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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.
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The post A new Jewish play imagines a New York were everyone gets along appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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US Government Contractor, Virginia Resident Pleads Guilty to Iranian Spying Scheme
An Iranian protester waves an Iranian flag while participating in an anti-Israeli multinational rally at the holy mosque of Jamkaran near the holy city of Qom, 156 km (97 miles) south of Tehran, Iran, on April 15, 2025. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl via Reuters Connect.
A resident of Great Falls, Virginia — Abouzar Rahmati, 42 — pleaded guilty on Wednesday to collecting intelligence on US infrastructure and providing it to the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced.
“From at least December 2017 through June 2024, Rahmati worked with Iranian government officials and intelligence operatives to act on their behalf in the United States, including by meeting with Iranian intelligence officers and government officials using a cover story to hide his conduct,” the DOJ said, noting that Rahmati even infiltrated a contractor for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that possesses “sensitive non-public information about the US aviation sector.”
Throughout the duration of his cover, Rahmati amassed “open-source and non-public materials about the US solar energy industry,” which he delivered to “Iranian intelligence officers.”
The government found that the operation began in August 2017, after Rahmati “offered his services” to a high-ranking Iranian government official who had once been employed by the country’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, according to the DOJ. Months later, he traveled to Iran, where Iranian agents assigned to him the espionage activity to which he pleaded guilty to perpetrating on Wednesday.
“Rahmati sent additional material relating to solar energy, solar panels, the FAA, US airports, and US air traffic control towers to his brother, who lived in Iran, so that he would provide those files to Iranian intelligence on Rahmati’s behalf,” the DOJ continued. Rahmati also, it said, delivered 172 gigabytes worth of information related to the National Aerospace System (NAS) — which monitors US airspace, ensuring its safety for aircraft — and NAS Airport Surveillance to Iran during a trip he took there.
Rahmati faces up to 10 years in prison. He will be sentenced in August.
This is not the first Iranian plot on US soil to be revealed by US federal law enforcement in recent months.
In November, for example, three Iranian intelligence assets were charged with contriving a conspiracy to assassinate critics of the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as then US President-elect Donald Trump.
According to the DOJ, Farhad Shakeri, 51; Carlisle Rivera, 49; and Jonathan Loadholt, 36, acted at the direction of and with help from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an internationally designated terrorist organization, to plot to murder a US citizen of Iranian origin in New York. Shakeri, who remains at large and is believed to reside in Iran, was allegedly the principal agent who managed the two other men, both residents of New York City who appeared in court this week.
Their broader purpose, prosecutors said, was to target nationals of the United States and its allies for attacks, including “assaults, kidnapping, and murder, both to repress and silence critical dissidents” and to exact revenge for the 2020 killing of then-IRGC Quds Force chief Qasem Soleimani in a US drone strike in Iraq. Trump was president of the US at the time of the operation.
The Quds Force is responsible for Iran’s proxies and terrorist operations abroad, and Soleimani was a revered figure among supporters of the Iranian regime.
The Justice Department added that Shakeri told law enforcement that he was ordered roughly a month before the 2024 US presidential election to develop a plan for murdering Trump, who has vocally criticized Iran’s efforts to obtain nuclear weapons, harass Israel, and overturn the regional order in the Middle East. It also said that Rivera and Loadholt’s activities in the US included “surveilling two Jewish American citizens living in New York City” and stalking another potential female victim, journalist Masih Alinejad, at her home and other locations. All the targets were to be murdered, jobs for which the agents stood to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
All three men are now charged with murder-for-hire, conspiracy, and money laundering. Shakeri faces additional charges, including violating sanctions against Iran, providing support to a terrorist organization, and conspiring to violate the International Emergency Powers Act, offenses for which he could serve up to six decades in federal prison.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post US Government Contractor, Virginia Resident Pleads Guilty to Iranian Spying Scheme first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Georgetown University Identifies Suspected Perpetrator of Antisemitic Graffiti
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect.
Georgetown University has identified the person suspected of graffitiing an antisemitic message in a residence hall, an incident that has caused alarm at an institution that was recently scrutinized over its student government’s scheduling a referendum on the anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement to take place during the Jewish holiday of Passover.
“The Georgetown University Police Department has identified a suspect in this case and is investigating it as a bias incident and hate crime,” said a statement addressing the incident that was signed by four high-level university officials — excluding interim president Robert Groves. “We strongly condemn antisemitism in all its forms, and this act of hatred has no place in our community.”
It continued, “We stand together with our Jewish community. We recognize the effect that this deeply troubling incident has on our community, including the impacts on individual students and employees.”
The officials added that other incidents of vandalism have been perpetrated on campus in “recent days,” prompting investigations by the institution’s police department. They noted that political disagreement is causing students to devalue one another to the point that they are willing to commit “discriminatory actions” for which there is “never justification.” They encouraged students to refer to the university’s Speech and Expression Policy for guidance on how to engage in civil political expression.
On Thursday, Students Supporting Israel (SSI) Georgetown — a Jewish advocacy group that is fighting to normalize the pro-Israel movement on campus — implored the university to impose a disciplinary measure on the perpetrator of the graffiti that matches the severity of the offense.
“SSI Georgetown is deeply concerned by the antisemitic graffiti recently found on campus — an act of hate that threatens the safety and dignity of Jewish students,” the group said. “We call on the university to hold those responsible accountable and make clear that antisemitism has no place at Georgetown. SSI stands proudly with the Jewish community and all communities that are recipients of hate, and we remain committed to ensuring students can live and express their identity without fear.”
