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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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The Situation at Colleges and K-12 Schools Is as Bad as It Has Ever Been for Jewish Students
Demonstrators march in support of Palestinians, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington, US, Feb. 5, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/David Ryder
University administrations continue to grapple with legal challenges to their handling of antisemitic protests. A series of lawsuits filed by the higher education industrial complex seek to reverse all the Trump administration’s initiatives to control costs, limit foreign students with radical pasts, and protect Jewish students.
University presidents are also being pressured to reverse the trend of institutional neutrality and to resume making statements on political issues. The lawsuits and the renaming and hiding of DEI initiatives indicate that universities are simply waiting out the current administration, but the structural changes being forced by economic conditions including Federal funding and broader demographics will be more enduring.
Reports indicate that the Trump administration is reworking its “compact with higher education” to make it acceptable to more universities, but in the meantime, a number of Federal investigations are ongoing. The University of Pennsylvania, however, has balked at a demand for employee records from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission as part of an investigation into discrimination aimed at Jewish employees.
The US Department of Education has also chosen not to challenge a Federal court ruling that prohibits it from requiring universities to remove all race based curriculum, student aid, and student services or risk losing funding. The move was represented by DEI advocates as a victory and reflects the industry’s efforts to wait out the Trump administration before restoring DEI as its central pillar.
Data from a new Department of Education website has again showed that Qatar is the leading funder of American universities with $6.6 billion in contracts and gifts. Cornell University received $2.3 billion, while $1 billion was given to Carnegie Mellon University, and more that $900 million each to Texas A&M University and Georgetown. Overall 1223 individual transactions involving Qatar are recorded, pointing to that country’s vast influence buying within the higher education industrial complex.
The influence of foreign funding has always been disputed by universities. A new lawsuit, however, alleges that Qatari funding directly shaped Carnegie Mellon’s neglect of antisemitism and discrimination directed at a Jewish faculty member.
In that case, the school was required to consult with the Qatar Foundation International before hiring the assistant vice provost for DEI and Title IX coordinator, while other DEI officials visited Qatar as part of their work. This pattern of support and collusion with Qatar through DEI is likely replicated across a vast scale across the higher education industry.
A new report has again detailed the manner in which the City University of New York systematically purged all Jews from its leadership and dramatically reduced the number of Jewish students. The university’s move appears to be a deliberate, top down marketing strategy focusing on New York’s Muslim community rather than Jews, which privileged partnerships with CAIR and endorsed BDS supporters within the faculty union.
Finally, in a significant move, the United Arab Emirates has banned scholarships for students studying in Britain. The stated rationale was fear of radicalization by the Muslim Brotherhood, which dominates British campuses.
In an interesting rhetorical shift, Harvard president Alan Garber blamed “faculty activism” in the classroom for chilling free speech on campus. He also stated that “there is real movement to restore balance in teaching and to bring back the idea that you really need to be objective in the classroom.”
The incorporation of explicitly anti-Israel terms such as “Israel Occupation Forces,” “Apartheid Wall,” and “Zionist regime” into academic papers has expanded immensely since 2019 and has created a self-reinforcing web of citations that gives the additional appearance of legitimacy to anti-Israel standpoints.
As has long been the case, this new guise conveniently aligns with broader left-wing opposition to the West, capitalism, and whiteness.
Faculty also continue to organize conferences on campus that emphasize anti-Israel activism, often without a guise of scholarship or pedagogy.
In one recent example, a conference at the University of Washington was reported to have promoted pro-Hamas activism and included faculty members and activists who defended Hamas, Iran, and campus property destruction. The university recently lifted suspensions on students who had caused over $1 million in damages to an engineering building during a pro-Hamas takeover.
In another example, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies will host a Gaza Lecture Series featuring a number of prominent defenders of Hamas and other terrorist groups, as well as deniers of October 7th sexual violence.
Institutionally, academic associations continue to be besieged by anti-Israel members. In January the executive council of the American Historical Association vetoed a resolution accusing Israel of scholasticide and the silencing of protests regarding “the U.S.-sponsored genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza.”
The council stated, “As worded the two resolutions fall outside the scope of the American Historical Association’s chartered mission,” adding that “Approving them on behalf of the entire association would present institutional risk and have long-term implications for the discipline and the organization.” Supporters of the resolution complained the move reflected anti-Palestinian bias. The Modern Language Association also approved a similar resolution.
In the first month of the new semester, job fairs and individual corporations were be targeted by pro-Hamas protestors. In one example, the Stanford Students for Justice in Palestine chapter organized a walkout to demand the university sever ties with Palantir, which it accuses of “enabling genocide” and profiting from “ICE raids, police violence, and mass surveillance at home.”
The Yale University “Endowment Justice Collective” also demanded that the university divest from investments in Palantir and other firms. The university rejected the demands. The University of Alabama SJP chapter made similar divestment demands.
