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Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it.
NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?
Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.
“One artistic director who was thinking of doing this [play] was like, ‘You know, it’s not like he’s Hamlet, but…’ And I thought, well, no, actually I think he is like Hamlet!” she said.
She added another take: “I feel like he’s Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel.”
Hansberry saw just two of her works produced on Broadway before her death from cancer at 34 in January 1965. Her first, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which follows a Black family dealing with housing discrimination in Chicago, is widely considered one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. The other, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” ran for a few months in the fall of 1964 until Hansberry’s death and has only been revived a handful of times since, all outside of New York.
Now, the star power of Isaac and Brosnahan is driving renewed interest in the play, which deals with weighty questions about political activism, self-fulfillment in a capitalist world, and racial and ethnic identity — including mid-century Jewish American identity.
The Brustein character, as Kauffman alluded to, is many things. A resident of Greenwich Village deeply embedded in that historic neighborhood’s 1960s activist and artistic circles, he is somewhat of a creative renaissance man. At the start of the play, his club of sorts (“it was not a nightclub” is a running joke) called “Walden Pond” has just shuttered and he has taken over an alternative newspaper. As the script reads, Brustein is an intellectual “in the truest sense of the word” but “does not wear glasses” — the latter description being a possible jab at his macho tendencies. Formerly an ardent leftist activist, he is now weary of the worth of activism and a bit of a nihilist. He’s in his late 30s and is a musician who often picks up a banjo.
Brustein is also a secular Jew, a fact that he telegraphs at certain key emotional and comedic moments. Others, from friends to his casually antisemitic sister-in-law, frequently reference his identity, too.
At the end of the play’s first half, for example, Brustein brings up the heroes of the Hanukkah story in talking about his existential angst — and his stomach ulcer. He has become belligerent to his wife Iris and to a local politician who wants Brustein’s paper’s endorsement.
“How does one confront the thousand nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time? Can a sword pierce it?” Sidney says. “One does not smite evil anymore: one holds one’s gut, thus — and takes a pill. Oh, but to take up the sword of the Maccabees again!”
Hansberry’s decision to center a white Jewish character surprised critics and fans alike in 1964 because many of them expected her to follow “A Raisin in the Sun” with further exploration of issues facing Black Americans, said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
“The major attack, both critically and on a popular basis, in regards to the play and to its central character was that Lorraine was out of her lane,” Gresham said. “That not only did she not know what she’s talking about, but that she had the nerve to even examine that subject matter.”
Hansberry’s closest collaborator was her former husband Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker whom she had divorced in 1962 but maintained an artistic partnership with. Nemiroff was a bit Brustein-like in his pursuits: he edited books, produced and promoted Hansberry’s work, and even wrote songs (one of which made the couple enough money to allow Hansberry to focus on writing “A Raisin in the Sun”). But Gresham — who is Nemiroff’s stepdaughter through his second marriage, to professor Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff — emphasized that his personality was nothing like Brustein’s. While Brustein is brash and mean to Iris, Nemiroff was undyingly supportive of Hansberry and her work, said Gresham, who lived with him and her mother at Nemiroff’s Croton-on-Hudson home — the one he had formerly shared for a time with Hansberry — from age 10 onward.
Instead, Gresham argued, the Brustein character was the result of Hansberry’s deep engagement with Jewish intellectual thought, in part influenced by her relationship with Nemiroff. The pair met at a protest and would bond over their passion for fighting for social justice, which included combating antisemitism. The night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and they would remain highly involved in the wave of activism that blossomed into the Black-Jewish civil rights alliance.
“Bob and Lorraine met and built a life together at a place where there was a very strong Black-Jewish nexus. There was a very strong interplay and interaction,” Gresham said. “I think Lorraine was very influenced by Bob’s family, the Nemiroffs, who were very radical in their politics. And so there was a way in which she was introduced to the base of Jewish intellectualism and Jewish progressive politics, that she took to heart and she was very passionate about.”
