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Jonathan Safran Foer’s online flirtation with Natalie Portman inspires a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — When Jewish literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss divorced in 2014 — amid rumors that he was in love with his longtime friend Natalie Portman — it captivated the nation.
Well, maybe not the nation, but certainly the literary and media worlds, as well as the hipster set in brownstone Brooklyn. Safran Foer and Krauss were rare literary megastars, whose “extremely loud and incredibly expensive” Park Slope brownstone was the subject of numerous articles (and a hefty dose of envy) when it hit the market for $14.5 million in 2013.
Portman, of course, was an actual megastar, and when the confessional correspondence between the celebrated actress and the “Everything Is Illuminated” writer was later published in 2016 in the New York Times, it elicited a fresh round of jealousy, speculation and eye-rolls from the masses, as well as numerous journalistic “takes” on the topic.
I was a teenager at the time, and had only a vague idea of why any of this mattered. But apparently it stayed with me for nearly a decade, because when I saw “The Wanderers,” a new Off-Broadway play running at the Roundabout Theatre Company, it didn’t take long for me to make the connection between this fictional production and the very real but mysterious drama that occurred between these famous Jewish writers.
“The Wanderers,” directed by Barry Edelstein, follows two couples in two different timelines. In the present day are Abe and Sophie, secular Jews and writers who live in Brooklyn and have been together since they were teenagers. The other storyline, set in the 1970s, centers around Esther and Schmuli, a Hasidic couple living in Satmar Williamsburg. The latter are introduced to the audience on the eve of their wedding, one of the first times they’ve ever been alone together.
Throughout the play, the couples, seemingly from different worlds, try to balance their careers, personal lives, internal desires and family obligations.
Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is a writer who boasts a Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. But he struggles with certain aspects of his life — his frayed relationships, mostly — and is hamstrung by an immense ego that is tempered only by a hefty dose of insecurity. As I watched the play, I began to feel like I knew the man, but I couldn’t quite place him. Was he just a stand-in for every genuinely talented, semi-pretentious, self-important male writer living in Brooklyn?
Abe eventually finds an outlet for his woes by striking up an email correspondence with fictional Hollywood actress Julia Cheever (Katie Holmes, the real Hollywood actress), whom he met when she came to a reading of one of his novels. Eventually, he declares his love for her — a pronouncement that essentially goes ignored by the actress. (In the play, Holmes sports a chic brunette bob not unlike a Jewish actress near and dear to our hearts.)
It became pretty clear who served as the inspiration for this play — and when I asked playwright Anna Ziegler about it, she said I was one of the few she had spoken with who had made the connection.
“In the summer of 2016, when I was writing, Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer were writing to each other in a correspondence they published in the New York Times,” she said. “She was promoting a new movie of hers, and I guess they had a previous relationship — that sparked the idea for one of the storylines in the play.”
What’s funny, Ziegler said, was that most audience members haven’t made the connection. “We haven’t really been talking about [Safran Foer and Portman] as one of the inspirations, and not many people have raised it,” she said. “I assumed that that resonance would be there for a certain percentage of the audience but, to be honest, I don’t think it’s there for the vast majority of people.”
At one point in the play, after learning his father died, Abe even says the line “Hineni, here I am,” to ground himself and calm his emotions. It’s a phrase in the Torah that usually translates to “I am ready,” which Abraham says to God before being asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as well as a prayer of humility chanted on Rosh Hashanah. But it’s also, possibly, a nod to Safran Foer’s 2016 novel “Here I Am.”
Neither Krauss nor Safran Foer responded to requests for comment on the play. “For people in my generation and younger, the recognition might be there, but it was also so many years ago now,” said Zielger, 44. “So I guess the only people who remember it are the people on whom it made an impact.”
Which is fine — “The Wanderers” stands on its own even if you don’t know the backstory. Plus, the themes of the play stretch far beyond infidelity: It also explores loneliness, free will and inherited family trauma.