Student sponsored events in support of Hamas and other Palestinian terror organizations also continue to be held. The University of Virginia Law School hosted International Solidarity Movement co-founder Huwaida Arraf for a “conversation” about Gaza. In another, the University of Chicago’s pro-Hamas groups promoted an International Week of Action to secure the release of Ahmad Sa’adat, the imprisoned general secretary of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
At the University of Washington, the presence of the Tariq El-Tahrir Student Network, “an international network of Palestinian, Arab, and Internationalist youth, students and organizations,” associated with terrorist organizations including the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, has provided the local pro-Hamas SUPER UW (Students United for Palestinian Equality and Return at University of Washington) group with continuing support. This includes webinar series featuring terror supporters from Samidoun and other groups. SUPER UW remains banned on campus but the Tariq El-Tahrir provides them with an effective alter ego.
Finally, in a move that demonstrated how the Holocaust is being actively divorced from and turned against Jews, the University of California at Irvine student government passed a motion commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day but stripped it of all reference to modern antisemitism and Holocaust denial.
The K-12 sector continues to be manipulated by anti-American and pro-Hamas teachers unions and infiltrated by foreign influence operations. Pro-Hamas pedagogy inside and outside the classroom have now become commonplace, often piggybacked on holidays and commemorations.
In one example, pro-Hamas teachers held a NYC Educators For Palestine MLK Day Teach-In. The organizers are among the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers and the United Federation of Teachers. A number of participants are also linked to pro-Hamas welfare organizations such as the Palestinian Children’s Welfare Fund and ANERA. Teach-ins for “Palestine” were also held on Martin Luther King Day for students in Philadelphia and for teachers in Oakland.
Teachers and parents from the Berkeley Families for Collective Liberation were involved in organizing a student walkout at Berkeley High School to participate in a pro-Palestinian teach-out held on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Organizers claimed the timing was purely coincidental. Speakers also criticized California’s new law addressing antisemitism in public schools.
The complicity of school administrators in permitting and organizing pro-Hamas events inside and outside classrooms is well documented. One recent example is the decision by the Michigan Department of Education to accept teachers’ participation in a professional development seminar about “how to teach about Palestine” organized by the Arab American National Museum, in association with Rethinking Schools, and Visualizing Palestine.
New evidence continues to emerge regarding foreign influence operations, including initiatives by the Qatar Foundation International to insert Arabic language and social justice curriculums into Georgia schools. Both the language and social justice materials are deeply suffused with anti-Israel and antisemitic themes.
British primary and secondary schools provide a roadmap to how teachers and foreign powers reshape curriculum and how demographic change among students have made antisemitism and anti-Israel bias foundational.
British teachers unions are resolutely anti-Israel and have adopted numerous resolutions of condemnation. This has translated into classroom hostility towards Israel, as well as towards Jewish students and teachers, some of whom are told by colleagues that Israel simply does not exist, which is amplified by the growing number of Muslim students.
In one recent case, a school barred a Jewish Member of Parliament from visiting after protests from teachers. The educational oversight authority Ofsted later cleared the school of wrongdoing without speaking to the Member of Parliament. In contrast, reports indicate that Hussein Zomlot, head of the Palestinian Mission to the UK, routinely tours British schools.
The Holocaust has also been co-opted and inverted as an anti-Israel and antisemitic tool. British teachers have begun presenting Israeli actions in Gaza as “genocide” and inverting Holocaust memory into an anti-Jewish concept. Reports also indicate that half of British schools have stopped marking Holocaust Memorial Day for fear of offending Muslim students.
The author is a contributor to SPME, where a different version of this article appeared.
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Israeli-Palestinian restaurant shutters in Berlin, though a TV show will continue its story
(JTA) — An Israeli-Palestinian restaurant in Berlin that became internationally known for its “Make hummus not war” message is closing after 10 years — but a new TV series will extend its story.
Kanaan, a hummus bar run by Oz Ben David, an Israeli, and Jalil Dabit, a Palestinian, has announced it will shutter in March. The partners evolved their restaurant into a platform for promoting peace and dialogue, but in recent years, they fought a string of economic challenges along with local tensions emanating from the Gaza war.
“Running a daily restaurant became too heavy,” they said in a post on Instagram. “The pandemic, the wars and the economic situation, all of those were too much.”
Now, the German production company Traumfabrik Babelsberg says it’s making a new dramedy series based on the Israeli-Palestinian duo. The show called “Breaking the Binary” was announced at a launch party in January, where the creators said they joined Ben David and Dabit over “a shared meal as a symbol of exchange and encounter.”
Ben David and Dabit are contributing to the writing and character development of the series. It will feature Mirna Funk, a German-Jewish author and journalist, as well as Yousef Sweid, a Palestinian citizen of Israel who appeared in the acclaimed Netflix series “Unorthodox” and HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
The partners briefly closed Kanaan after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, battling doubts about the credibility of their anti-war message. Six days later, they reopened with the determination to leverage their restaurant as a symbol of hope.
They organized free educational programs on cooking and prejudice, joining Palestinian refugees from Gaza with members of Berlin’s Israeli community. In November, they published a cookbook titled “Kochen ohne Grenzen,” or “Cooking Without Borders,” compiling their recipes together with those of rabbis, imams and priests in Berlin.
