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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!’”
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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.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
The post Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Poland Returns Jewish Religious Objects to Greece Stolen by Nazis During WWII
A Torah scroll. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
Poland on Wednesday returned 91 Jewish religious objects to Greece that were stolen by the Nazis from Greek synagogues and Jewish families during World War II.
The handover took place at a ceremony in Warsaw and marked the first time that Poland has repatriated cultural items illegally taken from their country of origin. The returned items included Torah scrolls, hanging ornaments, and fabrics.
The objects were stolen by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, a Nazi organization that focused on looting Jewish cultural items throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. The items were discovered in Poland after the war, and in 1951, the Polish Ministry of Culture transferred the Greek-Jewish artifacts to the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, where they were stored until this week.
“These relics, which were removed from synagogues throughout Greece during the Second World War, are today on their way back to their homeland,” said Greece’s Minister of Culture Lina Mendoni. “These relics do not only have historical or artistic value. They are part of the memory of my country and of the Jewish Greeks. They are intertwined with narratives passed down by parents and grandparents. They connected with the memory of relatives who never returned from the camps, victims of the Holocaust … Their emotional weight is great and the desire of all of us for their return has been particularly intense.”
“In order to demand the return of what rightfully belongs to one, one must be ready to return what rightfully belongs to others, when there is a clear legal and moral obligation,” Mendoni added.
The Greek government officially requested the restitution of the Greek-Jewish artifacts in December 2024, and the World Jewish Restitution Organization worked with Greek and Polish authorities to organize the return of the items. The objects will now be transferred to the Jewish Museum of Greece in Athens.
“We have been waiting for this moment for many years,” said Poland’s Minister of Culture Marta Cieńkowska. “Today, we are living a historic moment. Thanks to the close and determined cooperation of our two ministries, to the systematic engagement of experts and researchers, in less than two years, we can deliver today this remarkable piece of history.”
Before World War II, approximately 77,000 Jews lived in Greece, according to Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust. After Nazi Germany and its allies occupied the country, Greek Jews were deported to Nazi extermination camps and a total of 60,000 of the country’s Jewish population died in the Holocaust.