Robert Nemiroff and Lorraine Hansberry were married from 1953-62. They are shown here in 1959. (Ben Martin/Getty Images)
Hansberry didn’t hesitate to criticize Jewish writers who said controversial things about Black Americans, either. When Norman Podhoretz wrote “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” an explosive 1963 article in Commentary magazine now widely seen as racist, Hansberry responded with a scathing rebuke. She also sparred with Norman Mailer, who once wrote an essay titled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
Gresham said Brustein’s nihilism represents what Hansberry saw in a range of Jewish and non-Jewish white writers, whom she hoped could be kickstarted back into activism. But Hansberry also nodded to the reasons why someone like Brustein could feel defeated in the early 1960s, a decade and a half after World War II.
“You mean diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones? Forget about the Holocaust and worry about — reforms in the traffic court or something?” Brustein says at one point in the play to a local politician running as a reformer.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish scholar of literature who has written on Hansberry, said the resulting Brustein character is a very accurate depiction of a secular Jew at the time — both keenly attuned to prejudice in society and also lacking some understanding of the experience of being Black.
“I was just intoxicated that Hansberry could conjure that world, both so affectionately, but also so clear-sidedly that it seems like she can see the limitations of all of the characters’ perspectives,” he said. “But she also represents them with sympathy and humor.”
Kauffman, who also helmed a revival of the play in Chicago in 2016, is impressed with how “fully fledged” the Brustein character is.
“Who are the cultural icons who have sort of articulated the Jew in our culture in the last 50 years or 60 years, you know?” she said. “Brustein is not a caricature of a Woody Allen character, he’s not even ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ or a Jerry Seinfeld character. He’s a fully drawn character.”
Isaac, who is of mainly Guatemalan and Cuban heritage, has played Jewish characters before, including a formerly Orthodox man in an Israeli director’s remake of the classic film “Scenes From a Marriage.” In the lead-up to this play, he has largely avoided getting caught in headlines focused on the “Jewface” debate, over whether non-Jewish actors should be allowed to play Jewish characters on stage and screen.
But when asked about the responsibility of playing a Jewish character in a New York Times interview, Isaac referenced the fact that he has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side.
“We could play that game: How Jewish are you?” he said to interviewer Alexis Soloski, who is Jewish. “It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.”
When Kauffman directed a version of the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2016, her lead actor had “not a single drop of Jewish heritage…in his blood,” and she said she had to convey “what anger looks like” coming from a Jewish perspective. Working with Isaac has been different — instead of starting at a base of no knowledge, she has been pushing for more of an Ashkenazi sensibility than a Sephardic one.
“I believe that his heritage leans, I’m guessing, more towards Sephardic. And mine is pure Ashkenazi,” she said. “We sort of joke: ‘[The part] is a little bit more Ashkenazi than that, you know what I mean?’ Like, ‘the violence is actually turned towards yourself!’”
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UK Approves US Use of British Bases to Strike Iran Missile Sites Targeting Ships
People use their cameras as a USAF B-1 bomber approaches to land at RAF Fairford airbase, used by United States Air Force (USAF) personnel, amid the US–Israeli conflict with Iran, in Fairford, Gloucestershire, Britain, March 17, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
The British government gave authorization on Friday for the US to use military bases in Britain to carry out strikes on Iranian missile sites that are attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
British ministers met on Friday to discuss the war with Iran and Iran‘s blocking of the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Downing Street statement.
“They confirmed that the agreement for the US to use UK bases in the collective self-defence of the region includes US defensive operations to degrade the missile sites and capabilities being used to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz,” the statement said.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said in a post on X that Starmer was “putting British lives in danger by allowing UK bases to be used for aggression against Iran,” adding “Iran will exercise its right to self-defense.”
Starmer said this week Britain would not be drawn into a war over Iran. He initially rejected a US request to use British bases for the strikes on Iran, saying he needed to be satisfied that any military action was legal.
But the prime minister modified his stance after Iran conducted strikes on British allies across the Middle East, saying that the United States could use RAF Fairford and Diego Garcia, a joint US-UK base in the Indian Ocean.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly attacked Starmer since the conflict started, complaining he was not doing enough to help him.
On Monday, Trump said there were “some countries that greatly disappointed me” before he singled out Britain, which he said had once been considered “the Rolls-Royce of allies.”
The Downing Street statement on Friday called for “urgent de-escalation and a swift resolution to the war.”
Opinion polls in Britain suggest widespread skepticism about the war, with 59% of those surveyed by YouGov saying that they were opposed to the US-Israeli attacks.
