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The legacy of Isaac Babel, Russia’s Jewish Hemingway, is dissected in new Chicago play
CHICAGO (JTA) — All writers strive for a good story. How far they will go to find it depends on their ambition, their wherewithal and their sanity.
Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who came from a relatively stable, privileged background in Odessa in the late 1800s, would go to war among Cossacks who murdered Jews, make friends with Soviet agents and then cuckold one of them. The reason why Babel constantly put himself in harm’s way may have been simple, according to another writer.
“I think he wanted something to write about,” said Rajiv Joseph, whose play at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, “Describe the Night,” centers on Babel. “He was a young man who had wanted to be a writer but had nothing to write about.”
“Describe the Night” blends three stories from different eras that engage with questions of who controls the truth. The first portrays Babel, the Soviet secret police head Nikolai Yezhov and Yezhov’s wife, Yevgenia, with whom Babel begins an affair. The second follows a young Soviet agent rising through the ranks just before the Berlin Wall falls, and the third dives into a conspiracy behind a 2010 plane crash near Smolensk, Russia.
Babel himself may not rise to the ranks of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in terms of immediate name recognition in the United States, but the journalist, author and playwright is remembered as one of Russia’s preeminent 20th-century writers. His modernist and bloody tales in “Red Cavalry,” a collection of short stories inspired by his time on the frontlines of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919, vaulted him to the status of a Russian Hemingway. The pithy American war correspondent once expressed his admiration, perhaps even jealousy, of Babel’s writing, saying “Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.”
Like Hemingway, Babel went to war in search of a good story. Combat itself was not the only threat to him: as a Jew, he bore witness to the Cossack cavalry’s antisemitic atrocities. Babel tamped down his Jewish identity while covering the war, though he would feel a sense of isolation in both societies or as his grandson would later describe him “a Jew among the Cossacks, and a Cossack among the Jews.” In his own diary, Babel wrote “Talking to the Jews, I feel kin to them, they think I’m Russian and my soul is laid bare.”
Joseph, who is not Jewish and authored the Pulitzer-nominated play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” had read “Red Cavalry” years ago but was inspired to write “Describe the Night” after discovering the poetic journal Babel had kept during the war. The title of the play comes directly from the diary, which repeats the word several times in Babel’s own prompts to describe things ranging from kitchens to marketplaces to women to horses. Sometimes Babel successfully answers his own prompts by forcing himself to write, and other times he doesn’t, Joseph said.
Lead actor James Vincent Meredith is also not Jewish and admitted he had concerns about “the choice of casting a black man in the role of a Jewish man living in the world of Russia, the Ukraine and Paris.” He partly found his way to the character by watching the 2015 documentary “Finding Babel,” which follows Babel’s grandson across Russia and Ukraine as he searches for his famous ancestor’s remains.
“I can read Babel’s work (I have), I can travel to Israel (I have, decades ago), I can take Hebrew as an elective in college (I did, not very well), I can read Chaim Potok (I have). But these are at their best, however well intentioned, tourist pursuits for one who is not Jewish,” he said. “I will never come close to knowing the true soul of a Jewish person. Thankfully, Rajiv has created this character that by his design, anyone can inhabit.”
Yasen Peyankov and James Vincent Meredith in a scene from the play about Isaac Babel. (Michael Brosilow)
He added that the play isn’t meant to be historically accurate. “The character of Isaac, as well as others in the play, is meant to be an entry point into a world where the scalpel crafting the ‘truth’ is rarely placed in the hands of those who are adversely affected by it. As a black male and father of a black male in the U.S., I’m certainly cognizant of that world.”
Joseph feels that he and other artists share the instinct Babel had to leave his comfort zone. He wanted to be a writer, but growing up in suburban Cleveland gave him little inspiration. After college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years in West Africa.
