Man at Fiddler on the Roof Shouts “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump,” Audience Flees
Screencap via Twitter Politics News Anti-Semitism
Attendees at a Baltimore showing of the musical ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ had a tremendous scare on Wednesday night when a man at the Hippodrome Theatre began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump!” during intermission. As The Baltimore Sun reports, many in the theater assumed a shooting was imminent:
Audience member Rich Scherr said the outburst happened during intermission. The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”
The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued. But Scherr, 49, said it was hard to focus on the play after that. “My heart was just racing. I didn’t even really pay attention to the second act.”
Scherr shared a short video on Facebook and Twitter:
Sick, sad world. A man stands at intermission of tonight’s performance of Fiddler in Baltimore and yells, “Heil Hitler,” along with pro-Trump references. pic.twitter.com/slDcPwF7re
— Rich Scherr (@writerguyRich) November 15, 2018
‘Fiddler’ tells the story of a Jewish family in tsarist Russia, and the patriarch Tevye who attempts to preserve his religious heritage in the face of discrimination and eventual eviction from the family’s village.
As The Sun notes, this incident followed another at Goucher College in Towson, MD on Wednesday in which swastika graffiti was painted in a bathroom, and it comes hot on the heels of a rise in anti-Semitic incidents in America, most prominently the Oct. 27 murder of 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.