Uncategorized
Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it.
NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?
Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.
“One artistic director who was thinking of doing this [play] was like, ‘You know, it’s not like he’s Hamlet, but…’ And I thought, well, no, actually I think he is like Hamlet!” she said.
She added another take: “I feel like he’s Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel.”
Hansberry saw just two of her works produced on Broadway before her death from cancer at 34 in January 1965. Her first, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which follows a Black family dealing with housing discrimination in Chicago, is widely considered one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. The other, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” ran for a few months in the fall of 1964 until Hansberry’s death and has only been revived a handful of times since, all outside of New York.
Now, the star power of Isaac and Brosnahan is driving renewed interest in the play, which deals with weighty questions about political activism, self-fulfillment in a capitalist world, and racial and ethnic identity — including mid-century Jewish American identity.
The Brustein character, as Kauffman alluded to, is many things. A resident of Greenwich Village deeply embedded in that historic neighborhood’s 1960s activist and artistic circles, he is somewhat of a creative renaissance man. At the start of the play, his club of sorts (“it was not a nightclub” is a running joke) called “Walden Pond” has just shuttered and he has taken over an alternative newspaper. As the script reads, Brustein is an intellectual “in the truest sense of the word” but “does not wear glasses” — the latter description being a possible jab at his macho tendencies. Formerly an ardent leftist activist, he is now weary of the worth of activism and a bit of a nihilist. He’s in his late 30s and is a musician who often picks up a banjo.
Brustein is also a secular Jew, a fact that he telegraphs at certain key emotional and comedic moments. Others, from friends to his casually antisemitic sister-in-law, frequently reference his identity, too.
At the end of the play’s first half, for example, Brustein brings up the heroes of the Hanukkah story in talking about his existential angst — and his stomach ulcer. He has become belligerent to his wife Iris and to a local politician who wants Brustein’s paper’s endorsement.
“How does one confront the thousand nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time? Can a sword pierce it?” Sidney says. “One does not smite evil anymore: one holds one’s gut, thus — and takes a pill. Oh, but to take up the sword of the Maccabees again!”
Hansberry’s decision to center a white Jewish character surprised critics and fans alike in 1964 because many of them expected her to follow “A Raisin in the Sun” with further exploration of issues facing Black Americans, said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
“The major attack, both critically and on a popular basis, in regards to the play and to its central character was that Lorraine was out of her lane,” Gresham said. “That not only did she not know what she’s talking about, but that she had the nerve to even examine that subject matter.”
Hansberry’s closest collaborator was her former husband Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker whom she had divorced in 1962 but maintained an artistic partnership with. Nemiroff was a bit Brustein-like in his pursuits: he edited books, produced and promoted Hansberry’s work, and even wrote songs (one of which made the couple enough money to allow Hansberry to focus on writing “A Raisin in the Sun”). But Gresham — who is Nemiroff’s stepdaughter through his second marriage, to professor Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff — emphasized that his personality was nothing like Brustein’s. While Brustein is brash and mean to Iris, Nemiroff was undyingly supportive of Hansberry and her work, said Gresham, who lived with him and her mother at Nemiroff’s Croton-on-Hudson home — the one he had formerly shared for a time with Hansberry — from age 10 onward.
Instead, Gresham argued, the Brustein character was the result of Hansberry’s deep engagement with Jewish intellectual thought, in part influenced by her relationship with Nemiroff. The pair met at a protest and would bond over their passion for fighting for social justice, which included combating antisemitism. The night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and they would remain highly involved in the wave of activism that blossomed into the Black-Jewish civil rights alliance.
“Bob and Lorraine met and built a life together at a place where there was a very strong Black-Jewish nexus. There was a very strong interplay and interaction,” Gresham said. “I think Lorraine was very influenced by Bob’s family, the Nemiroffs, who were very radical in their politics. And so there was a way in which she was introduced to the base of Jewish intellectualism and Jewish progressive politics, that she took to heart and she was very passionate about.”
Robert Nemiroff and Lorraine Hansberry were married from 1953-62. They are shown here in 1959. (Ben Martin/Getty Images)
Hansberry didn’t hesitate to criticize Jewish writers who said controversial things about Black Americans, either. When Norman Podhoretz wrote “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” an explosive 1963 article in Commentary magazine now widely seen as racist, Hansberry responded with a scathing rebuke. She also sparred with Norman Mailer, who once wrote an essay titled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
Gresham said Brustein’s nihilism represents what Hansberry saw in a range of Jewish and non-Jewish white writers, whom she hoped could be kickstarted back into activism. But Hansberry also nodded to the reasons why someone like Brustein could feel defeated in the early 1960s, a decade and a half after World War II.
