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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
—
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Noam Bettan Releases Song ‘Michelle’ He’ll Perform as Israel’s Rep for 2026 Eurovision Song Contest
Noam Bettan in the music video for “Michelle.” Photo: YouTube screenshot
Noam Bettan revealed on Thursday the song he is set to perform when he represents Israel at the 70th Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, in May.
“Michelle” is a trilingual song written by Bettan, Nadav Aharoni, Tzlil Klifi, and Yuval Raphael, who represented Israel in last year’s Eurovision and finished in second place. The song features lyrics in Hebrew, English, and French, and premiered during a special broadcast on the Kan public broadcaster.
“‘Michelle’ tells the story of choosing to break free from a toxic emotional cycle. It’s a story about emotional growth and maturity, at the moment when the protagonist realizes they must let go and choose a new path for themselves,” Eurovision stated in its official description of the song.
“Michelle” is largely in Hebrew and French with only one verse in English. “Walking down Florentin/Ocean eyes/Memories/I, I’m losing my mind,” Bettan sings in English. “An angel but it is hell/Trapped in your carousel/Round and round/Under your spell.”
Bettan, who turned 28 on Thursday, was born in Israel and raised in the city of Ra’anana. His parents are French and lived in the French city of Grenoble before immigrating to Israel with their two older sons.
Bettan is fluent in French, Hebrew, and English. He won the Israeli television show and singing competition “HaKokhav HaBa” (“The Rising Star”) in January, which automatically secured him the position of representing Israel at this year’s Eurovision. Bettan will perform “Michelle” during the second half of the first Eurovision semi-final on May 12.
“I’m very proud of the song,” Bettan said in a released statement. “It’s a great privilege to bring such a creation to the Eurovision stage. The song is full of energy and emotion that touches on a wide range of feelings. I feel that ‘Michelle’ will bring us moments of shared joy and pride, and I hope this song can bring a little of that light with it.”
Watch the music video for “Michelle” below.
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‘Tool of the Enemy’: Tucker Carlson Under Fire for Latest Unhinged Rant Blaming Iran War on Chabad
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Firebrand podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of the most vocal critics of the US-Israel war against Iran, is now blaming the conflict on the Jewish Chabad-Lubavitch movement, telling listeners of his podcast that the war’s aim is to destroy the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and rebuild the Jewish temple.
The far-right pundit, who has a history of peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories, alleged in his podcast released Wednesday that Israel started its “global religious war” last Saturday as an excuse to destroy the mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the Al Aqsa compound, referred to by Jews as the Temple Mount, in order to build the Third Jewish Temple.
The site is Judaism’s holiest and the historic location of the First and Second Temples.
“There are key players involved in this war, the one happening tonight, who believe that what we’re seeing on our television screen and on Twitter will usher in a series of events that will begin with the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, Al Aqsa Mosque, and then the rebuilding of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
“This has been going on a long time in public through, in part, the efforts of a group called Chabad. C-H-A-B-A-D,” Carlson said, spelling out the name of the Orthodox Hasidic religious movement.
“Chabad has been pushing in a pretty subtle way, unless you look carefully, for the reconstruction of the Third Temple,” Carlson said.
As proof, Carlson pointed to photos of Israeli soldiers with patches of an illustration of the Third Temple, claiming — but providing no evidence — that they came from Chabad.
In a social media post from two years ago, soldiers fighting against the Hamas terror group were pictured sporting the patches. The Instagram page belongs to The Temple Institute, an NGO advocating for rebuilding the Third Temple that has no connection with Chabad.
The post was accompanied with the caption: “Hamas made it clear from the start when they named their barbaric attack on Israeli citizens, men, women and children, ‘the al Aqsa flood,’ al Aqsa being the jihadist nomenclature for the Temple Mount.”
“Yes, Iranian-backed Hamas, as well as Iran’s other terror proxies are waging war against Israel, against Jerusalem, against the Holy Temple and all that the Holy Temple stands for: peace, brotherhood, prayer, and love for HaShem’s world,” the post read, using the Hebrew name for God, and ending with the biblical passage promising a “house of prayer for all nations.”
Carlson said that building the Third Temple “is totally anathema to Christianity.”
“Christians have a way of dying disproportionately in these wars, which tells you something about their real motives,” he said.
The Chabad movement, which is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, is not politically affiliated and is widely known for its welcoming engagement with fellow Jews, with a presence in more than 100 countries.
Chabad spokesperson Yaacov Behrman said Carlson’s claims that Chabad is behind the war amount to “a slanderous lie” and “dangerous blood libel.”
“He is also wrong about the Temple patches. They did not come from Chabad. Had he done even basic research, that would be clear,” he added in a post on X. “Reckless rhetoric like this is dangerous and irresponsible.”
Carlson’s @TuckerCarlson claim about Chabad and the Temple Mount is a slanderous lie. His implication that Chabad is behind the war in Iran is a dangerous blood libel.
