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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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The Army’s only airborne rabbi finds his congregation wherever he lands
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — At dawn on Friday, two soldiers showed up for physical training. Their rabbi was already waiting.
Black T-shirts. Gold ARMY across the chest. Nothing to set them apart. They blended into the formation — hundreds of soldiers under the pine trees as reveille cut through the morning. The flag rose. They saluted, stretched, climbed ropes, ran into the dark.
For 30 minutes, they were indistinguishable. Then everything shifted.
The three men walked into a meeting room inside a battalion headquarters, their shirts still damp with sweat. One soldier held out his left arm. The other draped a camouflage tallit over his shoulders. Rabbi Scott Klein reached into his backpack, removed a pair of black leather tefillin, and began wrapping them around a soldier’s arm — seven times, the way it’s always done, the leather biting just enough to remind you it’s there.
At 36, Klein serves one of the most unusual pulpits in American Judaism. He is one of 140 chaplains at Fort Bragg, the world’s largest military base. And he is the Army’s only Jewish chaplain assigned to an airborne unit — which means that jumping out of an airplane, for him, is not a metaphor for faith. It’s a job requirement.
One of the men praying beside him that morning was Jacob Abrams, 24, a specialist from Manhattan, Kansas. He found out about Jewish life on the base by accident, in the commissary, on a flyer for a challah-baking workshop stapled near the cereal aisle.
“Scott instantly made me feel included in the community,” Abrams said.
On Friday mornings, the two wrap tefillin together after physical training. On Friday nights, they welcome Shabbat together. But the relationship doesn’t end at the chapel door. Klein joins field exercises. He sleeps in tents. He paratroops into combat zones.
“There are days — many days — where you just don’t want to be there,” Abrams said. “Having your chaplain out there, who’s also embracing the suckiness with you, it makes it a lot easier to get through.”
It is an old idea, dressed in new camouflage: that you do not minister from a distance. You jump first.
A congregation with no walls
Later that morning, Klein climbed into his car and began driving across Fort Bragg.
The base stretches for miles, a city unto itself — schools, supermarkets, banks, gas stations, a Chipotle, three Starbucks, all of it sitting inside roughly 250 square miles, a map Klein has long since stopped needing to consult.
As he drove, he pointed things out the way someone points out a childhood neighborhood: the headquarters of the 82nd Airborne Division, the parade fields, the training grounds where soldiers prepare to leave for places he has already been.
He grew up nearly 900 miles from here, in Skokie, Illinois, where his world, for a while, stayed small. After college, he joined his father’s accounting firm, dedicating himself to fostering local economic development and helping small businesses scale. The work paid the bills, but what he loved most was driving community entrepreneurship from the ground up — the Jewish networking events he organized for young professionals, the restaurant back rooms he’d reserve, the texts he’d send to make sure people showed up, and the strangers he introduced who became business partners, then friends.
“I realized that when you connect people, you aren’t just building networks—you’re building the infrastructure of a community,” he said.
Then, in his late 20s, an Army recruiter asked if he had ever considered serving. Klein had always thought of himself as deeply patriotic. He served on Skokie’s Fourth of July parade committee, loved civic life and believed, as an American Jew, that serving his country was a responsibility.
“If I have the opportunity to serve my country,” he recalled thinking, “I can’t let the door slam shut.”
The United States is marking this week its 250th birthday, what Klein called a “monumental” moment in the life of the “American experiment.”
He spoke of Francis Salvador, the first Jewish soldier killed in the Revolutionary War; Haym Solomon, who helped finance the Continental Army; the Civil War, which produced the country’s first official Jewish military chaplain, Rabbi Jacob Frankel, commissioned by Abraham Lincoln in 1862; the half a million American Jews who served in the two world wars that followed.
“We aren’t passive observers of this 250-year history,” he said. “We are foundational stakeholders.”
Klein commissioned into the Army Reserve. What followed reshaped his life.
During deployments across the Middle East, he became what the military calls a lay leader, the person responsible for holding Jewish life together in places where no chaplain existed to do it. On Friday nights, that meant leading Shabbat services in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia.