“You mean diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones? Forget about the Holocaust and worry about — reforms in the traffic court or something?” Brustein says at one point in the play to a local politician running as a reformer.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish scholar of literature who has written on Hansberry, said the resulting Brustein character is a very accurate depiction of a secular Jew at the time — both keenly attuned to prejudice in society and also lacking some understanding of the experience of being Black.
“I was just intoxicated that Hansberry could conjure that world, both so affectionately, but also so clear-sidedly that it seems like she can see the limitations of all of the characters’ perspectives,” he said. “But she also represents them with sympathy and humor.”
Kauffman, who also helmed a revival of the play in Chicago in 2016, is impressed with how “fully fledged” the Brustein character is.
“Who are the cultural icons who have sort of articulated the Jew in our culture in the last 50 years or 60 years, you know?” she said. “Brustein is not a caricature of a Woody Allen character, he’s not even ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ or a Jerry Seinfeld character. He’s a fully drawn character.”
Isaac, who is of mainly Guatemalan and Cuban heritage, has played Jewish characters before, including a formerly Orthodox man in an Israeli director’s remake of the classic film “Scenes From a Marriage.” In the lead-up to this play, he has largely avoided getting caught in headlines focused on the “Jewface” debate, over whether non-Jewish actors should be allowed to play Jewish characters on stage and screen.
But when asked about the responsibility of playing a Jewish character in a New York Times interview, Isaac referenced the fact that he has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side.
“We could play that game: How Jewish are you?” he said to interviewer Alexis Soloski, who is Jewish. “It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.”
When Kauffman directed a version of the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2016, her lead actor had “not a single drop of Jewish heritage…in his blood,” and she said she had to convey “what anger looks like” coming from a Jewish perspective. Working with Isaac has been different — instead of starting at a base of no knowledge, she has been pushing for more of an Ashkenazi sensibility than a Sephardic one.
“I believe that his heritage leans, I’m guessing, more towards Sephardic. And mine is pure Ashkenazi,” she said. “We sort of joke: ‘[The part] is a little bit more Ashkenazi than that, you know what I mean?’ Like, ‘the violence is actually turned towards yourself!’”
—
The post Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Deaths from Iran Protests Reach More Than 500, Rights Group Says
Smoke rises as protesters gather amid evolving anti-government unrest at Vakilabad highway in Mashhad, Razavi Khorasan province, Iran, released on January 10, 2026, in this screen grab obtained from a social media video. SOCIAL MEDIA/via REUTERS
Unrest in Iran has killed more than 500 people, a rights group said on Sunday, as Tehran threatened to target US military bases if President Donald Trump carries out threats to intervene on behalf of protesters.
With the Islamic Republic’s clerical establishment facing the biggest demonstrations since 2022, Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene if force is used on protesters.
According to its latest figures – from activists inside and outside Iran – US-based rights group HRANA said it had verified the deaths of 490 protesters and 48 security personnel, with more than 10,600 people arrested in two weeks of unrest.
Iran has not given an official toll and Reuters was unable to independently verify the tolls.
Trump was to be briefed by his officials on Tuesday on options over Iran including military strikes, using secret cyber weapons, widening sanctions and providing online help to anti-government sources, The Wall Street Journal said on Sunday.
Iranian Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf warned Washington against “a miscalculation”.
“Let us be clear: in the case of an attack on Iran, the occupied territories (Israel) as well as all US bases and ships will be our legitimate target,” said Qalibaf, a former commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards.
AUTHORITIES INTENSIFY CRACKDOWN
The protests began on December 28 in response to soaring prices, before turning against the clerical rulers who have governed since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Iranian authorities accuse the US and Israel of fomenting trouble and called for a nationwide rally on Monday to condemn “terrorist actions led by the United States and Israel” in Iran, state media reported.
The flow of information from Iran has been hampered by an internet blackout since Thursday.
Footage posted on social media on Saturday from Tehran showed large crowds marching along a street at night, clapping and chanting. The crowd “has no end nor beginning,” a man is heard saying.
In footage from the northeastern city of Mashhad, smoke can be seen billowing into the night sky from fires in the street, masked protesters, and a road strewn with debris, another video posted on Saturday showed. Explosions could be heard.
