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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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The post Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Ohio State University Says It Could Not Stop Holocaust Denier Myron Gaines From Speaking on Campus
Podcaster and commentator Myron Gaines. Photo: Screenshot
The Ohio State University (OSU) has said it was legally powerless to prevent online influencer Myron Gaines — who regularly promotes Nazism, Holocaust denial, and other antisemitic conspiracy theories on his podcast — from speaking on campus late last month amid widespread criticism of its having conferred legitimacy to a man who is notorious for denigrating women, African Americans, and Jews.
“Last week, an external speaker was invited to campus by a registered student organization, and during the visit, a variety of viewpoints were expressed, both by the speaker and those who chose to attend,” the university said following the event, which reportedly saw Gaines greet his audience by pantomiming the Nazi salute.
When asked at the event by a Jewish attendee how many people he believed had been killed by the Holocaust, Gaines replied, “271,000 at best.” He also denied evidence that rape occurred during Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
“Prior to the event, the university remind the host student organization of the expectations and guidelines within the university’s Freedom of Expression Policy … and Use of Outdoor Space policies,” the school added in its statement.
Gaines, whose real name is Amrou Fudl, has become increasingly affiliated with fellow podcaster Nicholas Fuentes’s so-called “groyper” movement, which rejects multiracial democracy, the US-Israel relationship, and liberalism as a political theory.
The “groypers,” a named derived from the evolution of the Pepe the Frog meme popularized by the far right, especially target Jews and the state of Israel most and have reprised antisemitic tropes and conspiracies to promote their agenda. A staple of their ideology is Holocaust denialism and revision, which is trafficked alongside false claims that Israel is committing a genocide of Palestinians.
Last year, Gaines was recorded on video calling a pregnant woman a “fat f**king Jew” while wearing a hoodie mocking Holocaust victims. The incident occurred outside of a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix, Arizona in December. He was wearing a hoodie depicting Sesame Street‘s Cookie Monster standing behind an oven. Above the image was text that read, “Let Em Cook.”
Gaines has been touring US college campuses to influence young minds as part of an initiative sponsored by Uncensored America, a nonprofit organization with ties to the far right.
“While the university is not legally permitted to prohibit free speech, including controversial speech, on its public grounds, appropriate steps were taken to preserve peace and ensure unrestricted travel on campus while it took place,” OSU said in its statement. “The university is also aware of the ways in which some instances of protected speech can personally impact various members of our community, and we remain committed to addressing these impacts when appropriate.”
Gaines’s appearance came amid a surge in right-wing antisemitism, especially among younger Americans.
In March, the University of Florida deactivated its College Republicans chapter following revelations that two of its leaders photographed themselves pantomiming the Nazi salute. Less than two weeks prior to that incident, The Miami Herald disclosed the existence of a virulently racist group chat in which conservative youth in Miami-Dade County, Florida exchanged antisemitic slurs while calling for the of murder African Americans.
Dariel Gonzalez, according to the Herald, was one of the chat’s most prolific contributors, bandying about comments regarding “color professors” and telling members that “You can f—k all the k—kes you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Gonzalez, a former board member of Florida International University’s College Republicans, also reportedly promoted belief in “Agartha,” a Nazi utopia confected by Heinrich Himmler, while fantasizing about the possibility of engaging in onanism there. Some vile remarks drew the approbation of other chat members, many of whom are connected to Republican Party organizations across the state.
Recent polling shows that young Republicans have increasingly embraced antisemitism and conspiracy theories.
In February, for example, a survey by Irwin Mansdorf, a fellow at the Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, and Charles Jacobs, president of the Jewish Leadership Project, found that 45 percent of Republicans under the age of 44 said Jews pose a threat to the “American way of life.”
In December, the Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, released a major poll showing that younger Republican voters are much less supportive of Israel and more likely to express antisemitic views than their older cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of Republicans under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50. Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Good Intentions Without Humility Can Be Dangerous
Rabbi Joseph Shapotshnick. Photo: From the album Samuel Royde’s photos by Samuel Royde, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” It’s one of those sayings we hear so often that it risks sounding trite. But history — and human nature — suggests that it may be one of the most important truths we ignore at our peril.
Because the people who cause the most damage are rarely those with bad intentions. They are the ones who believe, with complete sincerity, that they are doing something necessary — righteous, even — something only they have the courage to do.
In the early decades of the 20th century, in the crowded, combustible world of London’s East End, there lived a rabbi named Joseph Shapotshnick. He was not a marginal figure. Quite the opposite. Charismatic, energetic, creative, exceptionally talented, brilliantly articulate, and a serious scholar, after arriving in London in 1913, he quickly built a following among immigrant Jews who felt mistreated and overlooked by the communal establishment. He spoke their language — literally and figuratively — and positioned himself as their champion as they struggled to acclimate to the harsh realities of their new home.