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French Appeals Court Rules Vandalism of Memorial for Murdered Jew Not Antisemitic
A crowd gathers at the Jardin Ilan Halimi in Paris on Feb. 14, 2021, to commemorate the 15th anniversary of Halimi’s kidnapping and murder. Photo: Reuters/Xose Bouzas/Hans Lucas
A French appeals court has acquitted Tunisian twin brothers of antisemitism charges after they cut down an olive tree planted to honor Ilan Halimi, a young French Jewish man tortured to death two decades ago, in what appears to be yet another instance of France’s legal system brushing aside antisemitism as a potential motive for crime.
On Wednesday, the Paris Court of Appeal upheld the decision from the initial trial in October to dismiss the charge that the crime was motivated by antisemitism, which would have increased the punishments for the two brothers. The judges found no evidence that the assailants knew of Halimi’s identity or history or acted with the intent to target his memory because of his religious affiliation.
The court’s ruling this week upheld the original convictions, sentencing both men to eight months in prison — one with a suspended sentence, meaning he will only serve time if he reoffends or violates certain conditions, and who has since been deported to Tunisia. Both men are also barred from entering France for five years.
The two 19-year-old undocumented men with prior convictions for theft and violence were arrested in August for vandalizing Halimi’s memorial in the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine.
During the initial trial in Bobigny, in northeastern France, the brothers faced charges of “aggravated destruction of property” and “desecration of a monument dedicated to the memory of the dead on the basis of race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion,” offenses carrying sentences of up to two years in prison.
The court acquitted them of committing an antisemitic hate crime, ruling that they were unaware they had desecrated Halimi’s memorial.
Even though they admitted to being in the garden on the night of the incident, the brothers denied cutting down the tree and claimed they were unaware of Halimi’s story, leading the court to rule that the act was not antisemitic in nature.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, Halimi was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. Last year, in one of the latest attacks on his memory, the memorial in the northern Paris suburb of Épinay-sur-Seine was found felled — probably with a chainsaw.
Since the attack, French authorities have been working to replant olive trees to honor Halimi’s memory.
This latest case is by no means the first in France to raise alarm bells among the Jewish community, as courts have repeatedly overturned or reduced sentences for individuals accused of antisemitic crimes, fueling public outrage over what many see as excessive leniency.
In February, a French court tossed out antisemitic-motivated charges against a 55-year-old man convicted of murdering his 89-year-old Jewish neighbor in 2022.
According to French media, the magistrate of the public prosecutor’s office refused to consider the defendant’s prior antisemitic behavior, including online posts spreading hateful content and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis, arguing that it was not directly related to the incident itself.
In May 2022, Rachid Kheniche threw his neighbor, René Hadjadj, from the 17th floor of his building, an act to which he later admitted.
At the time, Kheniche told investigators that while having a discussion, he tried to strangle Hadjadj without realizing what he was doing, as he was experiencing a paranoid episode caused by prior drug use.
After several psychiatric evaluations, the court concluded that the defendant was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, reducing his criminal responsibility and lowering the maximum sentence for murder to 20 years.
Kheniche was ultimately sentenced to 18 years in prison and six years of “socio-judicial monitoring.”
Last year, the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, just west of Paris, appealed a criminal court ruling that cleared a nanny of antisemitism-aggravated charges after she poisoned the food and drinks of the Jewish family she worked for.
Residing illegally in France, the nanny had worked as a live-in caregiver for the family and their three children — aged two, five, and seven — since November 2023.
The 42-year-old Algerian woman was sentenced to two and a half years in prison for “administering a harmful substance that caused incapacitation for more than eight days.”
Even though the nanny initially denied the charges against her, she later confessed to police that she had poured a soapy lotion into the family’’ food as a warning because “they were disrespecting her.”
“They have money and power, so I should never have worked for a Jewish woman — it only brought me trouble,” the nanny told the police. “I knew I could hurt them, but not enough to kill them.”
The French court declined to uphold any antisemitism charges against the defendant, noting that her incriminating statements were made several weeks after the incident and recorded by a police officer without a lawyer present
In another shocking case last year, a local court in France dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted of the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
More than a year after the attack, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure.