Chabad’s focus is on encouraging
mitzvos—good deeds—to bring more goodness into the world and hasten the…— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) March 5, 2026
Rabbi Jonathan Markovitch, the chief Chabad emissary in Kyiv and rabbi of the Ukrainian capital, said he heard Carlson’s comments while sitting in a shelter in Tel Aviv during missile sirens, after being stranded in Israel by the war.
Calling the comments “nonsense,” he said they were driven neither by “concern for human life or any values,” but by “an ugly interest.”
“While I am sitting here in a shelter because of missiles sent by extremists who prefer destruction and death over caring for their own people, there are those who choose to spread baseless antisemitic accusations,” he told The Algemeiner.
“As Chabad emissaries and as Jews, we try to help every person, in every place in the world,” he added.
The Republican Jewish Coalition denounced Carlson’s remarks as “disgusting” and posted a photo of US President Donald Trump at the Queens gravesite of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Chabad leader, adding that “President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense.”
Tucker Carlson’s opprobrious comments against Chabad are disgusting.
President Trump and his administration reject this nonsense. https://t.co/7kjRQWjP0z pic.twitter.com/Gxjp0gHEMq
— RJC (@RJC) March 5, 2026
US Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer blasted Carlson’s comments on X, calling them “more abhorrent antisemitism from Tucker Carlson, invoking medieval tropes and ugly conspiracies.”
Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, Chabad’s social media director, pushed back on Carlson’s claim in a post on X, writing that belief in the Third Temple and the Messianic era is important “not just to Chabad, but to all of Judaism,” and describing it as part of the 13 Principles of Faith codified by the medieval Jewish thinker Maimonides.
“The sum total of the goodness and kindness that each of us do, Jew and non-Jew, usher in an era of world peace, when ‘Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore,’ where a third Temple ‘be a house of prayer for all nations,’” Lightstone added.
Carlson’s remarks were endorsed by several commentators, including fellow podcaster Candace Owens and former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
In a post on X, Owens warned followers to pay attention to where Chabad centers were located near them, describing Chabad members as “dangerous” and calling them “a radical sect of mystic occultists that follow the idea of a war messiah.”
Greene shared Carlson’s podcast episode, calling it “incredible.”
Incredible podcast by Tucker Carlson.
Telling the truth is no threat to anyone.
The greater threat is war for heretical lies. https://t.co/Vf1fZ9GjsU— Marjorie Taylor Greene
(@mtgreenee) March 5, 2026
Christian Zionist and longtime Carlson critic Laurie Cardoza-Moore slammed the remarks, saying Carlson was “ignorant of the Bible and all things Christian or Jewish.”
Cardoza-Moore, who is president of the Christian Zionist group Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, said she has worked alongside Chabad rabbis worldwide “to build bridges and understanding between our communities.”
“Tucker is simply rehashing medieval antisemitic conspiracies that led to the death of millions of Jews. He does not speak for America or Christendom. He has become a tool of the enemy,” she told The Algemeiner.
In an interview with The Algemeiner last month, Israeli Christian leader Shadi Khalloul accused the former Fox News host of “destroying Christian-Jewish relations” all over the world and “endangering the persecuted Christian community in the Middle East” by falsely portraying Israel as hostile to Christianity.
Carlson has ramped up his anti-Israel content over the last year, according to a study released in December by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which tracked the prominent far-right podcaster’s disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.
In September, for example, the podcaster appeared to blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and suggest Israel was behind the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
In a recent episode in which he interviewed US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, Carlson insisted that Israelis should be subject to genetic tests to determine any ties to the land of Israel.
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As ‘Death of a Salesman’ returns to Broadway, the question remains — how Jewish is Willy Loman?
Arthur Miller’s 1949 play Death of a Salesman, currently on Broadway in a new production starring Nathan Lane as Willy Loman, was inspired by an uncle of Miller’s and a suicidal colleague of his father’s, both Jewish salesmen.
On the play’s 50th anniversary, Miller told an interviewer that Willy Loman and his family were indeed intended to be Jews. But, he added, they were oblivious to this identity since in postwar America, the Lomans were “light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity.”
More to the point, in 1947, Miller had lectured at the Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists about a possible new Jewish literary movement in America. After the success of Focus, his 1945 novel about antisemitism, Miller opined: “Jewish artists and writers have it as their duty to address themselves in their works to Jewish themes, Jewish history and contemporary Jewish life.”
Yet despite this belief, Miller proceeded to explain that the Holocaust had temporarily made it impossible for him to write about Jewish life without being “defensive and combative” or to treat Jewish themes “in relation to antisemitism.” A delusional failure, Loman was no role model in his professional or family life, and presenting him as a Jew might have fed already-burgeoning antisemitism among audiences.
Miller would return to Yiddishkeit in his later plays After the Fall (1964); Incident at Vichy (1965); The Price (1968); Playing for Time (1980); and Broken Glass (1994), but Salesman reflected a cagier ethnic identity.
