RSS
A new Jewish play imagines a New York were everyone gets along
(New York Jewish Week) — Lou Bettinger, a stubborn but discerning businessman, has run a dingy luggage shop on the Lower East Side for 60 years when the new play “Bettinger’s Luggage” begins.
“I know everything about luggage,” Lou (Richard MacDonald) says, as he give an interview promoting his family’s store on a fictitious news program. “Luggage is my middle name.”
Set on Delancey Street in 1974, “Bettinger’s Luggage” follows Jewish patriarch Lou Bettinger and his hapless son, George (Connor Chase Stewart), who eschews taking over the family business in favor of pursuing his dreams of stand-up comedy. The father and son spar about the future while their neighbors flirt and fall in love, reminisce about their lives before they came to the U.S., and come together to heal when tragedy strikes.
With its liberal use of Yiddishisms, combined with fast-paced, pithy dialogue stuffed full of 1970s pop culture references, “Bettinger’s Luggage,” now running at Midtown’s AMT Theater taps into a powerful nostalgia of a bygone New York.
But unlike the real-life 1970s, which saw a New York City besieged by “white flight,” economic woes and violence, “Bettinger’s Luggage” envisions a New York without racial or ethnic strife. “I needed to write something that showed that people really can get along,” playwright Albert Tapper said of his semi-fictional Lower East Side, which places the Jewish-owned luggage store next to a Greek restaurant and a hardware store owned by an Irish immigrant.
A veteran producer, composer and playwright, Tapper’s version of the Lower East Side has characters unite in a shared New York identity without compromising what makes them unique. Lisa (Katherine Schaber) shares pastries from her family’s Italian bakery with the Bettingers while Lou attempts to teach her Yiddish. Meanwhile Lou, fearing that his son, George, won’t succeed in comedy confides in Lisa that he doesn’t want his son to be “a balagula, a schlemiel” — Yiddish for a person of low standing and a fool.
“Oh, a stunad,” she replies, using the Italian word for an idiot or stupid person, eliciting laughter from the audience.
“The idea of my writing this was to be able to have a neighborhood filled with people of all different nationalities and ethnicities and [show] how well they get along,” Tapper, who is in his 80s, said. Even when Lou calls his luggage shop worker Angel (Sean Church-Gonzalez) a “dumb shaygetz,” or non-Jewish man, he does so in jest — and fights off a racist patron who threatens the store.
Tapper’s inspiration for the play, directed by Steven Ditmyer, is based on his late real-life friend George Bettinger, a comedian and the son of a luggage store owner. The genial image of a bygone Lower East Side business community got the wheels turning in Tapper’s head, and he ran away with his own vision of a family-owned luggage store.
Many of the neighborhood denizens in the play, however, were inspired by Tapper’s own family and his upbringing in Worcester, Massachusetts. Tapper would “merge George’s father with my father” throughout the writing process, he said, creating a world that is both familiar to Jewish New Yorkers and unique to Tapper’s milieu.
The comedic nature of the play strikes a comforting chord for Jewish New Yorkers and differs from other Jewish theatrical fare of the past year. Unlike recent Broadway hits “Parade” and “Leopoldstadt” — which are both focused on historical stories of violence and antisemitism — “Bettinger’s Luggage” uses a father and son’s day-to-day life to begin a conversation about discrimination and cross-cultural communication.
“I’ve written seven or eight shows — none of them have dealt with antisemitism,” Tapper told the New York Jewish Week.
At the same time, however, Tapper admits that antisemitism — where it comes from, how to combat it, or why it has increased so much in the United States — keeps him up at night. “It’s just my life’s quest, and I know that sounds dramatic,” Tapper said. “But my life’s quest is to find out why people hate the Jews.”
That driving question has led Tapper, who splits his time between Midtown Manhattan and Boca Raton, Florida, back to his alma mater of Boston University, where he co-wrote the musical “National Pastime” with Tony Sportiello when he was 20. After finding success as a playwright and producer of film and television, including the documentary “Broadway: The Golden Age,” he’s endowed scholarships for lower-income students. His goal is to increase the diversity of the student population at B.U., which the Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies estimates is about 25 percent Jewish.
Tapper is also working with Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, where he has endowed a graduate scholarship, and with Brandeis University. “I told [university president Ronald D. Leibowitz], who’s a personal friend of mine, that I would like to contribute money to the school if they would put a course on antisemitism in their curriculum,” he said. He hopes that the scholarly research will be able to pinpoint why “people have hated the Jews for 3,000 years.”