During one deployment, he led a Passover Seder in Egypt for soldiers and diplomats, retelling the story of the Exodus on the banks of the river where it happened. He led High Holiday services at Guantanamo Bay. In Iraq, he lit a Hanukkah menorah inside one of Saddam Hussein’s former offices — a small, stubborn flame in a room built for someone who would have extinguished it.
Eventually, the distinction between lay leader and rabbi stopped making sense to him. Klein enrolled in rabbinical school while still in uniform, attending classes online from bases scattered across the Middle East — studying the Talmud in the region where rabbis first argued over its pages, sometimes logging in from bunkers, sometimes losing the connection mid-lesson, the line between ancient text and unreliable internet blurring into one continuous feed.
He was ordained in 2024. Soon afterward, he joined the ranks of more than 100 Jewish chaplains serving across the U.S. armed forces, which have roughly 10,000 active-duty Jewish military personnel. (Out of that total force, Klein is one of only about 10 to 15 Jewish chaplains serving on active duty in the U.S. Army). The Army sent Klein to Fort Bragg. There, he began building something more permanent.
‘Never plateau’
Klein pulls into the parking lot of one of the base’s supermarkets.
Inside, it looked like a large grocery store anywhere in America — wide aisles, fluorescent light, shoppers pushing carts past the produce and the canned goods. Klein headed straight for the bakery.
“See this?” he said, pointing to a stack of challah. “We didn’t have this before.”
When he arrived at Fort Bragg, it wasn’t something easy to find on base. Klein worked with the store manager to bring it in. Today, it helps sustain Shabbat for the more than 200 Jewish soldiers and their families who are stationed here.
He walked a few aisles over to the meat department and pulled open the door to a large refrigerated case with a “Kosher” sign taped to it: brisket, ribeye, ground beef, stew meat for cholent. Before Klein, the options were thin. Now the case stays stocked. When the meat comes in, he posts to a WhatsApp group and a Signal chat, and Jewish soldiers from one end of Fort Bragg to the other know to come get it before it’s gone. It is a community built less on sermons than on supply chains.
None of that, on its own, is unusual for a chaplain. But for Klein, it is not enough.
For the past two years, he has also served as the interim rabbi at Beth Israel, a century-old congregation in Fayetteville, about 15 minutes off base. The synagogue has around 100 members and an active Sunday school. A permanent rabbi has been hired and will move into the parsonage on its 10-acre property in August.
Klein also volunteers his time as a chaplain for the Fayetteville Police Department. He teaches “Torah on tap” classes at a local brewery. He recently finished a two-year fellowship for rabbis serving small-town Jewish communities, the kind of program built for people without a colleague down the hall to ask for advice.
He travels to rabbinical schools to recruit students who assume the only pulpit worth having is a sanctuary, showing them that there’s another version of the job — one that jumps out of airplanes, sleeps in tents, and answers a 3 a.m. phone call that no synagogue board ever will.
He is already a qualified paratrooper and recently earned his Air Assault wings — rigorous tactical credentials rarely held by military chaplains. Later this summer, he takes that same drive to a special operations unit.
“I set a goal for myself a long time ago to never plateau,” he said. “I’m in the right organization, because the Army has that culture: ‘Great, you’ve achieved this. What’s next?’ Even at 36, I feel like I’m just getting started.”
And it isn’t only about rank or certifications. “I want to continue learning in Judaism, in Torah,” he said. “But also just as a human. I have this itch to keep doing more.”
From phone calls to a first meeting
In the afternoon, Klein returned home.
On base, the houses are nearly identical — modest homes lined up along quiet streets, indistinguishable from one another unless you know which door to knock on. Inside, the living room was sparsely decorated, the furniture simple and functional. Klein shares the house with his wife, Eli, who teaches special education at a school on base, and Buddy, their 11-year-old goldendoodle, who curled up on a chair.
On the couch sat Paul Kenul, a 69-year-old retired U.S. diplomat who had flown in from Europe. Raised Catholic, he was now studying to become a Jew.
