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How New Yorker writer Ariel Levy adapted Philip Roth’s filthiest book for the stage
(JTA) — A scruffy, bearded Jewish man in his mid-60s — distressed, disheveled but wickedly self-satisfied — is invited to spend the night at the Manhattan apartment of an old friend and benefactor. Put up in the bedroom of the man’s college-age daughter, he slips a pair of her panties over his head and searches her drawers in hopes of finding nude Polaroids.
That’s a scene from Philip Roth’s 1995 novel “Sabbath’s Theater” and now a stage adaptation by the actor John Turturro and the New Yorker writer Ariel Levy. Turturro also stars as Sabbath, a washed-up artist best known for his transgressive puppet theater in the ’60s — and best known to readers, perhaps, as Roth’s most repellant character. Drenched, sometimes literally, in sex, the play begins with a riotous bout of intercourse and climaxes, as it were, with two old lovers remembering their kinks.
But if the book were only about sex it might not have earned its National Book Award. It is also a tender meditation on mourning: Sabbath’s Croatian mistress, Drenka Balich, is dead, as are his mother, his brother and his career. “And there are other kinds of love and loss: about mourning his family and his health and his youth and his virility,” Levy told me when we spoke earlier this week.
As a journalist, Levy often delves into the way sex and gender shape the lives of both celebrities and people on the margins. Her 2017 memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” began life as an award-winning essay on her miscarriage in a hotel room while on assignment in Mongolia, when she was 19 weeks pregnant, and expanded into a rumination on her dissolving marriage and roads not taken.
The New Group’s adaptation of “Sabbath’s Theater” opened Wednesday night and runs through Dec. 17 at the Pershing Square Signature Center in Manhattan. Turturro (who played another Roth character, the craven Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf, in the HBO adaptation of “The Plot Against America”) inhabits Mickey’s filthy, seductive charm. Elizabeth Marvel plays Drenka and other women in his life, and Jason Kravits plays the men. The play is as dirty as Mickey’s torn carpenter’s pants, but also poignant: When Sabbath cradles the belongings of his dead brother, lost in battle during World War II, it’s an echo of the violence and loss that have become overwhelming in recent weeks.
Levy and I spoke about adapting a quintessentially Jewish writer like Roth, the appeal of flawed protagonists and how an Italian actor like Turturro captures the Jewish soul of yet another Roth alter ego.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
With very few exceptions, adaptations of Roth’s work haven’t been all that successful. Do you agree and were thinking about how you might approach the material differently?
Well, I mean, I’d never adapted anything. Adapting Roth properly was like only one of many potentials for crises. Roth is my literary God. I like the way he uses language the most. He might not have liked me saying this because he was obviously very insistent on being an American writer, not a Jewish writer, but nobody captures the rhythm of the language of people whose first language is Yiddish and then move over to English. The way he uses those rhythms, that humor. The cultural familiarity is a powerful addition to my appreciation for his mastery of language and plot, irony and the level of his imagination, the level of his sense of play and his appreciation for what he calls, in ”Sabbath’s Theater,” the “nasty side of existence.”
John Turturro came to you through a recommendation by Hilton Als, a fellow writer at The New Yorker. Tell me about your writing process. What did you both agree on and disagree on — if you disagreed?
Oh, for the first couple of years, we kind of agreed on everything. It was the pandemic so we were going back and forth on Zoom. We had a very, very aligned vision of what the crucial stuff was. You could just tell that certain parts were going to work theatrically and certain parts were not, and then once we started rehearsing, after working on this together for two years and then going on this workshop at the National Theatre in London in January 2023 — once we got through that, we started to have a better sense of what will work theatrically. The unbelievable challenge for John was to be working on his performance and contemplating the script, because every change means a new thing you have to learn [as an actor].
Ariel Levy and John Turturro at the opening night party for The New Group Theater’s new play “Sabbath’s Theater,” at Green Fig Urban Eatery in New York City, Nov. 1, 2023. (Bruce Glikas/Getty Images)
How does a journalist learn to be a playwright? Was there anyone you were taking clues from about how to do this?
I was extremely worried and insecure about it. John knew I’d never written a play. He could have found plenty of playwrights who would have done this, but the way I’ve heard him explain it is that he didn’t want someone who’s gonna come in and say, “I know how to write a play. I’m going to rewrite this.” He wanted to use Roth’s language. We’re barely going to write stage directions, the stage directions are largely lifted from Roth’s writing. The most important thing to John was finding somebody who was Roth-reverent, and then also we just hit it off, we just liked each other. We liked the same parts of the book, and we both felt the book was a love story.
So, how did I learn to do it? I figured out that storytelling is storytelling. And also, I had John guiding me, John knows what a play is, and I had [the director] Jo Bonney guiding me through the process once we were in rehearsal.