And in many ways, he was their champion. Shapotshnick saw — and actively addressed — problems others preferred to ignore. He challenged entrenched institutions. He launched newspapers, organizations, and ambitious publishing projects. He believed Judaism needed to be accessible, dynamic, and responsive to the realities of modern life. These were not the instincts of a cynic. They were the instincts of someone who cared deeply — perhaps too deeply.
Because there was another layer. Behind the activism, behind the creativity, behind the undeniable passion, there was a pattern. Shapotshnick’s projects were grand — often breathtakingly so — but frequently untethered from practical reality.
His grand-sounding “Rabbinical Association” was, in essence, a one-man enterprise. His publishing ambitions stretched into the realm of the fantastical. Time and again, he demonstrated what can only be described as a profound inability to recognize the limits of his own authority and expertise. And then came the moment that would define him.
In the aftermath of the First World War, Jewish communities across Europe were grappling with a heartbreaking and complex crisis: agunot — women whose husbands had disappeared, possibly dead but possibly not, leaving them unable to remarry under Jewish law. It was a real and deeply painful problem, one that demanded not just compassion, but immense halachic skill and sensitivity to resolve.
And so, Shapotshnick stepped in. But he did not approach the issue as a careful halachic authority would — working case by case, building consensus, navigating the intricate web of precedent and responsibility. Instead, he sought something far more sweeping.
Shapotshnick envisioned systemic solutions — bold, far-reaching changes that would release every agunah, freeing them all to remarry. He issued rulings, claimed support from rabbinic colleagues he had barely — or never — consulted, publicized his conclusions, and positioned himself squarely at the center of the effort.
From his perspective, he was doing something heroic. After all, who could argue with the goal? Who wouldn’t want to alleviate suffering? Who wouldn’t want to free trapped women from impossible situations?
But that is precisely where the danger lay. Because what he failed to recognize was that, notwithstanding his good intentions, the very scale and sensitivity of the problem demanded restraint, not audacity. More than anything, it demanded a deep awareness of one’s own limitations.
Instead, what emerged was something else entirely: a man so convinced of the righteousness of his cause that he no longer saw the boundaries that should have governed his actions.
And then another layer began to surface — one far less noble. Alongside his passion for justice came an increasingly strident tone, particularly in his attacks on the leading rabbinic authorities of his day. Instead of engaging with them, debating them, or even deferring to their vastly greater experience, Shapotshnick dismissed them. Worse than that, he mocked them, positioning himself not merely as a challenger to the establishment, but as its superior.
What may have begun as a sincere attempt to solve a painful communal problem now revealed a deeper undercurrent: an ego that could not tolerate opposition, that interpreted disagreement as obstruction, and that saw itself as uniquely qualified to succeed where others had failed. In doing so, he didn’t just alienate the very people whose support he needed — he undermined the legitimacy of his own cause.
The tragedy is that his good intentions were real. But they were ultimately eclipsed by an inflated sense of self that turned a worthy cause into a personal crusade — and, in the process, weakened the very thing he was trying to achieve.
And of course, none of this was new. It is a pattern that has been repeated throughout history, and it already appears at the dawn of Jewish history, in Parshat Shemini. At the height of one of the most sacred moments in Jewish history — the inauguration of the Mishkan — two towering figures, Nadav and Avihu, the sons of Aharon, step forward to bring a special offering.
It was an act of devotion, an expression of spiritual longing. And then, in an instant, they are gone, felled in a moment of divine judgment. The Torah’s explanation is both simple and devastating: They offered a foreign fire, which they had not been commanded to bring.
It is one of the most perplexing episodes in the Torah. Nadav and Avihu were clearly great people, and the commentaries struggle to come to terms with their misstep. One opinion is that they acted in the presence of Moshe without consulting him, even though he was clearly their senior in wisdom and authority.
Their spiritual enthusiasm is not in doubt, but the underlying critique is simple: They allowed their inflated sense of themselves to override the boundaries that should have constrained them. They were drawing close to God, but entirely on their own terms — an example of ego overriding submission to a higher authority.
If you begin to believe your own PR — that your intentions are so pure, and your insights so refined, that the usual constraints no longer apply — you are already in dangerous territory. Because in that moment, good intentions turn into self-assertion. And self-assertion, in a sacred space, becomes hubris.
The tragedy of Nadav and Avihu is not a story of bad intentions. It is a story of good intentions untethered from humility. And that is precisely what makes it so unsettling — because it is so easy to see ourselves in it.
