On a recent trip to Berkeley I was traveling down College Avenue and noticed something which caused me to raise an eyebrow:

At the intersection of College and Derby are two buildings: On the left is the Julia Morgan Theater, a popular performance space for plays, musicals and concerts; and on the right is Chabad House, the East Bay headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement, which also functions as a local Jewish community center.

The buildings have been standing across the street from each other for decades, without the slightest whiff of controversy or animosity.

But as you can see from the photo, the current production at the Julia Morgan Theater is Oliver!, the musical based on Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and to advertise the show, the producers placed a huge banner out front depicting Fagin, one of the lead characters.

Here’s a split-screen closeup, showing the Fagin banner more clearly on the left, and the Chabad banner more clearly on the right.

This wouldn’t be particularly noteworthy except that Fagin is considered to be an insulting anti-Semitic stereotype, and the banner was positioned to face directly toward Chabad House across the street. When the Chabadniks look out the building’s front windows, they have to gaze directly at a 10-foot-tall image of a stereotypical “greedy Jew.”

Now, while it may be true that the script for Oliver! tones down the anti-Semitic aspect of Fagin’s character and treats him more as comic relief than a villain, in the original editions of Oliver Twist Fagin is completely despicable, and is considered by many to be the most anti-Semitic literary character of the 19th century.

While I can only assume that the juxtaposition of the Fagin banner and the Chabad House was inadvertent, somewhere in the back of my mind I still have the nagging feeling that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t entirely coincidental after all.