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A 1990s Israeli play is the feminist production NY needs right now
(New York Jewish Week) — When Anat Gov’s play “HaChaverot Hachi Tovot” (“Best Friends”) premiered in 1999, it was an anomaly among Israeli works of theater. In fact, Gov wrote it with anomalous intentions: In an interview before it opened, she called the piece a form of “compensation for the fact that there are no good roles for women.”
To remedy this, Gov wrote a play with no male roles — a 100-minute romp down memory lane which calls into question the very nature of friendship and whether or not the love between BFFs can stand the test of time.
At the time, the play was a smash, winning the Israel National Theater Award for best comedy of the year, and playing over 700 times during its initial run at the acclaimed Cameri Theatre in Tel Aviv. “Best Friends” was then rewritten as a TV miniseries for HOT, a popular Israeli TV network, and re-staged in 2013, after Gov’s death the previous year.
Today, the play is enjoying a new imagining here in New York: Through April 2, it’s being performed at the Rattlestick Theater in Manhattan, in alternating performances in both Hebrew and English, by the team at the Israeli Artists Project, a non-profit that presents Israeli theater, music and art in the greater New York area.
“Best Friends” is ostensibly about friendship but touches on broad themes of jealousy, fertility struggles, betrayal and much more. And yet, intentionally or not, its deep dive into the force and fury of the female experience comes at a time when the cause of women’s rights is seeing setbacks in Israel and the United States.
“There are so many facets to our work,” says Yoni Venridger, founder and producing artistic director of IAP. “But to put it simply, we want to be a home where people of any affiliation can come together, enjoy our common culture, and put politics aside. In a way, everything we do is inherently political. We are, after all, representing a country. That said, we’re interested in doing Israeli things, being Israeli people, without automatically politicizing our events.”
The play, which is both hilarious and heartbreaking, centers on three women — Leli, Sophie and Tirtza — who are at a breaking point in their lifelong friendship. In the opening scene, Leli calls her two ex-besties to gather; it’s a matter of life or death, she says, refusing to say which one it is. Despite an extended period of silence between the three and heightened tensions between Sophie and Tirtza, in particular, they come together, and begin to unpack every single piece of emotional baggage they have.
As is the case in actual lifelong friendships, there’s a lot to unpack here: high school crushes, first loves, heartbreak, professional successes and woes, births, marriages — no stone is left unturned. Shouting ensues, and laughter, and some awkward silences.
“We need more plays that give central roles to women,” said Vendriger. “It’s not necessarily about writing plays without any male roles, either. What’s critical is writing more lead roles for women, more well-rounded, rich roles for women.”
“Best Friends” is an extreme version of this, of course, by omitting all men from the cast, and it easily passes the Bechdel Test — that is to say, it includes at least two named female characters who discuss something other than a man — with flying colors. Leli, Sophie and Tirtza certainly talk about men, love and heartbreak, but the primary focus is on how they’ve let themselves, and each other, down.
One of the most effective choices Gov made was to have the drama play out in two decades simultaneously. There are two casts: a young version of the women, in the 1960s, and a middle-aged version, in the 1990s. Beyond the illustrative power of showing friendship instead of telling about it, Gov creates a fascinating dynamic between the two sets of women. At times, the two casts interact, holding one another, reminding one another of their various strengths and shortcomings. Who among us hasn’t wished to warn or encourage our younger selves, or that our younger selves could remind us of who we once were?
This revisited version of Gov’s classic was slated to run in New York in May 2020 — but the pandemic, of course, made that impossible. Instead, it arrives in time for Women’s History Month 2023. “The timing kind of just worked out for us,” explained Vendriger.
From left, Maia Karo, Adi Kozlovsky and Karin Hershkovitz Kochavi play a trio of BFFs in “Best Friends.” (Courtesy)
In Israel, a right-wing government is under siege by rivers of enraged citizens — primarily because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial overhaul, now on pause. But there is pushback among liberal Israelis for other reasons as well. Recently, Betzalel Smotrich, a far-right member of Knesset and the current minister of finance, made sure that Israel would not sign the UN’s International Violence Against Women Act. Prior to this, Smotrich had called himself a “proud homophobe;” he organized a “bestiality parade” as a counter-parade to the Jerusalem Pride march in 2006.