Originally, Ziegler set out to write something about arranged marriages, specifically within the Jewish community. “I had always been kind of fascinated and beguiled by the idea of arranged marriage — thinking about what it would be like spending that first night together, that notion always kind of haunted me,” she said.
“I had these two different plays [one about Portman and Safran Foer and the other about arranged marriages], and they seemed thematically related,” she added. “At some point, I concluded that they really were two strands at the same play and so I started weaving them together.”
Ziegler chose to write about the Hasidic Jewish community in particular because she was “somewhat familiar with that culture and community,” she told me.
Still, as a secular Jew, it’s a topic she approached delicately. She hired a cultural consultant and an accent coach for the actors who were both from the community. Ziegler herself, who lives in Brooklyn, spent time in Williamsburg, and read memoirs and watched documentaries.
In the play, the Hasidic wife Esther (Lucy Freyer) struggles to be seen by her community and to feel in control of her life. She doesn’t know where to turn and wonders if she’s fulfilled her potential — as a parent, wife, human and Jew. “One of the great joys of being an actor is being able to learn and dive head first into a community that you ordinarily wouldn’t get to know,” Freyer said.
As the story unfolds, it’s revealed that Esther left the community with her infant son, who grows up to be the renowned Jewish author Abe, who marries his childhood friend Sophie (Sarah Cooper, the comic and actress who broke big with videos mocking Donald Trump). The younger couple is almost entirely secular, yet they grapple with the same search for meaning and belonging, the same doubt as to whether they’ve chosen the right path for themselves — or if it had been chosen for them.
“All five characters, not just Schmuli and Esther, are trying to figure out how can you be happy with what you have, with where you stand in your own skin,” said Dave Klasko, who plays Schmuli.
“We say in the play the Hebrew phrase, ‘Ein ba’al hanes makir b’niso,’ which [Ziegler] poetically translates to ‘We are never aware of the miracles, especially when we are inside them,’” Klasko added. “How can I, in my own life, realize the miracle that I’m living in before I’m on the other side of it?”
For Ziegler, these are very Jewish questions — and the questions of the “Xillennial” generation. “We’re left [with] the complex heritage of feeling chosen, but also self-hating,” said Ziegler, whose previous plays include “Photograph 51,” about Rosalind Franklin, the Jewish X-ray crystallographer who helped Watson and Crick crack the DNA model. “I think this is the most Jewish of my plays, and it’s funny because I’m not that religious, but I have found in my career that there seems to be a hunger for plays about Judaism.”
“At some point in my career, I began to be thought of as a ‘Jewish writer’ — for better or for worse,” she added.
Safran Foer, 46, and Krauss, 48, have also wrestled with the “Jewish writer” term, as well as the play’s big questions of identity, self-doubt and complicated family relationships. In fact, as Ziegler and the actors point out, issues of the play are universal, and have nothing to do with how famous you are, how expensive your home may be, or how strictly you adhere to religious law. The celebrity allusion — plus the chance to see an actual celebrity, Holmes — may be a reason to buy a ticket to see “The Wanderers,” but the timeless message is what will keep you in your seat.
“The Wanderers” is playing at the Roundabout Theatre Company (111 West 46th Street) through April 2. Find tickets and more information here.
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New York City Council pushes action on antisemitism without Mamdani
The announcement Thursday by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin of a new task force dedicated to combating antisemitism — co-chaired by a critic of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — is setting up potential tension between the City Council and the mayor’s office over how to respond to the rise in antisemitism.
So is the introduction of a measure that could limit protests outside synagogues, part of a package of new Council bills aimed at antisemitism.
Councilmember Eric Dinowitz, a Democrat from the Bronx, who was selected along with Brooklyn Councilmember Inna Vernikov, a Republican, as co-chair of the seven-member working group, said they intend to take a more assertive legislative role in addressing rising concerns among Jewish New Yorkers “in a way that may be different than what the mayor wants to do.”
That includes weighing the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which considers most forms of anti-Zionism as antisemitic, as a framework for investigating hate crimes — a position Mamdani opposes. “I believe that IHRA has a good structure for defining antisemitism,” Vernikov said in an interview. In 2023, Vernikov passed a resolution to create an annual day to “end Jew-hatred.”