Rabbi Joseph Shapotshnick fell into that same trap. He cared deeply, and he acted boldly. But in doing so, he inserted himself into a space that demanded something else — not less passion, but more restraint. He was not lacking in courage; he was lacking in humility.
We should admire people who challenge systems and push boundaries — sometimes, that instinct is exactly what is needed. But there is a caveat: Never let ego overtake the process. The most dangerous moment is not when someone acts maliciously. It is when someone becomes so convinced of the purity of their intentions that they no longer consider the possibility that they might be wrong. That is when even the noblest cause becomes distorted. You have to know where you end, and the system begins — and understand that conviction is not a license to act without limits.
Joseph Shapotshnick wanted to fix a broken world. In that, he was not alone — and he was not wrong. But in the story of Nadav and Avihu, the Torah reminds us, in the most dramatic way possible, that wanting to do something good does not justify the way it is done. Good intentions matter. But without humility, they are not enough.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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I’m a Jewish candidate for New York comptroller. Our state must divest from Israel bonds
The New York state and local retirement fund owns $368 million in Israel bonds. Most state pension funds own none. And most New Yorkers have no idea that their tax-funded pension fund, as invested by State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, helps finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.
As an American Jew and as a candidate for New York state comptroller, I want to offer why I have committed, as part of my campaign, to divest this stake.
We have just finished observing Passover, our people’s essential story of freedom. It is also a story of reckoning. As we read through the book of Exodus, we learn that a walk that would normally have taken four weeks took 40 years as our ancestors wrestled with God and false idols, with each other and with themselves. Because liberation required reckoning — an entire generation of it — so the children of these refugees could understand that freedom comes not just with power but also responsibility.
This Passover gave us many reasons to reckon with our own power and responsibility.
Our country has been at war. Again. Our president has turned mask-wearing, rifle-wielding agents on our own people. Our politicians talk tough in echo chambers designed to echo louder and louder.
And as American Jews at this moment, many of us are also reckoning with Israel.
When I take on that reckoning, a word repeated ritually at our Seder comes to mind: “dayenu.” A word so sacred to me — meaning “it would have been enough for us” — that it is engraved on the Star of David I wear around my neck.
But it rang differently for me this year. Instead of hearing “dayenu” as an expression of gratitude for every single step of God’s deliverance, the word hit me like a piercing shofar blast, crying: “enough is enough!”
When is enough today?
Responding to the Hamas massacre of its civilians on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel said it would do what any country would do: defend itself and get its hostages back. But Netanyahu’s government has gone much further than that. It has unleashed overwhelming killing power, leaving tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians dead and millions more displaced and destitute. It has leveled a stretch of land the size of Brooklyn and Queens — dropping nearly as many bombs in that crowded space in the first week of fighting as fell during an entire year of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
It has also sponsored a newly energized and brutal expansion of settlements in the West Bank; just this week, the government approved 34 new settlements. And it has now invaded Lebanon after joining the U.S. in a bombing war against Iran.
The images from the massacre and trauma perpetrated by Hamas haunt me. But the Jewish values I grew up with — like tikkun olam (repairing the world) and ha lachma anya (the Seder’s call to offer what we have to those whose needs are greater) — could never justify responding to this trauma with such overwhelming cruelty. We have witnessed blockades and starvation; the cutting off of medical supplies; and the murder and displacement of children and families.
New York state must not enable or be complicit in such human misery any longer.
Our current state comptroller, who has been in office since 2007, does not see it that way. He continues to use New Yorkers’ money to finance Netanyahu’s war machine. He purchased an additional $20 million in Israel bonds after Oct. 7, and chose not to sell them as Israel’s government ravaged Gaza. The present campaign, in which Democratic voters will be able to cast a primary vote against DiNapoli for the first time in 20 years, gives us the opportunity to make a different choice.
We can and must divest our public pension fund’s stake in financing Israel’s government, and from all other foreign governments. (New York state holds stakes in just three other countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Canada, a degree of selectivity that suggests no coherent strategy). And we can do so now instead of waiting decades for these bonds to mature, as some of my opponents in this primary have proposed.
This makes financial and moral sense. The record amount of Israel debt DiNapoli has amassed — it currently makes up 80% of all foreign government debt owned by our pension fund — poses a concentration risk.
But concentration risk aside, there has to be a point when we reach our own limit, when we say enough is enough. If not, we lose what it means to be human. As humans, with God-given freedom and the responsibility that comes with it, we face the reality that the merciless policies of Netanyahu’s government represent a moral catastrophe, and New York state cannot continue to finance them.
The words of Exodus 23:9 leap off the page: “No stranger shall you oppress, for you know the stranger’s heart, since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” This is our call, as Jews, to fight for the stranger wherever they may be.
If you have the power to do something about it, you do it. And if you don’t have the power, you fight for it.
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