Klein balanced a laptop on his knees, scrolling through a passage from Pirkei Avot, a tractate devoted to ethics and moral teachings. Kenul leaned forward, listening closely, a pen in one hand and a notepad in the other.
Kenul grew up on Long Island, in a neighborhood that was almost entirely Jewish, except for him. He spent a career bouncing between Alaska and Heidelberg and Addis Ababa before landing, almost by accident, in Tel Aviv, working at the U.S. embassy. “I felt like I was home,” he said.
He lives in Poland now, with his wife, in a house with an Israeli flag flying in the garden.
For the past year, every Sunday, on the phone, the two men have worked their way through the Torah cycle. The first few months, Kenul said, he was “high” learning with Klein, mesmerized by a tradition he wished he’d found as a teenager.
For Kenul, the lessons had begun to feel like something more. “When I study with the rabbi,” he said, “I feel like I’m feasting.”
This week, for the first time, he flew in to meet Klein in person. “We hugged, and we just kept talking,” Kenul said matter-of-factly.
He talks now about the Torah’s cast of men who failed and were forgiven and failed again the way other people talk about relatives. “They feel like my ancestors,” he said. “They made so many mistakes. I can relate to that.”
Borrowed space, sacred time
The Watters Family Life Center for Counseling and Resiliency does not look like a synagogue, because it isn’t one. It’s a building the Army built for chaplains of every faith to share, and on Friday nights, for about an hour, it becomes one.
Past the kitchen, a walk-in storage room held boxes of Streit’s potato kugel, bottles of grape juice, a stack of siddurs, and “Shabbat in a box” kits donated by a Connecticut nonprofit — a Kiddush cup, a havdalah candle, a challah cover, and, inexplicably, a deck of playing cards. In the corner, leaning against the wall, rests a blue pop-up sukkah.
Klein passed out camouflage kippahs at the door.
About 15 people sat in folding chairs, more arriving until someone had to grab extra seats. Klein stood behind a small pulpit, a menorah on the stage behind him between an American flag and the Army Chaplain Corps flag. He’d traded his fatigues for a gray suit, no tie. The service moved through Hebrew and English, everyone following along in camouflage-covered siddurs.
It was the Shabbat before the Fourth of July, and the week’s Torah reading happened to be Klein’s own bar mitzvah portion — a text that describes the sudden death of Miriam. For Klein, the connection was heartbreakingly close; his own sister, Miriam, had passed away suddenly just a month prior.
He shared with the room how the Torah handles the loss with a striking, quiet brevity, offering no drawn-out account of public mourning. Instead, Jewish tradition teaches that a miraculous well of water traveled with the Israelites through the dry wilderness for as long as Miriam lived — and vanished the moment she died.
Klein’s sister moved through the world with that same quiet, life-giving impact, he said. “She didn’t need the spotlight; she just brought sustenance and life to everyone around her,” he reflected. “She never would have wanted a loud, public display of grief. She would want us to keep moving forward through the desert.”
Then he recited the Mourner’s Kaddish.
A chaplain’s job, as the Army defines it, comes in three parts: nurture the living, care for the wounded, honor the fallen.
The first happens every day — soldiers walking in with money trouble, a marriage coming apart, the slow pressures that build until someone needs to talk to a person who won’t repeat what’s said.
The third comes without warning. When a soldier dies, in training or in combat, the call goes to the chaplain. Klein has stood with families the moment they find out. He has escorted remains across state lines, sometimes across continents, making sure both military protocol and Jewish tradition are followed at every step. At Dover Air Force Base, where the country’s dead return home first, chaplains are often the ones waiting on the tarmac.
“Escorting a fallen service member home is the most sacred, heavy duty we have,” he said. “It is the ultimate expression of our promise never to leave a fallen comrade.”
After the prayer for peace and a prayer for the country’s soldiers, the room sang Shalom Aleichem and Klein poured Kiddush into plastic cups. There was babka, black and white cookies, and fresh challah baked by a soldier’s wife, still warm when it reached the table.
