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‘Our Class,’ a timely play asking big questions about antisemitism, makes its New York premiere
(New York Jewish Week) —“But what could I do?”
Variations of this question are asked again and again throughout Polish playwright Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s “Our Class.” The play is inspired by the real-life 1941 pogrom in the small Polish village of Jedwabne, in which local residents murdered hundreds of their Jewish neighbors.
And now, at a time of increasing antisemitism stemming from Israel’s war with Hamas, “Our Class” makes its New York premiere at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fisher Fishman Space.
“Our Class,” first produced in 2009, tracks 10 Jedwabne residents — half of them Jewish and half Catholic, with the majority of the characters based on real people — from 1925 through the pogrom and beyond. The characters begin as young classmates, children of 5 and 6 playing and learning together and dreaming of their futures. In this context, “But what could I do?” refers to harmless events, such as one student silently standing by while another is teased for his unrequited crush. As they reach young adulthood, the classmates are haplessly thrust into the roles of victim and perpetrator, and “But what could I do?” takes on a terrifying gravity.
That the murderers in “Our Class” were conducted by Jews’ neighbors, rather than occupying German Nazis, is what made director Igor Golyak so eager to tackle Słobodzianek’s text.
“It was just regular people, just like you and I, that could reach these heights of hate and find a reason to burn their neighbors,” Golyak, a Ukrainian Jew who immigrated to the United States at the age of 11, told the New York Jewish Week.
Based in the Boston area, Golyak is the founder and artistic director of Arlekin Players Theater, a company made up of Jewish immigrants and refugees from Eastern Europe dedicated to presenting Russian theater. He’s gained acclaim in recent years for his virtual theater work, including “State vs. Natasha Banina,” which was a New York Times Critics Pick, and “chekhovOS/an experimental game/,” starring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Jessica Hecht.
When Golyak and his creative team first read “Our Class” together in May 2023, they drew comparisons to the ongoing war in Ukraine. What they couldn’t have expected was how Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, and its aftermath that has included both a war in Gaza and global displays of antisemitism, have recast Słobodzianek’s play in a new light.
“It feels very urgent, like it’s another recognition of the importance of not forgetting the antisemitism and hate that unfortunately exists in the world,” Golyak said. “We think this lies asleep in the world culture. But it is a very light sleeper.”
The Jedwabne pogrom was thrust into the spotlight in 2001 with the publication of Jan T. Gross’ book “Neighbors.” Gross, a professor of history at Princeton University, discovered that despite public perception — and even a memorial in Jedwabne — the massacre of the village’s 1,600 Jews did not happen by the hands of the Nazis. Rather, it was the local Catholic Polish population who took the initiative in torturing, murdering and burning alive their neighbors. Gross’ revelation led Poland’s president, Aleksander Kwasniewski to apologize to the international Jewish community in 2001, though some Poles remained in denial. A decade later, on the 70th anniversary of the massacre, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski asked for forgiveness again.
More recently, however, the Polish government has adopted an official stance of denial, vigorously rejecting any claims of local complicity in the Nazi campaign against the Jews, which left 90% of Polish Jews dead.
Alexandra Silber, a Jewish actress with a ream of Broadway and West End credits who’s playing the part of Jewish classmate Rachelka, has also felt the tenor of the play shift since the events of Oct 7. “It’s made it horrifying and relevant in a new way,” she said. “I felt really called upon by Rachelka to serve her. I have a lot to say on her behalf.”
Rachelka is one of a handful of Jewish characters in “Our Class” who aren’t killed in the pogrom. One of her Polish classmates hides her away and eventually marries her. She converts to Catholicism and changes her name. Like with each of the 10 classmates, Rachelka’s journey raises its own questions.
“Is it better to survive?” reflects Silber. “Rachelka’s Jewishness, her Jewish name, her Jewish soul departs, and she has to live as a new person. Every single thing about her survivor’s life does not resemble who she began as, and is that better?”