You talked about your affinity for Roth. Was there something about “Sabbath’s Theater” that particularly connected to the things you’ve always been writing about and thinking about?
I’ve written a fair amount about the fundamental human drives for domesticity and comfort and kinship and security on the one hand, and adventure and novelty and stimulation on the other — those conflicting poles that human beings stretch between. And that’s very much in there in the realm of Sabbath. And John and I both cared a lot about the depiction of grief and the way the dead can become more real for you than the living sometimes and how, as you age, the accretion of missing people in your life just starts to pile up.
And then there is thinking about — not just sex, but the body. “Sabbath’s Theater” has so many amazing meditations on what it is to live inside a human body. I think we’re both really interested in all of that and the kind of animal reality of being a human who’s alive versus dead.
Were you worried at any point that some of Mickey’s transgressions — he has been tossed from a teaching job at a university after a phone-sex scandal with a student, he visits an old friend and rifles the dresser drawers of his host’s teenage daughter — would make him unredeemable in a post-#Me-Too era? And on the flip side, do you feel the play is pushing back against the #MeToo orthodoxy in some way?
I think that, you know, we didn’t put in every transgression from the book, but we put a lot. There’s a beautiful Garth Greenwell essay in The Yale Review about the book where he talks about how he teaches “Sabbath’s Theater” to undergraduates, and it bothers him when the question becomes whether a protagonist should be an example of moral rectitude. That’s not what art is for. This isn’t meant to be propaganda. This is raw. This is art. In some of my favorite literature of the 20th century, the moral compass, the moral core of the whole thing is reminding us that a human being is more than their worst or most repellent urges and behaviors. A human being contains multitudes. This is Mickey in all his humanity, and we certainly didn’t want to sanitize him. I mean, I think the play is still plenty, plenty dirty.
I’m going to quote your own words to you. I was rereading a profile you wrote about the film director Nicole Holofcener, and you say something about her that made me think, “Oh, this is why Levy wrote ‘Sabbath’s Theater.’” You wrote: “This is the kind of creature Nicole Holofcener is drawn to: weirdly alluring, mangled by life, and unable to resist lashing out against her own best interests.”
That’s so funny. Yeah, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s Mickey Sabbath. That’s eerie. That is Mickey Sabbath.
I have to ask you to weigh in on what I think is the world’s most boring debate, which is whether a non-Jewish actor like John Turturro should be playing a Jewish character like Mickey Sabbath written by a Jewish author like Philip Roth. Do you have any qualms about that?
I feel so culturally connected to John Turturro. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we had genetic overlap. I mean, it’s like the food’s different, and the accents are different, but it’s the same shit, you know? John in particular to me is very culturally recognizable. And, you know, he’s married to a Jewish person. He’s raising children with a Jewish person. He’s steeped in it. We are not an exotic.
Also, he’s an actor. It’s like a novelist, which I’m not: They can inhabit other realities. That’s what their job is.
I sometimes feel that the readership for Roth is a men’s club. I’ve rarely come across women who idolized him the way I did. Do you feel that?
I mean, until his mature period, [his] women weren’t as interesting. They didn’t come off the page the way the men did. So I can understand, you know, it’s a drag reading a novel where the women aren’t coming off the page. It doesn’t feel great. But then everything changes: When he grows up he becomes this incredibly sophisticated, nuanced writer who realizes that women are half the human race. “Sabbath’s Theater” is the work that preceded the American trilogy [“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”]. That’s when everything starts to become like a masterpiece, and that’s when the women get really interesting. I defy anyone to find a richer, more complicated and fascinating and alluring female lead than Drenka. I mean, she’s unbeatable.
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The post How New Yorker writer Ariel Levy adapted Philip Roth’s filthiest book for the stage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Majority of French People Oppose Macron’s Push to Recognize a Palestinian State, New Survey Finds
French President Emmanuel Macron delivers the keynote address at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue security summit in Singapore, May 30, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Edgar Su
Nearly 80 percent of French citizens oppose President Emmanuel Macron’s push to recognize a Palestinian state, according to a new study that underscores widespread public resistance to the controversial diplomatic initiative.
Last week, Macron announced the postponement of a United Nations conference aimed at advancing international recognition of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with no new date set.
The UN summit — originally scheduled for June 16–18 — was delayed after Israel launched a sweeping preemptive strike on Iran, targeting military installations and nuclear facilities in what officials said was an effort to neutralize an imminent nuclear threat.
Last month, Macron said that recognizing “Palestine” was “not only a moral duty but a political necessity.” The comments followed him saying in April that France was making plans to recognize a Palestinian state at a UN conference it would co-host with Saudi Arabia. Israeli and French Jewish leaders sharply criticized the announcement, describing the decision as a reward for terrorism and a “boost” for Hamas.