In the United States, women’s rights are also threatened — including by the dismantling of Roe v. Wade, ensuring their right to an abortion.
Against this backdrop, the 1990s of “Best Friends” look downright progressive. To Vendriger, however, this play is about the timeless nature of friendship.
“Gov managed to write in a way that makes her work continuously relevant, regardless of the passage of time,” he said. “It’s the humanity of it. There are connections, power struggles, interpersonal attractions — that stuff will never change. Despite the fact that it’s originally from the ’90s, the meditation on the power and fragility of friendship, on the fact that we need to maintain and work on friendships, it all feels immediate and very appropriate for the present day.”
In fact, the IAP team made no changes to the original text.
The play works today, in 2023, because it leans on universal, wide-reaching themes. At the same time, there is a palpable Israeliness to the whole thing, whether it’s the prickly slang or the fact that one character, whose son is serving in the first Lebanon War, is jealous that her friend’s son has asthma, and therefore gets to stay home.
“‘Best Friends’ integrates the complexity of humanity, friendship and Israeli society, and brings them into the realm of humor,” said director Hamutal Posklinsky-Shehory. “It’s funny, but it’s also dramatic and very witty. [In this iteration] the whole staff is female. All the actresses are — six onstage and two understudies — plus the assistant director, play manager, lighting designer, and costume designer. I feel this is very appropriate for the age that we’re living in and really underlines the space we need to give for female identifying artists.”
When Posklinsky-Shehory isn’t directing, she’s a drama therapist at NYC Peace of Mind, a group psychotherapy practice that brings together drama therapists to support and enrich one another’s creative treatment approaches. Her work, she said, informed her directorial choices. “The relationships presented between the three friends are not the healthiest ones,” she said, “and we went through a process, truly trying to figure out and understand the motivations and [emotional landscapes] of the characters.”
To this end, the cast used therapeutic techniques alongside theatrical practices in order to deepen their connections and understanding. “We incorporated some writing activities, with the actors writing to their characters. Another time, we sought connections and differences between our actors and the characters that they play, as a group. In this way, we developed trust and deepened our bond with one another,” she said.
This is, in a sense, the bottom line of the play: the bonds that tie, and how they can unravel under the strains of a lifetime. “As humans, we’re complex,” said Posklinsky-Shehory. “Even in a play that’s all fantastic and sweet and nostalgic, there’s still the complexity and darkness [of life]. I’d like people to leave with an understanding that what we feel is perfect and complex, and that’s OK. We need to accept those parts of ourselves and our society.”
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The post A 1990s Israeli play is the feminist production NY needs right now appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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UC Berkeley Settles Lawsuit Brought by Israeli Professor Denied Teaching Position
Students attend a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at University of California, Berkeley during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Berkeley, US, April 23, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect
The University of California, Berkeley has agreed to pay a five-figure sum to settle claims that it unlawfully denied a teaching position to a dance instructor because she is Israeli, both the victim’s legal counsel, provided by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and the school announced on Wednesday.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, Dr. Yael Nativ, who taught in UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies as a visiting professor in 2022, was denied another appointment in the department because a hiring official allegedly believed that her employment would be unpalatable to students and faculty in the aftermath of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, amid the ensuing Gaza war.
“My dept [sic] cannot host you for a class next fall,” the official allegedly told Nativ in a WhatsApp message. “Things are very hot here right now and many of our grad students are angry. I would be putting the dept and you in a terrible position if you taught here.”
Berkeley’s Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) later initiated an investigation into Nativ’s denial after the professor wrote an opinion essay which publicly accused the school of cowardice and violations of her civil rights. OPHD determined that a “preponderance of evidence” proved Nativ’s claim, but school officials went on to ignore the professor’s requests for an apology and other remedial measures, including sending her a renewed invitation to teach dance.
After nearly two years, the situation had remained unresolved, prompting Nativ to file suit and seek damages as well as the apology UC Berkeley refused to pronounce at the time. Now, just under four months after the filing of Nativ’s complaint, the two parties have reached an amiable settlement and disclosed its terms in a joint statement.