Reuters verified the locations.
State TV showed dozens of body bags on the ground at the Tehran coroner’s office, saying the dead were victims of events caused by “armed terrorists,” as well as footage of loved ones gathered outside the Kahrizak Forensic Medical Center in Tehran waiting to identify bodies.
Authorities on Sunday declared three days of national mourning “in honor of martyrs killed in resistance against the United States and the Zionist regime,” according to state media.
Three Israeli sources, who were present for Israeli security consultations over the weekend, said Israel was on a high-alert footing for the possibility of any US intervention.
An Israeli military official said the protests were an internal Iranian matter, but Israel’s military was monitoring developments and was ready to respond “with power if need be.”
Israel and Iran fought a 12-day war in June last year, which the United States briefly joined by attacking key nuclear installations. Iran retaliated by firing missiles at Israel and an American air base in Qatar.
IRAN DENOUNCES ‘RIOTERS AND TERRORISTS’
While the Iranian authorities have weathered previous protests, the latest have unfolded with Tehran still recovering from last year’s war and with its regional position weakened by blows to allies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah since the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attacks against Israel.
Iran’s unrest comes as Trump flexes US muscles on the world stage, having ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, and floating the possibility of acquiring Greenland by purchase or military force.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, in a TV interview, said Israel and the US were masterminding destabilization and that Iran’s enemies had brought in “terrorists … who set mosques on fire …. attack banks, and public properties.”
“Families, I ask you: do not allow your young children to join rioters and terrorists who behead people and kill others,” he said, adding that the government was ready to listen to the people and to resolve economic problems.
Iran summoned Britain’s ambassador on Sunday to the foreign ministry in Tehran over “interventionist comments” attributed to the British foreign minister and a protester removing the Iranian flag from the London Embassy building and replacing it with a style of flag that was used prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Britain’s foreign office did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
Alan Eyre, a former US diplomat and Iran expert, thought it unlikely the protests would topple the establishment.
“I think it more likely that it puts these protests down eventually, but emerges from the process far weaker,” he told Reuters, noting that Iran’s elite still appeared cohesive and there was no organized opposition.
Iranian state TV broadcast funeral processions in western cities such as Gachsaran and Yasuj for security personnel killed in protests.
State TV said 30 members of the security forces would be buried in the central city of Isfahan and that six more were killed by “rioters” in Kermanshah in the west.
US READY TO HELP, SAYS TRUMP
Trump, posting on social media on Saturday, said: “Iran is looking at FREEDOM, perhaps like never before. The USA stands ready to help!!!”
In a phone call on Saturday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US Secretary of State Marco Rubio discussed the possibility of US intervention in Iran, according to an Israeli source present for the conversation.
Some US lawmakers on Sunday questioned the wisdom of taking military action against Iran. Republican Senator Rand Paul and Democratic Senator Mark Warner warned that rather than undermining the regime, a military attack on Iran could rally the people against an outside enemy.
But Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, who has often touted a muscular approach to US foreign policy, advised Trump to “kill the leadership that are killing the people.”
Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last shah and a prominent voice in the fragmented opposition, said Trump had observed Iranians’ “indescribable bravery.” “Do not abandon the streets,” Pahlavi, who is based in the US, wrote on X.
Maryam Rajavi, president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, a Paris-based Iranian opposition group, wrote on X that people in Iran had “asserted control of public spaces and reshaped Iran’s political landscape.”
Her group, also known as Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK), joined the 1979 Revolution but later broke from the ruling clerics and fought them during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s.
Netanyahu, speaking during a cabinet meeting, said Israel was closely monitoring developments. “We all hope that the Persian nation will soon be freed from the yoke of tyranny,” he said.
Uncategorized
Fire at Mississippi’s largest synagogue under federal investigation after arrest
A suspect is in custody as authorities investigate a weekend fire that damaged Mississippi’s largest synagogue, which has been attacked before.
The fire broke out around 3 a.m. Saturday at Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, the state capital. Investigators said the blaze originated in the synagogue’s library, burning it and the offices. Soot and smoke damaged the rest of the building, including the sanctuary.
Two of the synagogue’s Torahs, kept in the library, were burned in the fire; another five in the sanctuary were damaged. An additional Torah, rescued from the Holocaust, was behind a glass case and survived the fire.
“At this time, we do have a person in custody for the fire,” said Division Fire Chief Charles Felton, who is overseeing the investigation. The arrest was made at about 8 p.m. Saturday, he said.
