Tevye, said Jewison, was "too American."

That commitment also led Jewison and his...