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Why Every Young American Should See Ari’el Stachel’s ‘Other’
Ari’el Stachel in “Other.” Photo: provided.
Theatre has always been one of the most powerful spaces for self-reflection. It is intimate and raw, placing us in the dark together while a performer unfolds a story that demands our attention. Unlike film or television, there is no screen to hide behind, no pause button, no escape. We share the same room, the same air, and we can’t look away.
Ari’el Stachel’s new solo play — originally staged as Out of Character and now retitled Other — leans fully into that vulnerability. Stachel, who grew up with a Yemeni-Jewish father and a European Ashkenazi mother, has lived his life moving between worlds. His Jewish story is the entry point, but the performance quickly expands outward. He is able to pass as Jewish, Arab, Middle Eastern, and even Black, depending on context. At times, this mobility is liberating, opening doors to multiple communities. At others it is alienating, leaving him with the disorienting sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Other is about carrying multiple voices within a single body and still searching for one authentic voice.
The backdrop of 9/11 looms large in Stachel’s account. As a boy in California, he watched his father — darker-skinned, bearded, recognizably Middle Eastern — suddenly become a figure of suspicion. Overnight, his family’s presence was filtered through the fear and mistrust that saturated America after the attacks. For Stachel, it was a formative trauma. He recounts how he began distancing himself from his father’s appearance and heritage, denying or reshaping parts of his identity in order to escape the judgments of others. What might have been a simple story of a mixed-heritage Jewish boyhood became a painful initiation into the politics of race, religion, and suspicion in post-9/11 America.
The performance is brutally honest. Stachel doesn’t just tell stories; he embodies dozens of characters — parents, teachers, classmates, inner demons — giving voice to the forces that shaped him. Critics who saw the earlier Out of Character noted how he performed more than 40 roles over the course of the evening, slipping between them with humor and intensity. At the center of it all is his anxiety, personified on stage as a relentless voice; a tormentor who exposes his insecurities and self-doubt. Even the physicality of the performance matters: at times, Stachel literally sweats under the strain, his body underscoring the emotional labor of wrestling with self-hood in public.
What makes Other so compelling is how it resists flattening. Stachel could have chosen to present a neat identity that pleased everyone. He could have leaned into his Ashkenazi heritage in Jewish spaces, downplayed his father’s Arab and Yemeni roots in the broader culture, or passed as Black when it fit. Instead, he embraces contradiction. He admits to the pain of passing, to the shame of dissembling, to the exhaustion of being welcomed everywhere but rooted nowhere. His honesty is not tidy, but it is deeply human and it is precisely what gives the play its moral force.
For Jews, Other carries special resonance. Too often, American Jewish life is imagined narrowly, as if it were monochrome and monolithic. In reality, it encompasses Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi heritages, as well as countless blends created by Diaspora and intermarriage. Stachel’s story insists that Jewish identity is wide, textured, and complex. By putting a Yemeni-Ashkenazi household on stage, he gives voice to Jews of color and Jews of mixed heritage who have too often felt peripheral in communal narratives. Other says clearly: you belong.
But Other is not just a Jewish story. It is also an Arab story, a Middle Eastern story, a Black story, and an American story. It is about what it means to be welcomed conditionally, mistrusted reflexively, and asked to define yourself in ways that never quite fit. For Arabs and Middle Eastern Americans, it is rare representation that does not reduce or stereotype. For Black Americans, it echoes the struggle of reconciling self-knowledge with the perceptions imposed by others. And for every young American navigating multiple expectations — between family and school, tradition and modernity, online and offline — it is a reminder that identity is not a slogan but a journey.
The play also speaks to our cultural moment. Cancel culture and digital performance have created an environment where young people feel pressure to present a polished, singular self for approval. Nuance is suspect. Ambiguity is punished. Doubt is treated as weakness. Other resists that world. It demonstrates that wholeness comes not from clarity but from wrestling — not from erasing contradictions, but from inhabiting them.
That is why Other deserves more than applause from Jewish audiences. It deserves to be seen as a work that speaks to all Americans, and especially to the rising generation. It shows that identity is not fixed but fluid, that belonging is never simple, and that authenticity often comes through tension rather than resolution. These are lessons our fractured culture badly needs.
Great theatre does not just entertain; it enlarges our sympathies. It forces us to see ourselves in another’s story and to carry that recognition out of the theatre and back into the world. Stachel’s Other does exactly that. It challenges Jews to expand our sense of who belongs. It challenges Americans to reconsider the categories we use to define one another. And it challenges young people to resist the temptations of performance and to find their authentic voice in the midst of contradiction.