Felton said the FBI is now involved and is expected to pursue federal charges, including determining whether the fire qualifies as a hate crime. Local authorities made the initial arrest before federal investigators stepped in, he said.
A reporter who was inside the building before federal authorities secured the scene described extensive damage. Allen Siegler, a reporter with Mississippi Today, said the interior was “very dark and ashen.”
“It was wet — puddles of ashes,” Siegler told the Forward.
Jackson Mayor John Horhn said the fire was an attack not only on the Jewish community, but on the city itself.
“Acts of antisemitism, racism, and religious hatred are attacks on Jackson as a whole and will be treated as acts of terror against residents’ safety and freedom to worship,” Horhn said in a statement. “Jackson stands with Beth Israel and the Jewish community, and we’ll do everything we can to support them and hold accountable anyone who tries to spread fear and hate here.”
A congregation shaped by fire — and defiance
Beth Israel Congregation, which counts around 150 member families, has anchored Jewish life in Jackson since the Civil War, its history closely tracking both the growth of the city and the persistence of a small but visible Jewish community in Mississippi’s capital.
Founded in the early 1860s, the congregation built Mississippi’s first synagogue — a modest structure on South State Street that doubled as a schoolhouse. It burned in an 1874 fire, a common fate of 19th century wooden buildings, though the cause of the fire is not recorded. The congregation built a new brick structure on the same site, dedicated in 1875.
As Jewish families moved within Jackson, Beth Israel moved with them, relocating first to Woodrow Wilson Avenue and, in the 1960s, to its current home in northeast Jackson.
By the mid-20th century, Beth Israel had become the largest Jewish congregation in the state and a familiar civic presence in a predominantly Christian city — a visibility that brought both belonging and risk.
In September 1967, Ku Klux Klan members bombed the synagogue just weeks after the building was dedicated, damaging the rabbi’s office and library. The home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum, a vocal supporter of the civil rights movement who had helped the Freedom Riders, was also bombed shortly afterward. No one was injured, and the congregation held High Holiday services in the building that same year.
Rabbi Valerie Cohen, who led Beth Israel from 2003 to 2014 and is now at Temple Emanuel Sinai in Worcester, Massachusetts, said the echoes between past and present were impossible to miss.
“The majority of the damage is in the same place as the bombing,” said Cohen, 54.
The fire felt especially disorienting, she said, because she had been inside the building just days earlier.
“That made this moment sad and surreal and awful,” Cohen said. “I was just there last Shabbat, officiating at a wedding for one of my bar mitzvah students from there that is all grown up now. I participated in the Torah study on Saturday morning in the library, led by their current spiritual leader.”
Cohen described Beth Israel as “very resilient throughout the years” and “very integral” to the Jackson community, noting that many non-Jewish residents know the synagogue through its longtime preschool and annual bazaar.
Despite the damage, congregants say Jewish life in Jackson will continue.
Tamar Sharp, 67, a member of Beth Israel since 2006, is scheduled to celebrate her adult bat mitzvah this coming Shabbat — even if it must be held in a borrowed space with a borrowed Torah.
“Absolutely,” Sharp said. “The show must go on.”
The post Fire at Mississippi’s largest synagogue under federal investigation after arrest appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
An arsonist torched a Mississippi synagogue. It feels hauntingly familiar.
A Mississippi synagogue has just been destroyed by hateful actors – and it is not the first time.
I am talking about what happened Saturday morning. An arsonist set fire to the historic Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. By the time the flames were extinguished, much of the building was destroyed and rendered unusable.
According to reporting by Mississippi Insider, the fire tore through parts of the building, damaging sacred objects, prayer books, and decades of communal memory. Firefighters were able to prevent a total collapse, but the synagogue — founded in 1860 and one of the oldest Jewish congregations in the state — will not be able to function as a house of worship for the foreseeable future.
I am experiencing historical déjà vu. On September 18, 1967, white supremacists bombed Beth Israel in retaliation for the civil rights activism of its rabbi, Perry Nussbaum. Rabbi Nussbaum was a visible ally of Black leaders in Jackson, including Medgar Evers, and his moral courage made him a target. Shortly thereafter, they bombed Rabbi Nussbaum’s home as well. He survived. The building was rebuilt.