Tapper is giving back to the theater community as well. When he and Sportiello, his frequent artistic collaborator since the 2008 musical “Sessions,” struggled to find an appropriate space to workshop “Bettinger’s Luggage,” they reasoned that raising the funds to buy a new theater space would both ensure their success and allow them to pay it forward for other artists. Sportiello now serves as the artistic director of Midtown’s AMT Theater, and Tapper as the venue’s main producer. “There’s not that many of them,” Tapper said of Off- and Off-Off-Broadway theaters. “And the demand for theaters is enormous. So I said, ‘Well, let’s build our own theater.’”
Plenty of emerging artists create their own theater ensembles, but affording and securing a physical performance space is a different ball game. Tapper recognizes this and is proud that the theater is now rented out to other artists through the end of 2024. Now, said Tapper, “We can do our shows, and we can rent it out to others who are doing other works. We have the combination and it serves us well.”
Like the Bettingers and the other characters who populate their Lower East Side storefront, Tapper knows that people thrive best in community — whether a community of artists, of Jews, or both. When that sense of community is breached, we may feel that we face our struggles alone.
Another reason that Tapper felt compelled to write “Bettinger’s Luggage” in this moment is because of the loss of the real George Bettinger, who died by suicide five years ago. “I spent a great deal of time with him when he lived in New York, and he would tell me his life story with sadness and humor,” Tapper said. “I felt it was everybody’s story, so I put pen to paper.”
“Bettinger’s Luggage” is at AMT Theater, 354 West 45th St., through Oct. 25. Details and tickets here.
—
The post A new Jewish play imagines a New York were everyone gets along appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Disney Curtails ‘Snow White’ Premiere Events Amid Scandals With ‘Free Palestine’ Supporter Rachel Zegler
Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot present the award for Best Visual Effects during the Oscars show at the 97th Academy Awards in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, US, March 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
Disney has not invited media outlets to attend the Hollywood premiere of “Snow White” on Saturday and canceled the film’s premiere in the United Kingdom in a reported effort to manage controversies involving the movie’s lead actress Rachel Zegler, an outspoken pro-Palestinian activist.
Disney will host a pre-party and screening at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday for the live-action remake of the beloved 1937 animated film, and guests will include the “Snow White” title star as well as Israeli actress Gal Gadot, who plays the Evil Queen. A number of media outlets are typically invited to premieres to interview talent on the red carpet. However, Disney is not allowing red carpet press at the LA premiere except for photographers and a house crew in order to avoid having Zegler and Gadot answer questions on the spot, Variety reported. Disney said they will instead have “a more celebratory, family-friendly afternoon event to match the tone and target audience for the film,” according to The Hollywood Reporter.
The film, directed by Marc Webb, will be released in theaters March 21.
Plans for a star-studded premiere in the UK have also been nixed, and Disney will instead host a “handful” of tightly controlled press events, a source told the Daily Mail. “Disney are already anticipating an anti-woke backlash against ‘Snow White’ and have reduced the media schedule to just a handful of tightly controlled press events,” the insider said. “That is why they have taken the highly unusual step not to host a London premiere for the film and are minimizing the amount of press questions that Rachel Zegler gets.”
Zegler, 23, has made a number of controversial remarks about her role in the film but also triggered a political media storm when she posted on social media in support of a “Free Palestine.” In August last year, three days after the trailer for the new “Snow White” film was released, the Golden Globe-winning actress took to X (formerly known as Twitter) to thank fans for their support of the film. Zegler wrote in part, “I love you all so much! thank you for the love.” In a separate post on X, she added: “And always remember, free palestine [sic].” Zegler was heavily criticized for the comment by many pro-Israel supporters, especially in light of the fact that Gadot, her lead co-star in “Snow White,” was born and raised in Israel, and is a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces.
Gadot, who is the eighth generation in her family to be born in Israel, is an avid supporter of her home country, and has several times condemned on social media the Hamas terrorist attack that took place in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Earlier this month, the “Wonder Woman” star addressed hundreds at the Anti-Defamation League’s 2025 Never is Now Summit on Antisemitism and Hate, expressing pride in being Israeli and Jewish. She told the crowd: “My name is Gal … I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a daughter, an actress, I am an Israeli – and I am Jewish. Isn’t it crazy that just saying that, just expressing such a simple fact about who I am feels like a controversial statement? But sadly, this is where we’re at today.” She also declared on stage “Am Yisrael Chai (Long Live Israel).”