In Jewish tradition, we often return to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story of struggle without resolution, of wounds that endure, but also of blessings that come only through the fight. Stachel’s play is a modern wrestling. It is a man confronting his many “others,” refusing easy answers, and choosing to tell the truth of his fractured self. That is why it is Jewish. That is why it is universal. And that is why every young American should see it.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Vance downplays ‘little skirmishes’ as Israel bombs in Gaza and Hamas fails to return hostages
(JTA) — Israel carried out a bombing campaign in Gaza on Tuesday in response to what it said was violations of the two-week-old ceasefire by Hamas.
Hamas, meanwhile, rejected the claim that it was behind an attack on Israeli soldiers and said Israel’s bombing was the ceasefire violation.
The two developments, plus Hamas’ continued holding of 13 hostages’ remains, represented the biggest threats yet to the U.S. brokered ceasefire in the two-year-long Gaza war. But U.S. Vice President JD Vance said he remained unconcerned.
“The ceasefire is holding,” Vance told reporters in Washington. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there.”
Vance traveled to Israel last week as part of a U.S. pressure campaign to preserve the truce and set the region on a path toward a deeper peace. Both Israel and Hamas have tested the terms of the ceasefire.
Hamas has not released the remains of all of hostages as required by the ceasefire and on Monday night returned remains belonging to a murdered Israeli whose body had previously been returned to Israel. Video footage from Gaza appeared to show Hamas placing the remains underground before retrieving them to hand to the Red Cross for transport to Israel — a charade that the Red Cross denounced as “unacceptable” in a statement.
Hamas said it would halt the planned release of another hostage’s remains on Tuesday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he ordered “immediate and powerful strikes in Gaza” following a meeting of his security advisors.
The strikes followed an attack on Israeli soldiers in Rafah, a portion of Gaza that remains under Israeli military control.
“The attack on IDF soldiers in Gaza today by the Hamas terror organization crosses a glaring red line to which the IDF will respond with great force,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement. “Hamas will pay many times over for attacking the soldiers and for violating the agreement to return the fallen hostages.”
Hamas said it did not carry out the attack and that the airstrikes, which it said killed at least nine people in Gaza, represented a violation of the ceasefire. But it said it remained committed to the truce, which has so far allowed it to reassert control within Gaza. A second phase, required once all hostages are released, calls for Hamas’ disarmament.
Vance said he understood that an Israeli soldier had been attacked. “We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that,” he said.
The post Vance downplays ‘little skirmishes’ as Israel bombs in Gaza and Hamas fails to return hostages appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Vance downplays ‘little skirmishes’ as Israel bombs in Gaza and Hamas fails to return hostages
Israel carried out a bombing campaign in Gaza on Tuesday in response to what it said was violations of the two-week-old ceasefire by Hamas.
Hamas, meanwhile, rejected the claim that it was behind an attack on Israeli soldiers and said Israel’s bombing was the ceasefire violation.
The two developments, plus Hamas’ continued holding of 13 hostages’ remains, represented the biggest threats yet to the U.S. brokered ceasefire in the two-year-long Gaza war. But U.S. Vice President JD Vance said he remained unconcerned.
“The ceasefire is holding,” Vance told reporters in Washington. “That doesn’t mean that there aren’t going to be little skirmishes here and there.”
Vance traveled to Israel last week as part of a U.S. pressure campaign to preserve the truce and set the region on a path toward a deeper peace. Both Israel and Hamas have tested the terms of the ceasefire.
Hamas has not released the remains of all of hostages as required by the ceasefire and on Monday night returned remains belonging to a murdered Israeli whose body had previously been returned to Israel. Video footage from Gaza appeared to show Hamas placing the remains underground before retrieving them to hand to the Red Cross for transport to Israel — a charade that the Red Cross denounced as “unacceptable” in a statement.
Hamas said it would halt the planned release of another hostage’s remains on Tuesday after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said he ordered “immediate and powerful strikes in Gaza” following a meeting of his security advisors.
The strikes followed an attack on Israeli soldiers in Rafah, a portion of Gaza that remains under Israeli military control.
“The attack on IDF soldiers in Gaza today by the Hamas terror organization crosses a glaring red line to which the IDF will respond with great force,” Foreign Minister Israel Katz said in a statement. “Hamas will pay many times over for attacking the soldiers and for violating the agreement to return the fallen hostages.”