Those attacks followed a grim and unmistakable American tradition. For several years, I served The Temple in Atlanta, and congregants still spoke in hushed tones about where they were on the morning of October 12, 1958, when The Temple was bombed by white supremacists angered by Rabbi Jacob Rothschild’s outspoken support for civil rights. That bombing is often remembered as the most infamous attack on a religious building in American history, but what many forget is that it did not stand alone. In the year leading up to it, synagogues in Miami, Nashville, Birmingham, and Jacksonville were also bombed.
Synagogues have succumbed to flames throughout Jewish history. On Kristallnacht, November 9–10, 1938, the Nazis and their collaborators burned or destroyed more than 1,400 synagogues across Germany and Austria. That night was not a spontaneous riot; it was a dress rehearsal for annihilation. And the line of fire stretches further back still, to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, and before that to the Babylonian destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE.
Beth Israel is not just a building. It is a witness. It is a repository of Jewish persistence in a place where Jews have lived as a tiny minority for generations, carving out space for faith, community, and civic engagement in the Deep South. To see it burned is to feel a familiar Jewish nausea, the sickening recognition that this story has been told before — far too many times.
Beth Israel in Jackson burned on Shabbat, coinciding with the Torah portion of Shemot, as we read in the book of Exodus about the burning bush — a bush that burns but is not consumed by flames. Such is Jewish history.
An American tradition?
What disturbs me most is not only the act itself, but its familiarity.
I mentioned my time in Atlanta. I also served as a rabbi in Columbus, Georgia. When I look back on my career, I realize that I have spent no fewer than twenty years serving Jewish communities in the South — and yes, I include South Florida in that number.
During those years, I learned a profound respect for Jews in small Southern communities who tenaciously maintain their synagogues in the face of demographic shrinkage, economic pressure, and cultural isolation. When those synagogues close, as too many do, the community must make sure that there are homes for their Torah scrolls and ritual objects. This is sacred labor, often carried out quietly and without recognition.
Most Americans do not realize that a surprisingly large percentage of Reform synagogues in this country look far more like Beth Israel in Jackson than like the caricature of the large, affluent suburban congregation. The heart of Reform Judaism beats in small, struggling, historic communities. That is why the fire in Jackson sears the Jewish soul. It could be any synagogue. And in my darkest fears, I believe there will be more.
Right about now, some of you are saying, “Well, what did you expect? Look at what has happened in Gaza, and the Palestinians, and Netanyahu…”
If you are saying this, your foolishness betrays you. No one vandalizes Russian Orthodox churches in America because of Vladimir Putin. No one boycotts Chinese restaurants because of China’s persecution of the Uyghurs. And no one should ever suggest that victims of violent bigotry are responsible for the hatred directed at them. We would never say this about any other group. We must not say it about Jews.
The raw truth is what historian Pamela Nadell names so clearly in her indispensable new book, Antisemitism: An American Tradition.
Pamela does not only name and record the incidents of antisemitism that have occurred over the years. She shows that antisemitism is, in fact, an American tradition. It has always been with us, sometimes polite, sometimes lethal, often lying dormant like an autoimmune disease, flaring up when fear, desperation, and social change demand a scapegoat.
An issue for all faiths
Not only because of what has happened, but because of what I fear will follow — not only imitation, but silence. As I write these words, I do not know whether this arson will merit national attention, whether it will appear in The New York Times or vanish into the vast archive of shrugged-off hate. I hope my fears are wrong.
I also wonder who will speak. Will our most trusted chroniclers of American moral life take notice? I admire historian Heather Cox Richardson deeply, and I hope she will address antisemitism with the same moral clarity she brings to other threats to democracy. Because it cannot be that even in the warmest of hearts there is a cold spot for the Jews.
I often think of an artifact I have seen at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. It is a Torah ark ripped from the wall of a synagogue in Essen, Germany, hurled into the street. Carved into it are the words, “Know before whom you stand.” But those words were deliberately chiseled away by a vandal, as if to declare that there is no one before whom we stand, no God whose presence must be reckoned with — because we are destroying the place where that God so often comes to dwell.
That is why I am turning now to my readers who are not Jewish. I am calling on Christian pastors, Muslim imams, and religious leaders of every tradition to denounce what happened in Jackson this coming weekend. Because just as we rightly said when Black churches were burned, any attack on a house of worship is not only an attack on one community. It is an assault on the very idea that holiness has a place in public life.
And that, ultimately, is an attack on God.
The post An arsonist torched a Mississippi synagogue. It feels hauntingly familiar. appeared first on The Forward.