There was also cake: carrot cake left over from his shloshim service for Klein’s sister, and a cookie cake for the country’s 250th — grief and birthday cake sharing a tablecloth. It was the whole evening in miniature: whatever needed holding, the room found a way to hold it.
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LA Jewish Federation staff picket their office
Employees of Los Angeles’ Jewish federation and three other local Jewish nonprofits are set to picket outside the federation’s building Tuesday, accusing federation management of a bait-and-switch in negotiations for a new contract.
Unionized workers of Jewish Federation Los Angeles, one of the four largest Jewish federations in the U.S. by net assets, say the federation verbally agreed June 25 to a 5% salary increase in the first year of a three-year contract during a bargaining session, only to lower the offer to 4% in the first year after the union withdrew other demands.
“It feels like bad-faith negotiations,” Lilia Arbona, who leads the employee union, said in an interview. “It’s disrespectful and distasteful to the community.”
About three-quarters of the union’s 93 members are employees of the federation itself. The remainder work for the Jewish Community Foundation, which manages more than $1 billion of charitable assets and is closely linked to the federation. The other two agencies, Jewish Big Brothers Big Sisters of Los Angeles and Builders of Jewish Education, partner with the federation and receive federation funding but are separate nonprofits, and the federation negotiates on their behalf.
The union staff, who are members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, also picketed the building last week.
Arbona, who has worked for the federation for 35 years and is currently their senior art director, said the union had agreed to withdraw proposals around healthcare, parental leave and severance pay for annual wage increases of 5%, 4% and 4% in the three years of the contract — the same structure it agreed to in 2023, when its last contract was signed. That contract expires Tuesday.
Arbona said management had attributed the missing 1% to healthcare contributions, but alleged that the healthcare increases didn’t make up the difference. She added that the picket was not a strike or a work stoppage; union members will participate during their lunch hour.
The union has the option of filing an unfair labor practices complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor, but Arbona said it could take a year to get a hearing and that a Trump-run department would not give the union a fair hearing.
Rob Goldenberg, who is serving as the federation’s communications lead, did not address Arbona’s claims but described the picket as a “common” occurrence in the bargaining process.
“Every three years, the Jewish Federation, representing several Jewish agencies, negotiates with our local union,” Goldenberg, the federation’s chief creative officer, said in a statement. “An informational picket, conducted during our employees’ non-work time, is a common part of this process. We have engaged in good-faith negotiations and look forward to reaching a conclusion soon that benefits everyone involved.”
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The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel
Towards the end of Birthright, a new play that just made its New York City debut at the MCC Theatre, two characters are arguing over Israel and Zionism in the wake of Oct. 7. The talking points will be familiar to anyone who’s been ensconced in the discourse of the past few years: Izzy says that Zionism is and has always been a colonialist project, and Chaya blames the conflict on Palestinian leaders who rejected early two-state solutions.
As they argue, each is frantically Googling; their phone screens are projected onto the walls of the set. We can see the chasm between their echo chambers: Izzy goes to the Jewish Voice for Peace website, Chaya to The Jerusalem Post. Each time they focus on their own screen, the sound of the argument becomes muffled and indistinct until they resurface to throw a new piece of evidence into the conversation.
It’s a clever piece of production magic that effectively drives home the schism over Israel in the Jewish world, and our inability to hear each other.
Birthright, commissioned by Miami New Drama from Tony Award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector and here directed by Teddy Bergman, is nominally about the eponymous free trip to Israel. But really it’s about a group of six friends that formed on the trip, and their personal journeys — through Judaism, and through life — as the somewhat motley crew diverges and reconnects over the years.
The show is a long one, three and a half hours once you include its two intermissions. Each act depicts a single night, spaced over the course of nearly two decades — first, right after they’ve returned from their trip to Israel in 2006, then in their early 30s as their careers are taking off in 2016, and finally a year after Oct. 7. While the runtime is admittedly long, it allows for well-developed characters, which are essential to approaching such a touchy topic with any nuance, and the fast-paced dialogue keeps things moving briskly. (A reasonable helping of humor, including a Kanye reference in every act, doesn’t hurt.)