On his first day in office earlier this month, Mamdani drew criticism from mainstream Jewish organizations for revoking an executive order by former Mayor Eric Adams that adopted the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Liberal Jewish groups oppose that framework. Some support the Nexus Document, which states that most criticism of Israel and Zionism is not antisemitic. The mayor has declined to say how his administration will define antisemitism when determining which cases to investigate or pursue.
Mamdani has kept open the recently created Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism, which he said will pursue his vision to address rising acts of hate against Jews. Mamdani said on Thursday that he’s in the final stages of selecting an executive director for that office.
Dinowitz, who also chairs the council’s Jewish Caucus, said it was important to move forward in parallel with the mayor’s efforts. “We are a separate, co-equal branch of government that has our own ideas and initiatives that we need to pursue to keep Jewish New Yorkers safe,” he said. Dinowitz, who represents the heavily Jewish neighborhood of Riverdale, added that most members of the task force are not Jewish, underscoring that antisemitism is not solely a Jewish issue.
Antisemitic incidents accounted for 57% of reported hate crimes in 2025, according to the NYPD. The new year started with a rash of antisemitic incidents across the city. On Thursday, a 36-year-old man was charged with attempted assault as hate crimes after repeatedly crashing into the entrance of the Chabad-Lubavitch world headquarters in Brooklyn the night before. On Tuesday, a rabbi was verbally harassed and assaulted in Forest Hills, Queens, and last week, a playground frequented by Orthodox families in the Borough Park neighborhood in Brooklyn was graffitied with swastikas two days in a row. In both incidents, the suspects have been arrested.
Vernikov’s past remarks draw scrutiny
Thursday’s announcement also drew controversy.
Vernikov has faced criticism for incendiary remarks on social media and has been a vocal critic of the Democratic Party’s approach to antisemitism. During the mayoral election, she warned that “Jihad is coming to NYC” if Mamdani wins, and called him a “terrorist-lover.” In response to a Yiddish-language campaign flyer, she wrote that Mamdani wants Jews “to burn in an oven.” She called the Jewish liaison for State Attorney General Letitia James a “Kapo Sell Out” for praising Mamdani’s outreach. In 2023, Vernikov was arrested after being pictured with a gun at her waist as she attended a pro-Israel counter-protest near a pro-Palestinian rally at Brooklyn College. A judge later dismissed the charges against her.
The progressive Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, which endorsed Mamdani through its affiliated political arm, The Jewish Vote, called Vernikov’s appointment unacceptable. Sophie Ellman-Golan, a JFREJ spokesperson, said Vernikov “regularly diminishes the seriousness of antisemitism by reducing it to a political cudgel.”
Menin, who some see as a check on the mayor and a potential guardrail on his actions, defended the appointment. “The Jewish Caucus voted to have this task force,” Menin told reporters. “Obviously, I don’t agree with the comments that she made in the past, and I’ve made that known to her.” Menin, the first Jewish speaker of the City Council, has pointed to the symbolism of her elevation alongside Mamdani, the city’s first Muslim mayor, as an opportunity to “take the temperature and the rhetoric down.”
Vernikov confirmed that the Jewish Caucus approved her selection, but insisted the speaker was involved in the initiative.
In the interview, Vernikov noted that Mamdani “has said things and done things that make the Jewish community very fearful.” She added that she hopes the mayor will translate his pledge to fight antisemitism into concrete action, “but until then, we have a trust issue with him.”
Mamdani addressed Vernikov’s attacks in an interview with Bloomberg TV on Thursday. “I know that there are so many in this city who have to deal with similar kinds of smears,” he said. “But what I know that New Yorkers want to see, what I want to see, is a humanity embodied in our politics, not the language of darkness that has taken hold.”