“As part of the settlement, UC Berkeley has agreed to continue to strictly enforce the University of California’s Anti-Discrimination Policy and ‘respond promptly and equitably to reports’ of prohibited conduct as defined in that policy,” the statement said. “Dr. Nativ will receive a personal apology from UC Berkeley’s Chancellor Rich Lyons and monetary damages in the amount of $60,000, a portion of which she has decided to donate to a charitable organization.”
The statement added that Nativ will be invited to teach the course she was denied, a major victory for the professor and a positive, if unusual, act of reconciliation between an employer and employee who were only recently contesting claims of discrimination in civil court.
“The excellence of Dr. Nativ’s teaching was never in question, and UC Berkeley appreciates Dr. Nativ’s willingness to teach the course despite the discrimination that OPHD found to have occurred,” the statement added.
In her own statement, Nativ said, “Incidents of discrimination of any kind must have no place within environments dedicated to learning and the free exchange of ideas. It is my hope that this outcome contributes to strengthening these commitments for all scholars and students.”
UC Berkeley was the site of one the most shocking antisemitic incidents in recent memory in the months which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In February 2024, a mob of hundreds of pro-Palestinian students and non-students shut down an event at UC Berkeley featuring an Israeli soldier, forcing Jewish students to flee to a secret safe room as the protesters overwhelmed campus police.
Footage of the incident showed a frenzied mass of anti-Zionist agitators banging on the doors of Zellerbach Hall while an event featuring Israeli reservist Ran Bar-Yoshafat — who visited the university to discuss his military service during Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion — took place inside. The mob then stormed the building — breaking glass windows in the process, according to reports in the Daily Wire — and precipitated school officials’ decision to evacuate the area.
During the infiltration of Zellerbach, one of the mob — which was recruited by Bears for Palestine, which had earlier proclaimed its intention to cancel the event — spit on a Jewish student and called him a “Jew,” pejoratively.
“You know what I was screamed at? ‘Jew, you Jew, you Jew,’ literally right to my face,” the student who was attacked said to a friend. “Some woman — then she spit at me.”
Shaya Keyvanfar, a student, told The Algemeiner that her sister was spit on and that the incident was unlike any she had ever witnessed.
“Once the doors were closed, the protesters somehow found a side door and pushed it open, and a few of them managed to get in, and once they did, they tried to open the door for the rest of them,” Keyvanfar said. “It was really scary. They were pounding on the windows outside — they broke one — they spit at my sister and others. They called someone a dirty Jew. It was eerie.”
In July, the chancellor of UC Berkeley described a professor who cheered Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities as a “fine scholar” during a congressional hearing held at Capitol Hill.
Richard K. Lyons, who assumed the chancellorship in July 2024, issued the unmitigated praise while being questioned by members of the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, which summoned him and the chief administrators of two other major universities to interrogate their handling of the campus antisemitism crisis.
Lyons stumbled into the statement while being questioned by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-MI), who asked the chancellor to describe the extent of his relationship and correspondence with Professor Ussama Makdisi, who tweeted in February 2024 that he “could have been one of those who broke through the siege on Oct. 7.”
“What do you think the professor meant,” McClain asked Lyons, to which the chancellor responded, “I believe it was a celebration of the terrorist attack on Oct. 7.” McClain proceeded to ask if Lyons discussed the tweet with Makdisi or personally reprimanded him, prompting an exchange of remarks which concluded with Lyons saying, “He is a fine scholar.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Praise for soccer star Leo Messi in new album of Yiddish songs for kids
Jordan Wax, a Santa Fe-based performer and composer of Yiddish and New Mexican regional music, has just released a record of original secular Yiddish children’s songs. When asked why, he didn’t skip a beat: “My day job is doing kids’ music,” he said.
It started eight years ago when Wax, who’s a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, took a job singing bilingual Spanish-English songs for toddlers across the three branches of the Santa Fe public library. The repertoire included traditional songs from New Mexico and Mexico, as well as his own adaptations of traditional songs to make them bilingual and participatory.