The French people largely seem to agree now is not the right time for such a move. A survey conducted by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) on behalf of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, found that 78 percent of respondents opposed a “hasty, immediate, and unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state.”
Sondage Crif x Ifop : “Le regard des Français sur la reconnaissance par la France de l’État palestinien”
Une large majorité de Français (78 %) s’oppose à une reconnaissance immédiate et sans condition de l’État palestinien. Parmi eux, près de la moitié (47 %) estiment qu’une… pic.twitter.com/AX9gP6eMLe
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) June 17, 2025
France’s initiative comes after Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia officially recognized a Palestinian state last year, claiming that such a move would contribute to fostering a two-state solution and promote lasting peace in the region.
According to IFOP’s recent survey, however, nearly half of French people (47 percent) believe that recognition of a Palestinian state should only be considered after the release of the remaining hostages captured by Hamas during the Palestinian terrorist group’s invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, while 31 percent oppose any short-term recognition regardless of future developments.
The survey also reveals deep concerns about the consequences of such a premature recognition, with 51 percent of respondents fearing a resurgence of antisemitism in France and 50 percent believing it could strengthen Hamas’s position in the Middle East.
France has experienced an ongoing record surge in antisemitic incidents, including violent assaults, following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, amid the ensuing war in Gaza.
According to local media reports, France’s recognition of a Palestinian state at the UN conference was expected to be contingent on several conditions, including a truce in Gaza, the release of hostages held by Hamas, reforms within the Palestinian Authority (PA) — which is expected to take control from Hamas after the war — economic recovery, and the end of Hamas’s terrorist rule in the war-torn enclave.
The PA has not only been widely accused of corruption and condemned by the international community for its “pay-for-slay” program, which rewards terrorists and their families for attacks against Israelis, but also lacks public support among Palestinians, with only 40 percent supporting its return to govern the Gaza Strip after the war.
Out of the 27 total European Union member states, Bulgaria, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden have also recognized a Palestinian state.
Meanwhile, Germany, Portugal, and the UK have all stated that the time is not right for recognizing a Palestinian state.
The post Majority of French People Oppose Macron’s Push to Recognize a Palestinian State, New Survey Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Jewish Leaders Plan ‘Emergency Mission’ to Washington, DC to Push US Gov’t for Antisemitism Protections
Thousands of participants and spectators are gathering along Fifth Avenue to express support for Israel during the 59th Annual Israel Day Parade in New York City, on June 2, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender via Reuters Connect
Amid a record wave of antisemitic attacks and heightened geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, leaders from nearly 100 Jewish communities and over 30 national organizations across the US will descend on Washington, DC next week for an “emergency mission” aimed at pressing the federal government to bolster protections for Jewish Americans and increase support for Israel.
The meeting will be organized by the Jewish Federations of North America and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The two-day gathering scheduled for June 25–26 will convene representatives from groups representing approximately 7.5 million American Jews. Participants plan to meet with members of Congress and the Trump administration to demand “strong and aggressive action” to thwart a surge in antisemitic violence and rhetoric, according to a press release.
“We are facing an unprecedented situation in American Jewish history where every Jewish institution and event is a potential target for antisemitic violence,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of the Jewish Federations of North America. “This is domestic terrorism, plain and simple, and defeating this campaign of terror is the responsibility of government.”
The meeting comes on the heels of a string of attacks on Jewish and pro-Israeli targets in places such as Washington, DC, and Boulder, Colorado, and amid growing fears over Iran’s role in backing groups hostile to Israel. Organizers link the current wave of antisemitism to the aftermath of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which over 1200 people were killed and 251 hostages were abducted.
In the 20 months since the Oct. 7 massacre, the United States has seen a dramatic surge in antisemitic incidents. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), antisemitism in the US surged to break “all previous annual records” last year, with 9,354 antisemitic incidents recorded. These outrages included violent assaults, vandalism of Jewish schools and synagogues, harassment on college campuses, and threats against Jewish community centers.
Some Jewish institutions have reported being forced to hire private security or temporarily close their doors due to safety concerns. At universities nationwide, Jewish students and faculty have described feeling unsafe amid anti-Israel and pro-Hamas protests where some demonstrators have used antisemitic slogans or glorified violence.
“American Jews are not bystanders to global terror and domestic extremism. We are deliberate targets,” said William Daroff, CEO of the Conference of Presidents. “The federal government has a mandate to act.”
The delegation plans to advocate for a six-point policy agenda that includes expanding the federal Nonprofit Security Grant Program to $1 billion annually, providing financial support for security personnel at Jewish institutions, boosting FBI resources to combat extremism, and strengthening enforcement of hate crime laws. It will also push for more robust federal aid to local law enforcement and new regulations addressing online hate speech and incitement.