When Ziegler’s casting was first announced in 2021, some Disney fans took offense to the fact that the character of Snow White will being played by an actress of Colombian descent even though the character is meant to famously have skin “as white as snow.” Some also questioned the studio’s decision to have Snow White be played by Zegler after the “West Side Story” star called the 1937 original film “weird” and “dated,” and said the prince “literally stalks Snow White” in various interviews two years ago. Supporters of US President Donald Trump also criticized Zegler for her negative comments about his reelection. “May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace. There is a deep deep sickness in this country,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. She later apologized for her remarks.
Others took offense to the fact that the film’s title makes no mention of “seven dwarfs,” even though they are critical characters in the movie, while the original film was titled “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
Famed actor Peter Dinklage accused Disney of promoting negative stereotypes with the film’s portrayal of little people. “Literally no offense to anything, but I was sort of taken aback,” the “Game of Thrones” star said in January 2024. “They were very proud to cast a Latino actress as Snow White, but you’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there.”
Not long afterward, Disney clarified how it will handle Dinklage’s concerns in the new film. “To avoid reinforcing stereotypes from the original animated film, we are taking a different approach with these seven characters and have been consulting with members of the dwarfism community,” the studio said in a statement to “Good Morning America.” They will appear as CGI characters in the new film.
The post Disney Curtails ‘Snow White’ Premiere Events Amid Scandals With ‘Free Palestine’ Supporter Rachel Zegler first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Israel Seeking to Normalize Ties With Lebanon in New Border Talks: Reports
Smoke billows after an Israeli Air Force air strike in southern Lebanon village, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, as seen from northern Israel, Oct. 3, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhar
Israel is seeking to normalize ties with Lebanon in upcoming talks that could potentially bring an end to decades of tensions and conflict, according to Israeli media reports.
Upcoming discussions between Beirut and Jerusalem to demarcate their countries’ shared border are part of “a broad and comprehensive plan,” with Israel aiming to establish formal diplomatic relations with Lebanon, unnamed sources told multiple Israeli news publications on Wednesday,
“The prime minister’s policy has already changed the Middle East, and we want to continue the momentum and reach normalization with Lebanon,” a political source told the Israeli news outlet Ynet. “We and the Americans think that this is possible after the changes that have occurred in Beirut.”
“Just as Lebanon has claims regarding borders, we also have claims and we will discuss these matters,” the source continued.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported similar quotes, as did the Times of Israel, the latter of which cited an unnamed official as saying that “the goal is to reach normalization.”
On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office announced that Israel and Lebanon will begin negotiations to resolve border disputes.
“During the meeting, it was agreed to establish three joint working groups aimed at stabilizing the region which will focus on the following issues: the five points over which Israel controls southern Lebanon, discussions on the Blue Line and points that remain in dispute, and the issue of Lebanese detainees held by Israel,” the statement read.
Following US and French mediation, Israel and Lebanon agreed to establish “working groups” to discuss the demarcation line between the two countries and keep the process on track. The groups would also address Israel’s ongoing presence at five strategic points in southern Lebanon, which borders northern Israel.
“Everyone involved remains committed to maintaining the ceasefire agreement and to fully implement all its terms,” US Deputy Presidential Special Envoy Morgan Ortagus said in a statement. “We look forward to quickly convening these diplomat-led working groups to resolve outstanding issues, along with our international partners.”
Despite a brief peace agreement in 1983 and past military and economic ties with Christian factions in Lebanon, Israel’s relations with Beirut have remained tense, with no formal diplomatic ties, an unstable border, and ongoing concerns about a major conflict.
A key reason for conflict has been the role of Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist group that for years has wielded significant political and military influence in Lebanon, especially the country’s south. Hezbollah leaders have long stated their goal is to destroy Israel.
Since 2020, as part of the Abraham Accords — a series of historic US-brokered normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab countries — Jerusalem has expanded defense and economic cooperation with the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Bahrain, and Morocco. Israel also has long-standing peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan.