Hamas said it did not carry out the attack and that the airstrikes, which it said killed at least nine people in Gaza, represented a violation of the ceasefire. But it said it remained committed to the truce, which has so far allowed it to reassert control within Gaza. A second phase, required once all hostages are released, calls for Hamas’ disarmament.
Vance said he understood that an Israeli soldier had been attacked. “We expect the Israelis are going to respond, but I think the president’s peace is going to hold despite that,” he said.
—
The post Vance downplays ‘little skirmishes’ as Israel bombs in Gaza and Hamas fails to return hostages appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Harvard Demands Dismissal of Latest Antisemitism Lawsuit
A Jewish student at Harvard University harassed by anti-Israel protesters. Photo: Screenshot
Harvard University on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss an antisemitism lawsuit which alleges that administrative officials violated civil rights law when they declined to impose meaningful disciplinary sanctions on two students who allegedly assaulted a Jewish student during a protest held to rally anti-Israel activists just days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israeli communities.
According to The Harvard Crimson, the university’s lawyers contended that the Jewish student, Yoav Segev, has not backed his claim with evidence and that his grievance is founded not in any legally recognizable harm but a disagreement regarding policy.
“Mr. Segev’s allegation, then, is not that Harvard failed to take action, but simply that he disagrees with the actions taken after the investigation,” the university’s lawyers wrote in a filing submitted on Monday, adding that the school believes Segev’s contention that Harvard “conspired” to deny him justice cannot be substantiated.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Segev endured a mobbing of pro-Hamas activists led by Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, who stalked him across Harvard Yard before encircling him and screaming “Shame! Shame! Shame!” as he struggled to break free from the mass of bodies which surrounded him. Video of the incident, widely viewed online at the time, showed the crush of people shoving keffiyehs — traditional headdresses worn by men in the Middle East that in some circles have come to symbolize Palestinian nationalism — in the face of the student, whom they had identified as Jewish.
Nearly two years after the assault, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo have not only avoided hate crime charges but also even amassed new accolades and distinctions — according to multiple reports.
After being charged with assault and battery, the two men were ordered in April by Boston Municipal Court Judge Stephen McClenon to attend “pre-trial diversion” anger management courses and perform 80 hours of community service each, a decision which did not require their apologizing to Segev even though Assistant District Attorney Ursula Knight described what they did as “hands on assault and battery.”
Harvard neither disciplined Bharmal nor removed him from the presidency of the Harvard Law Review, a coveted post once held by former US President Barack Obama. As of last year, he was awarded a law clerkship with the Public Defender for the District of Columbia, a government-funded agency which provides free legal counsel to “individuals … who are charged with committing serious criminal acts.” Bharmal also reaped a $65,000 fellowship from Harvard Law School to work at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic group whose leaders have defended the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s atrocities against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023.
As for Tettey-Tamaklo, he walked away from Harvard Divinity School with honors, according to The Free Press, as the 2024 Class Committee for Harvard voted him class marshal, a role in which he led the graduation procession through Harvard Yard alongside the institution’s most accomplished scholars and faculty. Harvard did, however, terminate his serving as a proctor for freshmen students.
The US campus antisemitism crisis has kept Harvard University in the headlines.
Earlier this month it disclosed a $113 million budget deficit caused by the Trump administration’s confiscation of much of its federal contracts and grants as punishment for, among other alleged misdeeds, its admitted failure to combat antisemitism on its campus.
According to Harvard’s “Financial Report: Fiscal Year 2025,” the university’s spending exceeded the $6.7 billion it amassed from donations, taxpayer support, tuition, and other income sources, such as endowment funds earmarked for operational expenses. Harvard also suffered a steep deficit in non-restricted donor funds, $212 million, a possible indication that philanthropists now hesitate to write America’s oldest university a blank check due to its inveterate generating of negative publicity — prompted by such episodes as the institution’s botching the appointment of its first Black president by conferring the honor to a plagiarist and its failing repeatedly to quell antisemitic discrimination and harassment.
“Even by the standards of our centuries-long history, fiscal year 2025 was extraordinarily challenging, with political and economic disruption affecting many sectors, including higher education,” Harvard president Alan Garber said in a statement. “We continue to adapt to uncertainty and threats to sources of revenue that have sustained our work for many years. We have intensified our efforts to expand our sources of funding.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.