Even so, alert audiences picked up on Yiddishisms or Brooklyn Jewish inflections, such as when Loman’s wife Linda says: “Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.”
The literary critic Leslie Fiedler deemed these echoes of Yiddishkeit a symptom of Miller’s being “devious” in creating “crypto-Jewish characters” who are presented instead as generic Americans, supposedly to appeal to a wider American audience.
In a 1998 essay, the playwright David Mamet alleged that by not overtly dwelling on the characters’ Judaism in Salesman, Miller had shortchanged Jewish culture; the play is the “story of a Jew told by a Jew,” he wrote, but Loman’s fate is “never avowed as a Jewish story, and so a great contribution to Jewish American history is lost.”
To which Miller politely retorted that Mamet had discerned the Jewish content in the play, “so it couldn’t have been lost. I mean, what more could anyone want?”
What some observers wanted was a literal embrace of Jewish tradition, which they received when the Yiddish stage actor Joseph Buloff, best remembered for his role as a peddler in the Broadway premiere of the musical Oklahoma! and as a Russian agent in the 1957 MGM musical film Silk Stockings. In 1951, Buloff translated and staged Salesman in Yiddish, a version which has since been revived and performed widely.
The plangent tone of the Yiddish “Toyt fun a Salesman,” made it an audience pleaser, and the literary critic Harold Bloom, a native Yiddish speaker, considered the Buloff translation the “most satisfactory performance” he ever saw of Salesman.
Less internationally celebrated was a contemporaneous staging by The Habima Theatre, the national theater of Israel. Directed by the Czech Jewish theatrical maestro Julius Gellner, it starred a powerhouse cast led by Aharon Meskin, an acclaimed Othello, Golem, and Shylock. Linda Loman was played by Hanna Rovina, who was known as the First Lady of Hebrew Theater; she had previously appeared with Meskin in the Habima production of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk, and their exalted, visionary scope suited the epic, oneiric moments in Salesman.
Yet Israeli audiences seemed to prefer Miller’s All My Sons to Salesman, reportedly because Loman was a schmendrick, a small-time loser, and his pathetic demise excluded him as an appropriate hero/martyr for the new Jewish state.
Unlike the tearful Yiddish-language Loman and exalted, mythical Hebrew version, both of which glorified Jewish identity, the original Broadway cast was more ambiguous. Loman was played by Lee J. Cobb (born Leo Jacoby) a bellowing bulvan of a performer whose one-note paroxysm riveted audiences with its grim weight. In a televised interview (see the 5-minute mark), the Jewish performer Zero Mostel later complained that even a failed salesman needed humorous charm, entirely missing from the doom-laden Cobb rendition.
Of course, Mostel had suffered during the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings in Washington, DC, at which Cobb and the Salesman stage director Elia Kazan were friendly witnesses, naming names of former friends to placate the government witch hunt, just a few years after Salesman premiered.
By contrast, Miller himself courageously confronted the HUAC and refused to yield to threats, winning admiration even from Jewish critics who did not always laud his work. To celebrate Miller’s 87th birthday, the sometimes waspish Robert Brustein proclaimed the playwright a “true public intellectual” who created “powerful plays, but also a shining moral example unmatched in American theater.”
This praise refutes decades of obloquy, often from fellow Jewish writers, some of whom oddly resented Miller for being married for a few years to Marilyn Monroe, who converted to Judaism before their wedding. Such personal attacks, like Loman, Miller and the play itself, now belong to the ages.
Miller’s play has also won applause for productions with African-American and international casts, including a celebrated staging in Beijing, which resulted in a book and documentary film on the topic. Miller, who traveled to China for the production, explained that the play’s filial theme was as poignant in Chinese tradition as it is for Jews. Indeed, Salesman in China, a 2024 Canadian play by Leanna Brodie and Jovanni Sy freshly revisits that historic production.
As the literary historian Leah Garrett has noted, Willy Loman and Salesman can be simultaneously Jewish and universal. Some theatergoers believe that the finest modern interpretation of the role was performed by Warren Mitchell, an English Jewish actor whose Loman at times sounded vaguely like the Jewish comedian George Burns (born Nathan Birnbaum).
The most powerful, yet nuanced, Loman I ever saw onstage was incarnated by a non-Jewish actor, George C. Scott, who had previously played the role of the biblical patriarch Abraham in the 1966 epic film The Bible: In the Beginning… After a Loman tirade just before intermission, the house lights went up and the audience at New York’s Circle in the Square Theater sat in stunned silence, riveted. The impact resembled that of a 1950 Berlin production at which the audience refused to leave the theater after the show was over.
This immense force of Miller’s play is not always conveyed on stage or screen, even when accomplished actors like Dustin Hoffman and Brian Dennehy have played Loman. But the drama’s inherent force shows how the play has survived triumphantly as an American Jewish literary achievement.
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