On Wednesday, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated news outlet Al-Akhbar said that Israel is trying to disarm Hezbollah by force, arguing that this”“will lead to civil war” and “devastating results.”
“Opening the door to negotiations under these conditions means that there are those in Lebanon who do not read history and who do not know the risks inherent in such a step,” editor-in-chief Ibrahim al-Amin said. “Those responsible must understand that they bear responsibility for everything that results from this process of normalizing relations, and there will be devastating results.”
He also accused Israel of kidnapping Lebanese prisoners from their villages and forcibly occupying Lebanese territory.
“There are no security or military considerations that justify their continued occupation, other than to exert pressure on the residents of the border villages to prevent their return to their villages and to prevent the rehabilitation process,” Amin said.
According to local media reports, a total of 11 Lebanese nationals are currently being held by Israel. In a post on X, the Lebanese president’s office announced that Beirut had already received four Lebanese “hostages” from Israel, with a fifth to be handed over on Wednesday.
In November, Lebanon and Israel reached a US-brokered ceasefire agreement that ended a year of fighting between the Jewish state and Hezbollah. Under the agreement, Israel was given 60 days to withdraw from Beirut’s southern border, allowing the Lebanese army and UN forces to take over security as Hezbollah disarms and moves away from Israel’s northern border.
However, Israel announced last month that it would keep troops in five locations in southern Lebanon past a Feb. 18 ceasefire deadline for their withdrawal, as Israeli leaders sought to reassure northern residents that they can return home safely.
Tens of thousands of residents in northern Israel were forced to evacuate their homes last year and in late 2023 amid unrelenting barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones from Hezbollah, which expressed solidarity with Hamas amid the Gaza war.
Last fall, Israel decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities with an air and ground offensive, which ended with the ceasefire.
The post Israel Seeking to Normalize Ties With Lebanon in New Border Talks: Reports first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
‘October 8’ Documentary on Eruption of Antisemitism, Hatred of Israel After Hamas Attack to Premiere in US
UC Santa Barbara student Tessa Veksler in the documentary “October 8.” Photo: Briarcliff Entertainment
More than 100 movie theaters across the United States will release on Friday a scathing documentary that examines how antisemitism exploded on college campuses, social media, and the streets across America starting the day after Hamas-led terrorists went on a deadly rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
From Briarcliff Entertainment and award-winning filmmaker Wendy Sachs, “October 8” dives deep into the surge of antisemitism in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attacks, while Israel was still counting the number of people murdered and taken hostage by the terrorist group.
The documentary shows that on Oct. 8, 2023 — just one day after the largest massacre of Jews to take place since the Holocaust — people across the US were already trying to justify and celebrate the Hamas atrocities and use them as an excuse to spread hatred against Jews and Israel. It features footage from Time Square, New York, where less than 24 hours after the Hamas attack, thousands gathered to protest against Israel and applaud Hamas for murdering 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 hostages ranging in age from nine months to 93 years old.
“Rather than the outrage being directed against those slaughtering the Jews, the outrage was being directed at the Jews for objecting to being slaughtered,” says author and podcast host Dan Senor in the documentary.
After sharing harrowing footage from the Oct. 7 massacre and testimony by survivors, the documentary scrutinizes how Hamas has been celebrated as freedom fighters rather than terrorists for orchestrating the attack and exposes how the anti-Israel narrative promoted by the US-designated terrorist organization has become mainstream on college campuses through its numerous ties to student groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). It is estimated that SJP has roughly 200 branches on college campuses across the country.
Sachs was visiting her daughter at the University of Wisconsin on Oct. 7, 2023, and learned about the terrorist attack through the images and videos shared on television and social media. “It was horrifying and gutting,” she told The Algemeiner. “I think we all as the Jewish diaspora community felt completely gutted, as if a generational trauma had been unleashed.”
Seeing the immediate surge in hatred against Israel and Jews after the attack made her want to start filming the phenomenon and share it with the world, she explained. Sachs filmed the documentary “October 8” for 10 months around the world, including on college campuses, in Israel, London, and across the US.
“Really it was on October 8 when I saw the protest in Times Square, where they were celebrating Hamas as freedom fighters rather than as terrorists. And then on October 9 we saw that more than 30 student groups at Harvard had signed on to a letter blaming Israel for the attack on itself. And then we saw everything unfolding at all these college campuses and I realized that something epic was going on,” Sachs noted. “And as a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and a Jewish American, I knew there was a story here and I wanted to document what was happening.”
