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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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Jewish Chef Eitan Bernath Sets New Guinness World Record for Making Largest Matzah Ball Soup
Eitan Bernath set a new Guinness World Record for making the largest serving of matzah ball soup on Feb. 27, 2026. Photo: Eric Vitale
Jewish chef and cookbook author Eitan Bernath recently set a new Guinness World Record for making the largest serving of matzah ball soup.
The matzah ball soup weighed in at 1,356.9 pounds and was verified by Guinness World Records in Brooklyn, New York, on Feb. 27. The soup contained 847 hand-rolled matzah balls, and it took 10 chefs about 11 hours to prepare the soup, according to the Guinness World Records. All the soup was donated to City Harvest, New York City’s largest food rescue organization, which will serve it to thousands of hungry New Yorkers in food pantries and soup kitchens.
“There’s no food that brings back more memories of being surrounded by family than matzo ball soup,” Bernath, 23, told The Algemeiner in a statement. “So, when I set out to make the world’s largest version of a dish, choosing matzo ball soup was a no-brainer. Every bowl is a bowl of comfort. Being able to create a giant version was both an incredible challenge and a thrill. It meant even more to me that after setting the record, we were able to donate all the soup to New Yorkers in need — sharing the comfort of matzo ball soup even further.”
Bernath — who is also a social media content creator and the principal culinary contributor for “The Drew Barrymore Show” — said the matzah ball soup was comprised of 120 chickens, 300 carrots, and 250 bunches of herbs. The soup also included parsnip, turnip, celery root, onions, parsley, dill, paprika, and salt. Bernath used ChatGPT to scale up his grandmother’s matzo ball soup recipe to a 200-gallon version, and to help him also find the right vessels needed to make such a large portion. To hold more than 160 gallons of hot liquid, he ended up using a water trough, typically used for horses, which was lined with a food-grade liner.
On Instagram, Bernath shared behind-the-scenes photos that show the making of the massive matzah ball soup. In the caption, he explained that creating the record-breaking dish “was one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done.”
“As a proud Jew, creating a record-setting giant version of such an important Jewish dish meant the world to me,” he added. “I couldn’t be prouder of my team and I for pulling this off. I will never look at a bowl of matzo ball soup the same again!!”
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Noam Bettan Releases Song ‘Michelle’ He’ll Perform as Israel’s Rep for 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
Noam Bettan in the music video for “Michelle.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Noam Bettan revealed on Thursday the song he is set to perform when he represents Israel at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“Michelle” is a trilingual song written by Bettan, Nadav Aharoni, Tzlil Klifi, and Yuval Raphael, who represented Israel in last year’s Eurovision and finished in second place. The song features lyrics in Hebrew, English, and French, and premiered during a special broadcast on the Kan public broadcaster.
“‘Michelle’ tells the story of choosing to break free from a toxic emotional cycle. It’s a story about emotional growth and maturity, at the moment when the protagonist realizes they must let go and choose a new path for themselves,” Eurovision stated in its official description of the song.
“Michelle” is largely in Hebrew and French with only one verse in English. “Walking down Florentin/Ocean eyes/Memories/I, I’m losing my mind,” Bettan sings in English. “An angel but it is hell/Trapped in your carousel/Round and round/Under your spell.”
Bettan, who turned 28 on Thursday, was born in Israel and raised in the city of Ra’anana. His parents are French and lived in the French city of Grenoble before immigrating to Israel with their two older sons.
Bettan is fluent in French, Hebrew, and English. He won the Israeli television show and singing competition “HaKokhav HaBa” (“The Rising Star”) in January, which automatically secured him the position of representing Israel at this year’s Eurovision. Bettan will perform “Michelle” during the second half of the first Eurovision semi-final on May 12.
“I’m very proud of the song,” Bettan said in a released statement. “It’s a great privilege to bring such a creation to the Eurovision stage. The song is full of energy and emotion that touches on a wide range of feelings. I feel that ‘Michelle’ will bring us moments of shared joy and pride, and I hope this song can bring a little of that light with it.”
Watch the music video for “Michelle” below.
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‘Tool of the Enemy’: Tucker Carlson Under Fire for Latest Unhinged Rant Blaming Iran War on Chabad
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Firebrand podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of the most vocal critics of the US-Israel war against Iran, is now blaming the conflict on the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement, telling listeners of his podcast that the war’s aim is to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and rebuild the Jewish temple.
The far-right pundit, who has a history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories, alleged in his podcast released Wednesday that Israel started its “global religious war” last Saturday as an excuse to destroy the mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Al Aqsa compound, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount, in order to build the Third Jewish Temple.
The site is Judaism’s holiest and the historic location of the First and Second Temples.
“There are key players involved in this war, the one happening tonight, who believe that what we’re seeing on our television screen and on Twitter will usher in a series of events that will begin with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, Al Aqsa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad. C-H-A-B-A-D,” Carlson said, spelling out the name of the Orthodox Hasidic religious movement.
“Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
As proof, Carlson pointed to photos of Israeli soldiers with patches of an illustration of the Third Temple, claiming — but providing no evidence — that they came from Chabad.
In a social media post from two years ago, soldiers fighting against the Hamas terror group were pictured sporting the patches. The Instagram page belongs to The Temple Institute, an NGO advocating for rebuilding the Third Temple that has no connection with Chabad.
The post was accompanied with the caption: “Hamas made it clear from the start when they named their barbaric attack on Israeli citizens, men, women and children, ‘the al Aqsa flood,’ al Aqsa being the jihadist nomenclature for the Temple Mount.”
“Yes, Iranian-backed Hamas, as well as Iran’s other terror proxies are waging war against Israel, against Jerusalem, against the Holy Temple and all that the Holy Temple stands for: peace, brotherhood, prayer, and love for HaShem’s world,” the post read, using the Hebrew name for God, and ending with the biblical passage promising a “house of prayer for all nations.”
Carlson said that building the Third Temple “is totally anathema to Christianity.”
“Christians have a way of dying disproportionately in these wars, which tells you something about their real motives,” he said.
The Chabad movement, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, is not politically affiliated and is widely known for its welcoming engagement with fellow Jews, with a presence in more than 100 countries.
Chabad spokesperson Yaacov Behrman said Carlson’s claims that Chabad is behind the war amount to “a slanderous lie” and “dangerous blood libel.”
“He is also wrong about the Temple patches. They did not come from Chabad. Had he done even basic research, that would be clear,” he added in a post on X. “Reckless rhetoric like this is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Carlson’s @TuckerCarlson claim about Chabad and the Temple Mount is a slanderous lie. His implication that Chabad is behind the war in Iran is a dangerous blood libel.
Chabad’s focus is on encouraging
mitzvos—good deeds—to bring more goodness into the world and hasten the…— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) March 5, 2026
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch, the chief Chabad emissary in Kyiv and rabbi of the Ukrainian capital, said he heard Carlson’s comments while sitting in a shelter in Tel Aviv during missile sirens, after being stranded in Israel by the war.
Calling the comments “nonsense,” he said they were driven neither by “concern for human life or any values,” but by “an ugly interest.”
“While I am sitting here in a shelter because of missiles sent by extremists who prefer destruction and death over caring for their own people, there are those who choose to spread baseless antisemitic accusations,” he told The Algemeiner.
“As Chabad emissaries and as Jews, we try to help every person, in every place in the world,” he added.
The Republican Jewish Coalition denounced Carlson’s remarks as “disgusting” and posted a photo of US President Donald Trump at the Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Chabad leader, adding that “President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense.”
Tucker Carlson’s opprobrious comments against Chabad are disgusting.
President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense. https://t.co/7kjRQWjP0z pic.twitter.com/Gxjp0gHEMq
— RJC (@RJC) March 5, 2026
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Carlson’s comments on X, calling them “more abhorrent antisemitism from Tucker Carlson, invoking medieval tropes and ugly conspiracies.”
Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, Chabad’s social media director, pushed back on Carlson’s claim in a post on X, writing that belief in the Third Temple and the Messianic era is important “not just to Chabad, but to all of Judaism,” and describing it as part of the 13 Principles of Faith codified by the medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides.
“The sum total of the goodness and kindness that each of us do, Jew and non-Jew, usher in an era of world peace, when ‘Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,’ where a third Temple ‘be a house of prayer for all nations,’” Lightstone added.
Carlson’s remarks were endorsed by several commentators, including fellow podcaster Candace Owens and former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In a post on X, Owens warned followers to pay attention to where Chabad centers were located near them, describing Chabad members as “dangerous” and calling them “a radical sect of mystic occultists that follow the idea of a war messiah.”
Greene shared Carlson’s podcast episode, calling it “incredible.”
Incredible podcast by Tucker Carlson.
Telling the truth is no threat to anyone.
The greater threat is war for heretical lies. https://t.co/Vf1fZ9GjsU— Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@mtgreenee) March 5, 2026
Christian Zionist and longtime Carlson critic Laurie Cardoza-Moore slammed the remarks, saying Carlson was “ignorant of the Bible and all things Christian or Jewish.”
Cardoza-Moore, who is president of the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, said she has worked alongside Chabad rabbis worldwide “to build bridges and understanding between our communities.”
“Tucker is simply rehashing medieval antisemitic conspiracies that led to the death of millions of Jews. He does not speak for America or Christendom. He has become a tool of the enemy,” she told The Algemeiner.
In an interview with The Algemeiner last month, Israeli Christian leader Shadi Khalloul accused the former Fox News host of “destroying Christian-Jewish relations” all over the world and “endangering the persecuted Christian community in the Middle East” by falsely portraying Israel as hostile to Christianity.
Carlson has ramped up his anti-Israel content over the last year, according to a study released in December by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which tracked the prominent far-right podcaster’s disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.
In September, for example, the podcaster appeared to blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and suggest Israel was behind the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
In a recent episode in which he interviewed US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Carlson insisted that Israelis should be subject to genetic tests to determine any ties to the land of Israel.