But while these projects won international recognition, Kanaan was battered by economic uncertainty and a fraught political environment. Far-left and far-right activists protested the “normalization” of an Israeli and a Palestinian working together. Meanwhile, many customers surveyed by the restaurant said they were fatigued by conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and they preferred to unwind with a night of sushi or Italian food.
“‘We don’t understand if you are pro-Israel or pro-Palestine.’ That’s something that we heard a lot,” Ben David said last year.
In 2024, Kanaan was ransacked after hosting a Jewish-Muslim brunch. Months later, an Israeli woman was assaulted by four people while wearing Kanaan’s signature pin, which depicts a heart divided between the Israeli and Palestinian flags.
Ben David and Dabit said they will continue to share their food through other formats, including pop-ups, catering, educational projects and collaborations.
“This chapter is coming to an end — but Kanaan is not,” they said.
The post Israeli-Palestinian restaurant shutters in Berlin, though a TV show will continue its story appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Blue Wave’: Israel Expands Diplomatic, Security Ties Across Latin America Amid Shifting Regional Politics
Argentine President Javier Milei speaks during a Plenum session of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in Jerusalem, June 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
A new wave of diplomacy in Latin America has seen several governments adopt a friendlier, more supportive stance toward Israel, deepening bilateral ties that Jerusalem is now leveraging on the global stage while signaling a potential shift in regional political alignments.
In a new interview with Israel’s Channel 12, Amir Ofek, deputy director for Latin America at Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explained that the country is undergoing a major shift in its diplomatic engagement across the region, marked by a series of significant developments.
“There have been shifts in countries that were once our allies, and we have faced periods under very critical and challenging governments,” Ofek said. “We respond quickly to these changes, stay in close contact, and we are now beginning to make real progress.”
In a significant regional breakthrough, Israel and Bolivia formally restored diplomatic relations late last year, ending a two-year rupture sparked by the war in Gaza and reopening channels of official dialogue between the two countries.
In December, Bolivian Foreign Minister Fernando Armayo also announced that the country will lift visa requirements for Israeli travelers, a move that Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar praised as helping to “strengthen the human bridge between our peoples.”
Chile and Honduras are also leading the way among other Latin American nations making a striking turn toward Israel
Last year, Chile elected far-right President José Antonio Kast, who promised to reshape the country’s foreign policy toward the Jewish state, overturning the stance of a previously hostile administration.
This year, Honduras also chose a far-right candidate, President Nasry Asfura, who expressed hopes for a “new era” in bilateral relations and stronger ties with Jerusalem.
“The shift in Honduras is part of a broader regional trend: a ‘blue wave’ across Latin American countries that embrace freedom and democracy and align closely with US policy in the region,” Nadav Goren, Israel’s ambassador to Honduras, told Channel 12. “We are in a very optimistic period for Latin America.”
With the official launch of the Isaac Accords by Argentina’s President Javier Milei last year, Israel has been working to expand its diplomatic and security ties across the region, in an effort designed to promote government cooperation and fight antisemitism and terrorism.
Modeled after the Abraham Accords, a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries, this new initiative aims to strengthen political, economic, and cultural cooperation between the Jewish state and Latin American governments.
“Israel offers globally recognized expertise that meets the needs of many countries, covering areas such as agricultural technology, water management, food security, cybersecurity, and innovation. Partners understand that Israel can help propel them forward, even in the context of internal security,” Ofek said.
The first phase of the Isaac Accords will focus on Uruguay, Panama, and Costa Rica, where potential projects in technology, security, and economic development are already taking shape as this framework seeks to deepen cooperation in innovation, commerce, and cultural exchange.
The Isaac Accords will also aim to encourage partner countries to move their embassies to Jerusalem, formally recognize Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist organizations, and shift longstanding anti-Israel voting patterns at the United Nations.
Less than a year after the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Argentina became the first Latin American country to designate the Palestinian Islamist group as a terrorist organization, with Paraguay following suit last year.
Building on a deepening partnership, Saar and Paraguay’s President Santiago Peña also signed a landmark security cooperation memorandum, as the two countries continue to expand their relationship following Paraguay’s move to relocate its embassy to Israel’s capital of Jerusalem in 2024.
“Over the past two very difficult years, our friendship has shown its strength through international forums, mutual cooperation, official visits, and measures against Iran. We have expressed our friendship in meaningful, if sometimes implicit, ways,” Ofek told Channel 12, referring to the country’s growing ties with Paraguay.
In recent years, Latin America has gained strategic importance for Israel as a frontline in countering Iran and its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah, whose growing influence and criminal networks in the region — especially in Venezuela and Cuba — have prompted Jerusalem to expand its diplomatic, security, and intelligence presence.
“For us, this is a circle of allies that recognizes the same threat we face from Iran’s growing influence in the region, and it is only natural to cooperate to halt its expansion,” Ofek said. “We have seen firsthand how damaging this is, particularly in the context of attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets.”