The antisemitic incident comes amid a moment of turbulence at Georgetown University.
Earlier this week, its Student Association (GUSA) rescheduled an anti-Israel referendum after numerous complaints that holding it during Passover would effectively disenfranchise Jewish students by depriving them of a chance to express opposition to the measure at the ballot box.
GUSA said on Monday that it moved the referendum date to acknowledge concerns raised by SSI, as well as Chabad Georgetown, Georgetown Israel Alliance, and the Jewish Student Association.
“We made this decision after hearing concerns about the placement of the election during a religious holiday,” the governing body said in a statement posted on Instagram. “Although the election has been rescheduled, formal campaigners may continue to campaign for the referendum until the end of the campaigning period. Individuals may continue to register as formal campaigners until the end of the campaigning period.”
The referendum must still be contested for other reasons, SSI told The Algemeiner on Tuesday.
“We commend the decision to move the vote past Passover but are still intent on combating the procedural irregularities surrounding the referendum,” the group said, referring to the fact that the resolution only passed because GUSA senators, the campus newspaper reported, “voted to break rules” which require referenda to be evaluated by the Policy and Advocacy Committee (PAC), a period of deliberation which establishes their merit, or lack thereof, for consideration by the senate.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Georgetown University Identifies Suspected Perpetrator of Antisemitic Graffiti first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Five Students Arrested After Unruly Anti-Israel Protest at Berlin University
Graffiti on the walls of Humboldt University in Berlin, where students defaced property with antisemitic slogans during an anti-Israel protest. Photo: Screenshot
German police arrested five students who participated in an anti-Israel protest at Humboldt University in Berlin, where they chanted antisemitic slogans and vandalized school property.
The unruly demonstration came as authorities in Germany continued to work to address the growing surge in antisemitism and pro-Hamas activism across the country.
On Wednesday, a group of students took over several buildings at Humboldt University, a public research university in central Berlin, and staged a demonstration against Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. They also called on the state government to halt the deportation of four Hamas sympathizers who participated in raucous anti-Israel protests and, according to German authorities, “pose a threat to public order.”
In the buildings, the students put up banners bearing slogans such as “You are complicit in genocide,” “There is only one state, Palestine 48,” and “Intifada until victory.”
They also defaced university property with banned slogans, including “Zionism is fascism” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which the German government prohibited last year for promoting the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.
Students held a pro-Palestinian protest at Berlin’s Humboldt University
Police forcibly detained at least 5 demonstrators as security forces moved in to disperse the crowd
pic.twitter.com/wQm8Kjz1FW
— Anadolu English (@anadoluagency) April 16, 2025
There were also around 40 to 60 people outside the buildings staging a demonstration and chanting slogans such as “Freedom for Palestine,” “Boycott Israel,” “No borders, no deportations,” “Germany is a fascist country,” and “Resistance is an international right.”
After the university administration requested the removal of the protesters, local police intervened and arrested at least five people.
The European Jewish Congress, the representative umbrella organization of European Jewry, condemned the incident, stating that “hate must never be normalized.”
“Such hateful and inflammatory rhetoric fosters an atmosphere where Jewish students feel unsafe, unwelcome, and targeted,” the group wrote in a post on X. “These aren’t just words on a wall, they contribute to a climate of fear and exclusion.”
“Hate must never be normalized. Not in our societies, and not in our universities.”
We are appalled by the antisemitic vandalism at @HumboldtUni, where slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionismus ist Faschismus” were scrawled across university property.
Such hateful and inflammatory rhetoric fosters an atmosphere where Jewish students feel unsafe,… pic.twitter.com/M9s0Y8aaq3
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) April 17, 2025
Earlier this month, German authorities issued deportation orders for three EU citizens and one US citizen living in Berlin over their participation in several anti-Israel protests.
The four deportees, identified as Hamas sympathizers, have until April 21 to leave the country or risk being forcibly removed.
The German State Office for Immigration issued “residence termination notices” against the four individuals – two Irish citizens, a Polish citizen, and an American citizen – for their participation in pro-Hamas demonstrations, including a sit-in at Berlin’s central train station, a road blockade, and the occupation of a building at the Free University of Berlin (FU).
According to the deportation notice, they “pose a threat to public order” and “indirectly supported” terrorist groups like Hamas.
A spokesperson for the German Senate Department for the Interior announced that an appeal against the decision has been filed with the Supreme Court.
While legal representatives and experts have expressed concerns that the deportation orders violate civil liberties for EU citizens in Germany, as neither individual has been convicted of a criminal offense, German law does not require a conviction for deportation.
Germany has experienced a sharp spike in antisemitism amid the war in Gaza. In just the first six months of 2024 alone, the number of antisemitic incidents in Berlin surpassed the total recorded for the entire previous year, according to Germany’s Federal Association of Departments for Research and Information on Antisemitism (RIAS).
The figures compiled by RIAS were the highest count for a single year since the federally funded body began monitoring antisemitic incidents in 2015, showing the German capital averaged nearly eight anti-Jewish outrages a day from January to June last year.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), police registered 5,154 antisemitic incidents in Germany in 2023, a 95 percent increase compared to the previous year.
The post Five Students Arrested After Unruly Anti-Israel Protest at Berlin University first appeared on Algemeiner.com.