Alongside Silber, the cast is made up of actors hailing from New York, Los Angeles, Ukraine and Russia, and includes both Jewish artists and some with Polish roots. “We’ve really created an unbelievable diversity of humanity in our group of 10,” Silber said.
Golyak adds that after the Oct. 7 attack, the cast came together in a series of discussions. “We have cast members and team members, designers, that were personally affected by Oct. 7 because of relatives and friends that have actually been murdered,” he said. “So it’s been a very, very personal journey.”
While “Our Class” dives deeply into its challenging subject matter, it is not without its moments of levity.
“I’m trying to find a lot of humor in this play because people are funny, and that’s what makes them humans and humane,” Golyak said. “We can relate to people that make mistakes and are sometimes funny and sometimes awkward, and these people are just like us.”
New York audiences will have the chance to see themselves most clearly in the character of Abram, the only one of the 10 classmates who left for the United States before the 1941 pogrom. Throughout the play, Abram (played by “Indecent” star Richard Topol) communicates with his old friends through letters, trying to piece together the conflicting information he receives from the safety of his home in New York.
Abram serves as a foil, a reminder of the fallibility and subjectivity of memory. “We need to understand this as people living in America, separated by the ocean from evil,” Golyak said. “The more relatable Abram is, the more we understand that this evil is actually closer than we think.”
Technology has become a hallmark of Golyak’s work, and this production uses devices such as a fake documentary movie set — complete with an onstage camera person — along with chalk drawings and projections, to expose elements of the characters’ journeys. He’s joined by a creative team including scenic designer Jan Pappelbaum, music director Lisa Gutkin, choreographer Or Schraiber, and many more.
“Our Class” raises a lot of questions, but neither Słobodzianek nor Golyak are interested in offering simple answers. But for the director, that’s precisely the point.
“It’s very difficult to overcome these big events in one’s life, and I’m definitely not here to judge who did the right thing or the wrong thing, because I don’t know how I would act in these situations,” Golyak said. “But the beauty of this play is that it asks these questions.”
“Our Class” will be performed through Feb. 4 at BAM’s Fisher Fishman space (321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn). Tickets start at $59.
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Union Antisemitism Running Rampant on College Campuses, Experts and Student Tell US Congress
Illustrative: Rutgers University students holding an anti-Zionist demonstration on March 19, 2024. Photo: USA Today Network via Reuters Connect
Experts told the US Congress on Tuesday that antisemitism runs rampant in campus labor unions, trapping Jews in exploitative and nonconsensual relationships with union bosses who spend their compulsory membership dues on political activities which promote hatred of their identity and the destruction of the Jewish homeland.
Testifying at a hearing titled “Unmasking Union Antisemitism” held by the House Education and the Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, the witnesses described a series of issues facing Jewish graduate students represented against their will by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) union.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTW), which was represented among the expert witnesses, has spoken publicly before about a litany of alleged injustices to which UE officials subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University.
At MIT, the group said in August, “union officers” aided a riotous mob which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
During an interview with The Algemeiner after the hearing, Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for NRTW, said union antisemitism highlights the issues inherent in compulsory union representation, which he says quells freedom of speech and association. He pointed to the case of Cornell University PhD candidate David Rubinstein, who testified before the subcommittee on Tuesday about his own tribulations and a climate of hatred which evades being redressed because the ringleaders fostering it hold left-wing viewpoints.
“The only reason that David is forced to be represented by UE and is theoretically forced to pay them dues is because federal labor law allows that and in many cases requires it,” Taubman explained. “What I told the committee is that ending the union abuse of graduate students and people like David requires amending federal law so that unions are not the forced representatives of people who don’t want such representation.”
He added, “Unions have a special privilege that no other private organization in America has, and that is the power to impose their representation on people who don’t want it and then mandate that they pay dues because they quote-un-quote represent you. That is the most un-American thing that I can imagine.”
Rubinstein told The Algemeiner that he is a Democrat who supports many of the causes for which unions advocate but that what he described as UE’s support for Hamas leaves him no choice but to seek every avenue for disassociating with it.