“It absolutely felt like this was a Kristallnacht, a pogrom, something that we never experienced before,” she added, referring to the infamous Nazi assault on the German Jewish community on Nov. 9-10, 1938. “And the reaction by universities, by what we were seeing in the streets of America, on social media, by the silence of so many people, was so shocking to me that I felt like I needed to document this moment and the explosion of antisemitism that we were seeing.”
The documentary largely focuses on pro-Hamas narratives that are flourishing on college campuses across the US with the help of SJP. One striking audio clip featured in the documentary is an FBI wiretap from 1993, when 25 senior members of Hamas held a meeting at a hotel in Pennsylvania to discuss strategy for how to expand the organization’s influence in North America through American media outlets, universities, and research centers. Viewers are also shown evidence proving that SJP’s tactics have direct links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, and how the student organization is perpetuating violence and not doing anything to advance peace in the Middle East.
“To me what was most surprising and shocking was honestly what I discovered about SJP,” Sachs told The Algemeiner. “I think like most other people, you see SJP and you think it’s just another student group. What I didn’t understand was that it’s really connected to the Muslim Brotherhood, American Muslims for Palestine, and Hamas, and the tentacles lead back to Iran. I think that level of understanding of how sophisticated SJP is, and that it is not just a student group and that the messaging is coming from Hamas in America and Hamas abroad. And that revelation from that 1993 Marriot hotel room in Philadelphia where we have FBI wiretap of members of Hamas in America talk about how to make their messaging more palatable to an American audience and how when they’re speaking to people on the left, they’re going to speak in terms of social justice and apartheid. That understanding was really mind-blowing to me, my editors, and our production team. That was really a revelatory moment in making the film.”
“They’re not taking about a two-state solution and they’re not talking about peace,” she continued, blasting SJP. “I was filming at Columbia University and they’re talking about one state, we want it all we want it all. That to me was also really shocking because I think so many of us just assume that they’re protesting a war or a situation. But they’re protesting that Israel exists. Let’s start with that. They’re protesting that there is a Jewish state of Israel and until we understand that — it’s fundamental to any conversation of lack of conversation that we can have about the issue. They’re not talking about peace. They say it for themselves.”
“October 8” profiles several college students — including the student body president of the University of California, Santa Barbara – who have been targeted with antisemitic abuse and are trying to counter anti-Israel hatred at their schools, such as Columbia University, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. The film includes footage from the 2023 congressional testimony of three university presidents who had a hard time answering questions about their failed to protect Jewish students from harassment on campus and if calls for the genocide of Jews violated their school’s code of conduct.
Other topics examined in the documentary include the demonization of Israel by human rights groups and the media – such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and UN Women — the publishing of false news about Israel, and the normalization of violence against Jews online. The documentary also condemns the widespread silence by celebrities about the Oct. 7 attack and Hamas’s hostage-taking, in comparison to the public outrage expressed after schoolgirls in Nigeria were abducted by Boko Haram in 2014.
“I felt completely betrayed by Hollywood,” actress Debra Messing says in the film.
Sachs conducted more than 80 interviews for the documentary and spoke to college students and professors, politicians, social media experts, antisemitism experts, journalists, academics, and celebrities.
Filming for “October 8” was completed in October 2024, when there were still 101 hostages being held by Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. There are currently 59 Israeli hostages still held captive in Gaza and at least 35 are dead.
Sachs told The Algemeiner one thing she hopes viewers realize after seeing “October 8” is that “anti-Zionism is antisemitism today. There is no gray anymore.”
“And that the exceptionalizing of Israel has really led to this moment,” she added. “We see it in the bias that we see in the media. We see it from NGOs, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, and the propaganda being fed to young people. It is the perfect storm that has led to this moment, where this irrational obsessive hate of Israel has led to Hamas being celebrated as freedom fighters rather than as terrorists. And that’s really what I want people to walk away with — to understanding that when they see ‘Zionists Not Allowed’ [signs], that means ‘Jews Not Allowed.’”
“October 8” will have a week-long nationwide theatrical release at AMC theaters starting on Friday. Advance tickets are now available.
The post ‘October 8’ Documentary on Eruption of Antisemitism, Hatred of Israel After Hamas Attack to Premiere in US first appeared on Algemeiner.com.