Menin’s legislative package to counter antisemitism
Also on Thursday, Menin introduced a legislative package as part of her five-point plan to combat antisemitism, including a proposal to ban protests near the entrances and exits of houses of worship, $1.25 million in funding for the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the creation of a city hotline to report antisemitic incidents.
Mamdani said he broadly supports the package but expressed reservations about the proposed 100-foot buffer zone around synagogues and other houses of worship. “I wouldn’t sign any legislation that we find to be outside of the bounds of the law,” he said.
At a press conference, Menin said the measure was designed not to restrict protest but to prevent confrontations. “Enforcement is not based on speech or viewpoint,” she said. “It is based on conduct that endangers others.”
The Council will vote on the measures at its next meeting in February.
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Here’s exactly why it’s dangerous to compare ICE to Nazis
It may feel morally clarifying to compare ICE to Nazis in moments of outrage. But those comparisons are also historically inaccurate, and politically counterproductive.
Nazism remains historically singular, both because of its eliminationist antisemitism and its state-driven project of industrial genocide. No other political movement has so entirely organized its worldview around the idea that a specific people constitutes a cosmic threat. The Nazis were driven by the belief that the mere existence of Jews endangered humanity, and that Jews therefore had to be physically annihilated everywhere.
A clear understanding of this truth has been absent amid renewed controversy over federal immigration enforcement and protests in Minneapolis. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz compared children hiding in fear from ICE raids to Anne Frank hiding in Amsterdam, in terror of capture by Nazi Germany. Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich compared ICE operations under President Donald Trump’s administration to the tactics of Hitler’s Brownshirts. They have been joined by many others, including in this publication.
Comparison is a central tool of historical and political analysis, and Nazism can and should be compared to other ideologies. But flattening the particular contours of Nazism strips it of its distinctive genocidal logic, and risks pushing us to take the wrong messages from its horrors.
When Nazism becomes a general synonym for “bad politics,” the Holocaust becomes a moral prop rather than a historically specific catastrophe. This is especially painful for Jews, but it also distorts the memory of the regime’s many other victims: Roma and Sinti, people with disabilities, prisoners of war, queer people and political dissidents, among others.
Part of what drives these comparisons is cultural familiarity. The Holocaust and the Gestapo are widely understood shorthand for the worst imaginable abuses of state power. Invoking Nazi metaphors often says more about present anxieties — foremost among them the fear that the United States may be sliding toward authoritarianism — than about historical reality.
Those anxieties are profound, and legitimate, especially when it comes to the concerns about injustice toward immigrants. Federal immigration enforcement has long prompted alarm about the abuse of civil liberties, including concerns about racial profiling, excessive force, family separation and opaque chains of accountability.
These problems span multiple U.S. administrations, showing that vigilance and legal challenge are always necessary. Calling them “Gestapo tactics,” however, as some national leaders have, obscures rather than clarifies the issue.
It conflates a flawed system operating within a still-robust framework of legal challenges and public scrutiny with a secret police apparatus designed for totalitarian control and genocide. For instance, in Minnesota, a federal judge threatened to hold the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in contempt for repeatedly defying court orders requiring bond hearings, prompting the agency to release a detainee. The fact that judges can and do continue to compel compliance, even amid sharp disputes over enforcement, shows that the U.S. remains a democracy rather than a secret police state.
There are countries today in which opposition parties are banned, protest is routinely criminalized, courts are fully captured by the regime, and independent media are systematically dismantled — such as Russia, Iran, or Venezuela. In those contexts, the language of secret police, one-party rule, and total state control describes concrete institutional realities.
It does not do so here. Yes, the U.S., like many countries today, is experiencing measurable democratic backsliding. But it remains far from an authoritarian regime. Much of the press remains free, despite significant pressure from the White House as well as structural pressures from corporate ownership, and continues to report extensively on immigration enforcement controversies. Independent courts have ruled against unlawful revocations of immigration protections. Protests in places like Minneapolis have mobilized large numbers of participants and, rather than being criminalized, are showing efficacy in getting the administration to change its course.