“As a Jew, I cannot support an organization which spends its time not advocating for wages and health care but rather for ‘intifada revolution,’” he said. “The union antisemitism is empowered by the Cornell administration’s persistent weakness and consistent reneging on its promises to defend the rights of Jewish students.”
Rubinstein added that Cornell University president Michael Kotlikoff came close to exempting students from paying UE dues but abandoned the policy change after its members threatened to strike and thereby disrupt university operations.
“The threat of being terminated, the demands for money, and the constant harassment that others and I have experienced from UE would have never been possible had it not been for the weakness of Cornell leadership,” he added.
Campus antisemitism has drawn NRTW into an alliance with Jewish faculty and students across the US.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Kyle Koeppel Mann, senior staff attorney at the New York Legal Assistance Group, and Joseph McCartin, professor and executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, also testified at Tuesday’s hearing.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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German Police Arrest 5 Anti-Israel Activists After Break-In, Vandalism Targeting Elbit Systems
Demonstrators attend the “Lift the Ban” rally organized by Defend Our Juries, challenging the British government’s proscription of “Palestine Action” under anti-terrorism laws, in Parliament Square, in London, Britain, Sept. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Jasso
Authorities in Germany on Monday arrested five activists linked to the anti-Israel network Palestine Action after the group broke into an Elbit Systems building in the southern city of Ulm, vandalizing the facility with red paint, smoke bombs, graffiti, and smashed windows before occupying an upper floor in an effort to oppose the Jewish state’s war to dismantle the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
The officers who responded surrounded the building and apprehended the suspects. The state’s Security and Counterterrorism Center then took over the investigation.
Video posted by Palestine Action showed masked figures hurling paint, breaking through doors, and damaging equipment inside the facility owned by the Israeli defense contractor, which the activist group and recently proscribed terrorist organization has regularly targeted. The vandals claimed they had sought “to dismantle the tools used to commit genocide in Gaza.”
Elbit released a statement condemning the crime.
“Elbit Systems Deutschland GmbH is a German company and has been a reliable partner of the Bundeswehr for many years in protecting democracy and freedom in the Federal Republic of Germany. In this regard, we condemn in the strongest possible terms the illegal acts of destruction and vandalism committed at our site over the weekend,” the defense firm stated. “It is unacceptable that violent groups, presumably under the influence of foreign agitators, are repeatedly attempting to disrupt production processes in Ulm, seeking to endanger employees and to instill fear.”
The company added that “we have been an attractive employer and a driver of technical innovation in the Ulm region for decades, and we trust in the support of the authorities in quickly solving the latest crimes and restoring the status quo. The company is working that production of systems for the German Armed Forces at the Ulm plant will resume shortly.”
Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, labeled the attack on Elbit an act of terrorism.
“In Ulm, the branch of an Israeli company was attacked by masked perpetrators — presumably motivated by left-extremist, Israel-hostile intent,” he wrote on X. “While Hamas supporters smash windows here, terrorists in Jerusalem murder 6 civilians in a brutal attack on a bus. Anyone who attacks Israel — whether with words, deeds, or weapons — simultaneously assaults our shared security and our values. Antisemitism and terror must have no place in Germany. These attacks are terrorist acts — they must be clearly named and harshly punished.”
Prosor was referring to a terrorist attack in Jerusalem on Monday in which Hamas terrorists opened fire on a bus, murdering six Israelis and injuring several more.
The break-in is the latest in a concerted campaign of vandalism and intimidation carried out by Palestine Action across Europe. Founded in the UK in 2020, the group has specialized in spectacular stunts and property destruction aimed at shutting down Elbit facilities and other companies the group regards as complicit in an alleged genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Its activists have smashed factory windows, chained themselves to gates, poured red paint over equipment, and even attacked military planes at a Royal Air Force base.