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US Sending Marines and Amphibious Assault Ship to Middle East, Officials Say
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth holds a briefing with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, at the Pentagon in Washington, DC, US, March 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Evan Vucci
The US military is deploying thousands more Marines to the Middle East, officials told Reuters on Friday, as President Donald Trump accused NATO allies of cowardice over their reluctance to send forces to help open the Strait of Hormuz.
The narrow waterway, conduit for around a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, has been effectively closed to most shipping since the United States and Israel launched the war against Iran almost three weeks ago.
Vital energy infrastructure in both Iran and neighboring Gulf states has also been attacked, and oil prices have jumped about 50% since the start of the war on Feb. 28, threatening a global economic shock.
More than 2,000 people have been killed, mostly in Iran and Lebanon, while Americans, facing sharply higher prices, appear increasingly concerned at signs the war could expand further.
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump will order troops into a large-scale ground war, with only 7% supporting such a move.
On Friday, Israel’s military said it carried out two large waves of air strikes on Tehran and central Iran, targeting weapons production facilities and sites storing ballistic missile launchers and components. Israel faced multiple waves of missile attacks from Iran, according to the Israeli military, triggering air raid sirens in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where explosions from interceptions were heard.
Fragments from an Iranian missile struck Jerusalem on Friday, landing just outside the Old City, which is sacred to Christians, Jews, and Muslims, according to a photograph released by the police. There were no reports of injuries or casualties.
Kuwait’s state oil firm said its Mina Al-Ahmadi refinery had suffered multiple drone attacks that set some units alight, the latest energy facility hit by Iran in recent days.
TROOPS DEPLOY
Three US officials told Reuters that 2,500 Marines, along with the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, and accompanying warships would deploy to the region, although they did not say what their role would be.
Two officials said there had been no decision on whether to send troops into Iran itself. Sources have earlier told Reuters that possible targets could include Iran‘s coast or Kharg Island oil export hub.
Trump said the United States was close to reaching its goals in the war, which include degrading Iran‘s military and preventing it from developing a nuclear weapon, and may wind down its military effort.
Trump also called US allies “cowards” for declining to help open the Strait of Hormuz while fighting continued in a conflict they were not consulted about beforehand.
Several allies have pledged to join “appropriate efforts” to ensure safe passage through the strait, but Germany and France have both said fighting must stop first. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he would speak to Trump this weekend.
The UK government authorized the US to use its bases in Britain to strike Iranian missile sites that are targeting ships in the strait.
END OF RAMADAN AND PERSIAN NEW YEAR
As Muslims around the region tried to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, which ends the fasting month of Ramadan, and Iranians marked Nowruz, the Persian New Year, new Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei issued a message of defiance.
Khamenei, who has not been seen in public since the Israeli attack that killed his father and predecessor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on the war’s first day, said Iranians had responded with unity and resistance and “dealt a disorienting blow to the enemy.”
US and Israeli officials say Iran can still hit back, even though weeks of bombing have severely weakened the government and depleted its stock of missiles and drones.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said they had attacked Haifa and Tel Aviv with multi-warhead missiles and used drones to attack weapons stocks at US bases, including Sheikh Isa air base in Bahrain. No comment was immediately available from US forces.
The semi-official Iranian news agency Tasnim said intelligence minister Esmail Ahmadi was killed, the latest of dozens of leading figures assassinated by Israel.
“We have nobody to talk to,” Trump said. “And you know what? We like it that way.”
FUEL PRICES CLIMB AHEAD OF US ELECTIONS
Soaring US diesel and gasoline prices may hurt Trump’s core political support as his Republicans prepare to defend slim majorities in November’s congressional elections.
On Friday, the benchmark price of Brent crude oil was up slightly, near $110, after surging the day before on growing fears that the largest ever disruption to world energy supplies would trigger a global economic shock.
Flows of crude and petroleum have dropped by about 12 million barrels per day – roughly 12% of global demand – due to output cuts and export halts by Gulf producers.
Those barrels cannot easily be replaced by the industries that rely on them, and will be felt for months or even years.
A major Qatari gas field was disrupted by an Iranian strike, and Iraq on Friday declared force majeure on all oilfields developed by foreign oil companies.