Now, he’s a regular feature at the local Jewish preschool, in Temple Beth Shalom. The songs are still bilingual — but this time, they’re in Yiddish and English.
In his new album Pantakozak and Other New Yiddish Songs for Kids, some of the songs were actually written in collaboration with these very preschoolers. “The Polar Bear song came from one of them who was kind of grumpy that day, and just wanted to roar and be ferocious and express rage,” he said.
The album was released by the Yiddish specialist label Borscht Beat in late November of this year.
Wax’s background with children’s music might seem surprising if you’ve heard his other album, the recently-released Taytsh [The Heart Deciphers], which features heavy subject matter like the bloodlust of power, the loss of culture, perpetual war and the fallout of late-stage capitalism, all sung in Yiddish.
At the same time, he’s very comfortable with being silly, and wants people to know that Yiddish culture is, too. “Yiddish music does have a lot of seriousness. It does have a lot of political commentary. It has a lot of spiritual commentary. But it also has fun and goofiness.” For example, “Bulbes,” a nonsense song about eating potatoes everyday, is part of the traditional Yiddish canon.
Along with light humor, Pantakozak is deeply infused with stories and musical references to prewar Jewish Eastern Europe — material that Wax started recording in earnest during a visit to Moldova in 2023. He took a special interest in the traditional Romani Lăutari music of the Bessarabian region, which was once closely entwined with local klezmer music, and befriended the Lăutari band Taraf de Chișinău. They feature on several tracks, including the Hanukkah song Khanike iz Freylekh / Spin Around Like a Dreydl, where Vladislav Tanas’ cimbalom drives the pulsating rhythm.
The album reflects a deep Jewish connection to the Old World. Wax’s late friend, Misha Limanovitch, was a storyteller who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home in Olechnowicze, formerly Poland, now part of Belarus. Limanovitch made the old world that felt nearly mythical to Wax feel close at hand until he passed away in 2023.
Limanovitch described a resident of the village called Itshke the Klezmer, a recording of which later became the introductory part of Wax’s song, “Itshke the Klezmer.” “He remembered this character in his village who would come around, who was a kind of itinerant musician, a klezmer,” Wax said. “That made a big impression on me after studying klezmer music.” Wax had heard a lot about the village musicians in Eastern Europe, and before hearing about Itshke the klezmer, it all felt “like a million light years away.”
Limanovich also told Wax the story of Pantakozak, the Cossack-like figure who threatened children that he would go into their cradles if they didn’t lay quiet — a story which his sister used to tell him before going to bed. Wax wasn’t sure if this young girl made up the story or not, since he couldn’t find any reference to this creature anywhere.
Wax also looked through the Yiddish Book Center’s OCR (optical character recognition) for phrases that Limanovich had told him about Pantakozak, like “ikh hob dray lange nezer, ikh trink fun draytsn glezer,” (I have three long noses, I drink from 13 glasses) and other absurd rhymes. He found the phrases in the 1917 Antologye, 500 yor yidishe poezye, an anthology of 500 years of Yiddish poetry, in a verse written by the compiler himself, Morris Bassin. Bassin called Pantakozak, the Cossack-monster, by a different name: Gonte Kozak.
Wax was enthused to see that his preschoolers enjoyed the resulting song he composed from the story. One of the preschool teachers sent him a phone video showing a group of four-year-olds sitting around a table during snack time, reciting lines from his song about Pantakozak: “My name is Panta Kozak! I blow up like a blozak! I put on stripey pants, I do my Panta dance!”
The structure of the album is designed not only for kids, but also for their parents and caretakers. The album begins with music aimed at motivating kids to move their bodies and wiggle. One is a Yiddish counting song, “Di hent af di fis un di fis af di hent” (“Your hands on your feet and your feet on your hands”). While it resembles the contemporary English children’s song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” it contains references to a traditional Jewish “patsh-tants,” a hand-clapping dance.
Afterwards, the album settles into storytime legends old and new, featuring Limanovich’s tales and a ballad dedicated to Argentinian soccer star Leo Messi. (“There was a kid who wouldn’t sing about anything if it wasn’t Leo Messi,” Wax explained.) The songs then adopt a slower pace until they lead into the peaceful, moving lullaby, “Khayeles Viglid” (Little Chaya’s lullaby).