The UK regards Palestine Action as a terrorist organization. On Sunday, police announced the arrests of almost 900 at a demonstration organized in support of the group. Charges included 857 alleged to support a banned extremist entity and 17 alleged assaults.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Claire Smart said of the event that “the violence we encountered during the operation was coordinated and carried out by a group of people … intent on creating as much disorder as possible.”
James “Fergie” Chambers, an American heir to the Cox Enterprises fortune, pays the legal fees of arrested Palestine Action members. He once wrote online, “I chant death to America every day” and that “No faction of the Palestinian resistance, Hamas or other, has done *anything* wrong.”
Richard Barnard, a co-founder of the UK-designated terrorist group, is scheduled to face trial next year on “one count of inviting support for a proscribed organization, namely Hamas, under section 12(1A) of the Terrorism Act and two counts of encouraging ‘criminal damage’ against Israeli weapons factories under s44 of the Serious Crime Act.”
Barnard stated in a June 2024 interview that he had previously broken into US Air Force bases in Germany. In October 2023, he said that “when we hear the resistance, the Al-Aqsa flood [Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel], we must turn that flood into a tsunami of the whole world.”
Huda Ammori, another co-founder of Palestine Action, also expressed her enthusiasm for the mass slaughter of Jews on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Zionists spend 75 years stealing Palestinian land but fails [sic] to take away the Palestinian determination for liberation. Palestine will be free!” Ammori wrote on the day of the attack. “If armed thugs stormed your home, forced you and your family to live in the garage, routinely beat you and starved you. Would you fight back? #FreePalestine.”
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‘End Hate’: Major New Campaign Targets Antisemitism in K-12 Schools
Pro-Hamas activists calling themselves the United Front for Liberation lead march through Valley Plaza Mall. The ‘Ceasefire’ rally began at Wilson Park in Bakersfield, California, on Dec. 16, 2023. Photo: Jacob Lee Green via REUTERS CONNECT
EndJewHatred (EJH), a Jewish civil rights nonprofit group based in New York City, declared war on K-12 antisemitism on Tuesday, launching its new “End Hate in Education” initiative in the US and beginning preparations for a push into the Canadian media market.
“For too long, classrooms have been used as platforms for pushing divisive ideologies that undermine our core values,” EJH founder Brooke Goldstein said in a statement on Tuesday. “Across the United States, K-12 schools and college campuses have become incubators of extremist ideology, including pro-terror and radical Islamist agendas. The End Hate in Education campaign is about reclaiming our schools, defending civil liberties, and ensuring that every child — regardless of background — can learn in an environment grounded in truth, respect, and constitutional values.”
In press materials, EJH outlined six objectives for the campaign — “curriculum transparency,” “rejecting political indoctrination,” “accountability through funding,” “examination of the rule of foreign funding,” “strategic legal action,” and “grassroots mobilization” — all of which serve its larger, ambitious goal of eradicating from public schools not just antisemitism but all forms of “hate and harassment.”
Creeping antisemitism in public education is a growing problem, as The Algemeiner has reported previously. In June, for example, the North American Values Institute (NAVI) raised alarms when the Wissahickon School District (WSD) in Ambler, Pennsylvania presented as fact an anti-Zionist account of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to its K-12 students by using it as the basis for courses taken by honors students.
The material, provided by virtual learning platform Edgenuity, implied that Israel is a settler-colonial state — a false assertion promoted by neo-Nazis and jihadist terror groups — while referring to the founding of Israel as the “nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe” used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists. Based on documents obtained by The Algemeiner, the material does not seemingly detail the varied reasons for Palestinian Arabs leaving the nascent State of Israel at the time, including that they were encouraged by Arab leaders to flee their homes to make way for the invading Arab armies. Nor does it appear to explain that some 850,000 Jews were forced to flee or expelled from Middle Eastern and North African countries in the 20th century, especially in the aftermath of Israel’s declaring independence.