In addition to urging legislation, leaders say they intend to thank lawmakers who have consistently supported Jewish communities and the state of Israel, especially in light of the recent barrage of rockets launched at Israeli cities from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.
“The fight for Jewish security is not just domestic — it is global,” Daroff added. “The stakes have never been higher.”
The mission underscores growing concerns among Jewish Americans who say the dual threats of domestic extremism and rising international hostility toward Israel are converging in dangerous ways — and require a coordinated federal response.
The post Jewish Leaders Plan ‘Emergency Mission’ to Washington, DC to Push US Gov’t for Antisemitism Protections first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Columbia University Releases Campus Antisemitism Climate Survey
Pro-Hamas protesters at Columbia University on April 19, 2024. Photo: Melissa Bender via Reuters Connect
Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism has released a “campus climate” survey which found that Jewish students remain exceedingly uncomfortable attending the institution.
According to the survey, 53 percent of Jewish students said they have been subjected to discrimination because of being Jewish, while another 53 percent reported that their friendships are “strained” because of how overwhelmingly anti-Zionist the student culture is. Meanwhile, 29 percent of Jewish students said they have “lost close friends,” and 59 percent, nearly two-thirds, of Jewish students sensed that they would be better off by electing to “conform their political beliefs” to those of their classmates.
Nearly 62 percent of Jewish students reported “a low feeling of acceptance at Columbia on the basis of their religious identity, and 50 percent said that the pro-Hamas encampments which capped off the 2023-2024 academic year had an “impact” on their daily routines.
Jewish students at Columbia were more likely than their peers to report these negative feelings and experiences, followed by Muslim students.
“As a proud alumna who has spent decades championing this institution, I found the results of this survey difficult to read,” acting Columbia University president Claire Shipman said in a statement. “They put the challenges we face in stark relief. The increase in horrific antisemitic violence in the US and across the globe in recent weeks and months serves as a constant, brutal reminder of the dangers of anti-Jewish bigotry, underscores the urgency with which all concerned citizens need to act in addressing it head-on, and the fact that antisemitism can and should be addressed as a unique form of hatred.”
Shipman added that university officials are “aware of the extent of the immense challenges faced by our Jewish students” and have enacted new policies which strengthen the process for reporting bias and prevent unauthorized demonstrations which upend the campus.
“I am confident we can change this painful dynamic. I know this because we share a commitment to protect all members of our community. We owe it to our students — and to each other,” she said.
Columbia University recently settled a lawsuit brought by a Jewish student at the School of Social Work (CSSW) who accused faculty of unrelenting antisemitic bullying and harassment.
According to court documents, Mackenzie “Macky” Forrest was abused by the faculty, one of whom callously denied her accommodations for sabbath observance and then held out the possibility of her attending class virtually during pro-Hamas protests, which according to several reports and first-hand accounts, made the campus unsafe for Jewish students. Her Jewishness and requests for arrangements which would allow her to complete her assignments created what the Lawfare Project described as a “pretext” for targeting Forrest and conspiring to expel her from the program, a plan that involved fabricating stories with the aim of smearing her as insubordinate.
Spurious accusations were allegedly made by one professor, Andre Ivanoff, who was the first to tell Forrest that her sabbath observance was a “problem.” Ivanoff implied that she had failed to meet standards of “behavioral performance” while administrators spread rumors that she had declined to take on key assignments, according to court documents. This snowballed into a threat: Forrest was allegedly told that she could either take an “F” in a field placement course or drop out, the only action that would prevent sullying her transcript with her failing grade.
Forrest left but has now settled the lawsuit she filed to get justice in terms that Columbia University has buried under a confidentiality agreement.
Columbia was one of the most hostile campuses for Jews employed by or enrolled in an institution of higher education. After Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, the university produced several indelible examples of campus antisemitism, including a student who proclaimed that Zionist Jews deserve to be murdered and are lucky he is not doing so himself and administrative officials who, outraged at the notion that Jews organized to resist anti-Zionism, participated in a group chat in which each member took turns sharing antisemitic tropes that described Jews as privileged and grafting.
Amid these incidents, the university struggled to contain the anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which in late January committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete. Numerous reports indicate the attack may have been the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students.
The university is reportedly restructuring itself to comply with conditions for restoring $400 million in federal funding canceled by US Education Secretary Linda McMahon in March to punish the school’s alleged failure to quell “antisemitic violence and harassment.”
In March, the university issued a memo announcing that it acceded to key demands put forth by the Trump administration as prerequisites for releasing the funds — including a review of undergraduate admissions practices that allegedly discriminate against qualified Jewish applicants, the enforcement of an “anti-mask” policy that protesters have violated to avoid being identified by law enforcement, and enhancements to the university’s security protocols that would facilitate the restoration of order when the campus is disturbed by pro-Hamas radicals and other agitators.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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