But when the kids are asleep, the album isn’t over. A more somber adult-oriented piece appears: “Yugnt-Himen” (“Anthem of the Young,” written in 1943 by Shmerke Kaczerginski, the Vilna Ghetto cultural organizer and member of the “Paper Brigade,” the group that smuggled important cultural materials into the ghetto. The melody was composed by Basye Rubin, a contemporary of Kaczerginski’s.
In an archival recording excerpted at the beginning of the track, Kaczerginski recalls the need to give courage to the younger generation through song. “Those times demanded, more than any other time, courage and spirit in the face of despair; I taught this song in the ghetto to children,” he says.
Wax sings the original along with adaptations of his own in English. Its stirring message is meant for everyone: “Yung iz yeder, yeder, yeder ver es vil nor,” anyone who wants to be young is indeed young.
Pantakozak’s lyrics, its embrace of intergenerational bonding and its meaningful historical references — as well as its high quality production and performances — are unusual in children’s music. The care that Wax put into this record comes from his idea that we should respect our children’s intelligence, just as Kaczeginski implied in his introduction to the song.
“They deserve to be given something that has the same integrity as what I would want to be given,” Wax said.
The post Praise for soccer star Leo Messi in new album of Yiddish songs for kids appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli Druze Leader Seeks US Security Guarantees for Syrian Minority
Leader of the Druze community in Israel, Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif, speaks with Reuters at his house in Julis, northern Israel, July 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ali Sawafta
Israeli Druze leader Sheikh Mowafaq Tarif urged the United States to guarantee the security of the Druze community in Syria to prevent a recurrence of intense violence earlier this year in Sweida, a Druze-majority province in Sunni-dominated Syria.
Washington needed to fulfill its “duty” to safeguard the rights of Syria’s minorities in order to encourage stability, Tarif told Reuters on Tuesday during an official visit to the UN in Geneva, adding that US support would also remove the need for Israeli intervention in Syria’s south.
“We hope that the United States, President Trump, and America as a great power, we want it to guarantee the rights of all minorities in Syria … preventing any further massacres,” he said.
US President Donald Trump vowed in November to do everything he can to make Syria successful after landmark talks with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa.
BLOODY CLASHES IN JULY
The Druze are a minority group whose faith is an offshoot of Islam and have followers in Israel, Syria, and Lebanon.
In July, clashes between Druze and Bedouin residents broke out in Sweida after tit-for-tat kidnappings, leading to a week of bloodletting that shattered generations of fragile coexistence.
The violence worsened when government forces dispatched to restore order clashed with Druze militiamen, with widespread reports of looting, summary killings, and other abuses.
Israel entered the fray with encouragement from its Druze minority, attacking government forces with the stated aims of protecting Syrian Druze and keeping its borders free from militants.
Tens of thousands of people from both communities were uprooted, with the unrest all but ending the Bedouins’ presence across much of Sweida.
In the aftermath, Druze leaders called for a humanitarian corridor from the Golan to Sweida and demanded self-determination, which the government rejects.
‘NEED TO REBUILD TRUST’
Asked about proposals by influential Druze Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari to separate Sweida from Syria, Tarif took a different stance, stressing the need for internal autonomy or self-governance within Syria as a way of protecting minorities and their rights and pointing to federal systems in Switzerland and Germany as examples.
It was inconceivable to ask the Druze to surrender their weapons, he said. Talks to bring Sweida’s former police force onto Damascus‘ payroll — while allowing the Druze to retain wide local autonomy — had been making steady progress until July’s bloodshed derailed them.
Al-Sharaa, a former al Qaeda commander who led rebel factions that ousted former long-time leader Bashar al-Assad last December, has vowed to protect the Druze. However, Hajari insists he poses an existential threat to his community and in September rejected a 13-point, US-brokered roadmap to resolve the conflict.
Asked if talks should be revived, Tarif said trust had to be rebuilt by allowing residents to return to their homes, and permitting full humanitarian access to Sweida.
“There is no trust today … Trust must be rebuilt,” he said.