And the show does manage an astonishing amount of subtlety for a topic that has become so factionalized. The characters represent a reasonably diverse range of Jewish thought and experience, though certainly leaves some out. (There are no Jews of color or converts, for example, and no true right-wing hawks.)
There’s Chaya (Zoe Winters, best known as Logan Roy’s secretary and mistress on Succession), who grew up Conservadox, but spent college rushing a sorority and dyeing her hair blonde; she ends up working for the Democratic establishment. Noah (Eli Gelb, Tony-nominated for Stereophonic) is a political wonk with a Facebook-addled dad prone to right-wing conspiracy theories. Izzy (Molly Bernard), a queer Jew who eschewed law school, has worked on the Jewish left long before it became buzzy. Lev (Hale Appleman), a lost soul wanderer with a penchant for Jewish philosophy — he name-drops Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath and Yosef Yerushalmi’s Zakhor — has family who survived the Holocaust. Alona (Molly Ranson), a sociology PhD who fell for an IDF soldier on the trip, eventually marries an Israeli and moves to Tel Aviv. And Emerson (Nate Mann), a musician, is barely aware that he’s Jewish when he lands on their trip half by accident.
This long summary represents only a smidgen of the events in the group’s lives. The play makes sharp use of production gimmicks, opening the second and third acts by projecting a montage of messages, summarizing the events of the group’s intervening years — and also cleverly reminding us of the quirks of bygone eras. Before the second act, we see wedding invitations and job announcements sent out by email, and then newborn photos posted on Facebook. Before the third, there are group chats on iMessage and then Whatsapp, where we see more birth announcements. Later, they exchange articles about the Israel-Hamas war.
This glut of information is how the show achieves its depth. On paper, one could slot some of these characters into obvious archetypes: The Zionist who makes aliyah, the queer anti-Zionist activist who has made politics her whole identity, the centrist liberal who staunchly supports Israel. But every character has real depth and pathos, and none of the action plays out to its stereotypical end.
When someone asks Izzy, the JVP-type activist, why she hates Israel so much, she doesn’t list out its sins; instead, she’s affronted. “I don’t hate Israel. I love it,” she says. “What it could be at its best.” She doesn’t believe she’s fighting against the nation, but for it.
Meanwhile, Alona, who made aliyah, does not launch into a speech about how Hamas has to be eradicated before the war can end; Bibi, the rest of the Israeli government and settlers, she says, are just as much of a “cancer” as any terrorist group.
Though the political discussions are impressively nuanced, Birthright finds its true success in spending as much time on the rest of the characters’ lives as it does on their political stances. There are the complications of falling for a non-Jewish partner. The ways having children changes life in inalterable ways. Divorces. Substance abuse. The way a dream career can still disappoint. For a topic that is so often turned into a polemic, the play takes a broader view.
In presenting stories of real, believable Jewish lives that are not solely defined by their Judaism, the play demonstrates that Jewishness doesn’t mean just one thing to anyone. Instead, it explores the ways Jewish identity layers on, mingles with and sometimes challenges the rest of one’s choices, values and beliefs.
There are views left out of Birthright, to be sure. No one is right wing (the characters call their group “BirthLeft”), and in the first act they all make fun of their trip as a way to get Jewish kids laid. No one is truly hawkish about the war; in the first act, the characters make fun of George W. Bush and fantasize about working on Democratic campaigns. No one is making an argument, as plenty of people have in the past few years, that Palestinians should be exiled from Gaza or deserve to die.
But the overall point can apply equally: Judaism, and Israel, is not one clear thing. There’s no perfect answer. We aren’t all supposed to agree — but that doesn’t have to tear us apart. It’s a simple message, but one that is hard to believe these days; Birthright makes it feel tangible.
As Lev says when considering their Birthright trip, and his confused feelings about it. “History, Jewish history, it’s never been a straight line, and it’s never meant only one fixed thing. It’s more a thing you interpret, that you find meaning in.”
The new play Birthright is playing at the MCC Theater in Manhattan through Jul 26, 2026.
The post The play is about Birthright, but it’s about a lot more than Israel appeared first on The Forward.