Another module reviewed by The Algemeiner contains a question based on a May 15, 1948, statement from The Arab League — a group of countries which adamantly opposed Jewish immigration to the region in the years leading up to the establishment of the State of Israel and refused to condemn antisemitic violence Arabs perpetrated against Jewish refugees — after Israel declared its independence. The passage denies that Jews faced antisemitic indignities when the land was administered by the Ottoman Empire, a notion that is inconsistent with the historical record, and asserts that “Arab inhabitants” are “the lawful owners of the country.”
Following the passage, students are asked to agree with its content as a prerequisite for proceeding to the next module. That means selecting as the correct answer the choice which says “the creation of Israel failed to consider Arab interests.”
Speaking to The Algemeiner during an interview on Tuesday, Gerard Filitti, senior counsel of EJH and The Lawfare Project, a partner organization, said the Wissahickon case highlights the degree to which antisemitism and anti-Israel bias has planted itself in public schools.
“What we’re seeing in colleges and universities is just the tip of the iceberg. The radicalization in schooling, in reality, starts much earlier,” Filitti said. “We’re seeing lesson plans which push the idea that Israel is a genocidal state, or that it is an illegitimate state. We see faculty and administrators who do not support Zionist identity and reject that it can be the basis of discriminatory hate.”
“College campus antisemitism has gotten a lot of attention because we see the effects, the protests, the barricades, and encampments,” he added. “In K-12, it’s not as flagrant. It’s educational material that’s talked about in the classroom and which parents may not be aware of unless they talk with their children about what’s happening in school. So this has essentially been a secret issue because the American people are not aware of what children are learning in schools or how schools have been handling antisemitism in school.”
Antisemitism in K-12 schools has increased every year of this decade, according to data compiled by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). In 2023, antisemitic incidents in US public schools increased 135 percent, a figure which included a rise in vandalism and assault.
The problem has led to civil rights complaints and lawsuits.
In September 2023, for example, some of America’s most prominent Jewish and civil rights groups sued the Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) in California for concealing from the public its adoption of ethnic studies curricula containing antisemitic and anti-Zionist themes. Then in February, the school district paused implementation of the program to settle the lawsuit.
One month later, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, StandWithUs, and the ADL filed a civil rights complaint accusing the Etiwanda School District in San Bernardino County, California, of doing nothing after a 12-year-old Jewish girl was assaulted, having been beaten with stick, on school grounds and teased with jokes about Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
The problem has taken hold in private schools as well, according to a recent Anti-Defamation Leage (ADL) survey.
Among surveyed school parents, 25.2 percent said their children had experienced or witnessed antisemitic symbols in school since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, the data showed. Perhaps more striking, 45.3 percent of surveyed parents reported that their children had experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the Hamas atrocities of Oct. 7, and 31.7 percent said their children had “experienced or witnessed problematic school curricula or classroom content related to Jews or Israel.”
Parents are displeased with schools’ handling of the issue, the ADL said. Focus groups told its experts that schools decline to denounce antisemitism or resort to denying altogether that it is fostering a negative learning environment which causes student discomfort and precipitous declines in academic performance. In a poll, over a third of parents have said their local school’s response “was either somewhat or very inadequate.”
Moreover, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, which were purportedly meant to improve race relations, abstain from recognizing antisemitism as a form of hatred meriting a focused response from administrators. The Algemeiner has previously reported that many of those programs also ignore antisemitism because they actively contribute to spreading it. Due to this, schools often lack authority figures who understand antisemitism, its subtle and overt variations, leaving Jewish students with no recourse when they become victims of hate.
“These independent schools are failing to support Jewish families. By tolerating — or in some cases, propagating — antisemitism in their classrooms, too many independent schools in cities across the country are sending a message that Jewish students are not welcome. It’s wrong. It’s hateful. And it must stop,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement at the time. “ADL is partnering with parents to demand change.”
ADL vice president of advocacy, Shira Goodman, added: “School administrators and faculty have a duty to ensure safe, inclusive environments for all. ADL will fully invest in bolstering the families who are demanding that their schools meet this obligation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.