Learning from the Holocaust does not require declaring that everything is Nazism. Collapsing the distinction between democratic backsliding and full-fledged authoritarianism weakens our ability to diagnose what kind of political danger we are actually confronting. It might even weaken resistance: Mistaking slow erosion for a finished catastrophe can breed despair instead of motivating strategic action.
Nazi parallels also corrode political discourse itself. If ICE is the Gestapo, and Trump is Hitler, then Republican voters become Nazis by implication. This forecloses the possibility of democratic repair.
While far-right extremist currents undeniably exist within the MAGA movement, it is also a broad political camp that includes voters motivated by a variety of factors, including economic anxiety, distrust of elites and religious identity. Collapsing all of this into “Nazism” is analytically lazy and politically disastrous.
All that on top of the risk of historical whitewashing that comes with this rhetoric. If every abuse is Nazism, then nothing is Nazism, and the lessons of the Holocaust — foremost among them the necessity of vigorously combatting antisemitism in our society — are lost.
Of course, supporters of Trump also engage in similar rhetoric, calling their own opponents Nazis. Ending this cycle of mutual Nazi-labeling is essential if the country hopes to move forward. Historical memory is a tool, not a weapon. We can confront injustice without exaggeration. And the best way to defend democracy is not to demonize our opponents, but rather to speak clearly, act responsibly, and work to build a political culture that can actually heal.
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Italian rapper Ghali’s planned Winter Olympics set draws backlash over his Gaza advocacy
(JTA) — Italian rapper Ghali’s slated performance at the opening ceremony for this year’s Winter Olympics in Milan has drawn criticism from Italian leaders over his past activism against Israel.
Ghali Amdouni, a prominent Milan-born rapper of Tunisian parents, will be joined by a host of performers including Andrea Bocelli and Mariah Carey during the opening ceremony on Feb. 6. This year, nine Israelis will compete, including the national bobsled team for the first time.
The selection of Ghali drew criticism from members of Italy’s right-wing League party.
“It is truly incredible to find a hater of Israel and the centre-right, already the protagonist of embarrassing and vulgar scenes, at the opening ceremony,” a source from the party told the Italian outlet La Presse. “Italy and the games deserve an artist, not a pro-Pal fanatic.”
In early 2024, Ghali drew criticism from Italian Jewish leaders and Israel’s former ambassador to Italy, Alon Bar, after he called to “stop genocide” during his performance at the Sanremo Italian song festival. The spat later spurred protests outside the office of the Italian public broadcaster RAI.
On X, the rapper has also criticized other artists for not using their platforms for pro-Palestinian activism and appeared to refer to the war in Gaza as a “new Holocaust.”
Ghali’s selection comes as Italy has become an epicenter of pro-Palestinian activism that has been sustained even as such activism has receded in other places. In October, over 2 million Italians took part in a one-day general strike in support of Palestinians and the Global Sumud Flotilla. The previous month, a separate general strike was organized in response to call from the country’s unions to “denounce the genocide in Gaza.”
According to a study of global antisemitism published in April by Tel Aviv University, Italy was one of two countries that saw a spike in antisemitic incidents from 2023 to 2024. A September survey from the pollster SWG found that roughly 15% of Italians believe that physical attacks on Jewish people are “entirely or fairly justifiable.”
Italian Sports Minister Andrea Abodi said he does not believe Ghali will make a political statement on stage.
“It doesn’t embarrass me at all to disagree with Ghali’s views and the messages he sent,” said Abodi, according to the Italian outlet La Repubblica. “But I believe that a country should be able to withstand the impact of an artist expressing an opinion that we don’t share. And that opinion will not, in any case, be expressed on that stage.”
Noemi Di Segni, the president of the Union of the Italian Jewish Community, told Italian media that she was hopeful Ghali would receive instructions ahead of his performance.
“It is clear that I hope Ghali has received instructions or guidelines on the ‘role’ he is expected to play. So I hope he will understand what he needs to do in that context and at that moment,” Di Segni told the Italian outlet La Milano. “I am confident that he will understand what he is called upon to do in that context and at that moment.”
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