“That was a real life-changing event for me that opened my world and opened my mind,” Joseph said. “Not nearly as traumatic as traveling with the cavalry through Poland in 1920, but the same impulse to break out of your norms.”
Yet Joseph believes Babel’s desires went beyond pushing boundaries and into a deep, pathological need to associate with danger.
“The thing I find really interesting about Babel, both through his writing and through his personal life, is this inexorable draw towards danger and filth,” Joseph said, adding that Babel would hang out in taverns with Soviet soldiers, members of the secret police and executioners like Yezhov. “He was already treading on such thin ice. So he had a recklessness, you could call it a death wish if you want.”
Meredith was also stunned by the writer’s intense flirtations with danger.
“Why get that close to the flame? That to me is one of the things that really appealed to me about this guy,” Meredith said. “I tend to play it safe, as safe as an actor can play it, but I see this guy who had these kinds of desires, he had this quest to make this amazing art as far as his stories and I just I’m just so attracted to that.”
Joseph said he saw some parallels between Babel’s story and the exodus of some of his artistic peers in Russia, who have fled to Europe. In his time, Babel was seen as subversive by nature, existing as a Jewish man in early Soviet Russia. His relished writing about prostitutes and mobsters, transforming underworld characters into urban legends. His 1935 political play “Maria” was canceled during rehearsals and by 1939, Soviet police arrested him and confiscated his writing. Throughout the 1940s, his works disappeared from circulation. Though some believed Babel had spent time throughout that decade in a prison camp, the government had executed him in 1940.
“In the 1930s and ‘40s, I think if you are a Jewish creative writer, you’re automatically subversive,” Joseph said. He noted one pivotal scene where Nikolai Yezhov labels Babel as such because his writing portrays Russia as gloomy rather than inspiring.
“If you’re telling the truth, you are subversive,” Joseph added. “So I think that pretty much any creative writer worth his or her weight would be considered subversive at that moment.”
“Describe the Night” runs until April 9 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.
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Quotation Marks That Silence Iran
Traces of an Iranian missile attack in Tehran’s sky, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 3, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
There are times when journalism errs not in what it states — but in how it chooses to frame the issue. Quotation marks, the ultimate symbol of fidelity to another’s words, can also become instruments of distortion when stripped of the conditions in which those voices exist: fear, coercion, and imposed silence.
Recently, the British newspaper The Guardian — one of the most influential media outlets in the world — published the following statement from a man in Tehran: “Nothing good can come of this, since obviously the US and Israel don’t give a damn about the Iranian people.”
Presented in quotation marks, the phrase acquires an air of legitimacy. But what is not in quotation marks is precisely what matters most: who can speak freely within Iran.
The statement appeared in an article whose title was, in itself, a warning: “Iran calls on young people to form human chains around power plants as Trump deadline looms.”
The article described an official call for young people to surround power plants as a deadline set by the United States approached, under threat of attack. This was not a marginal detail, but the very core of the report: civilians being summoned to physically occupy potential targets — a practice that, by deliberately exposing the population to risk, violates not only international law, but any basic notion of humanity.
The coverage noted that attacks on civilian infrastructure can constitute war crimes, a correct — but incomplete — statement. It omitted the fact that the use of civilians as human shields, or the deliberate placement of populations in the line of fire, is equally a grave violation of international humanitarian law. This is not an isolated practice: the Iranian regime and its proxies have repeatedly relied on the exposure — and, ultimately, the sacrifice — of civilians as a method of warfare, both in defense and in attack. In its most literal sense, this is terrorism.
The question, then, is not only what this man said, but under what conditions he could have said anything different.
The reality is unequivocal. Estimates from independent organizations indicate that the death toll from the 2026 protests in Iran may have reached as high as 43,000 — people killed for daring to challenge the regime. This is part of a systematic policy of repression.
The executions of young protesters continue, often under charges such as “war against God” — a vague formulation that, in practice, turns dissent into a capital crime. In Iran, disagreement is not merely dangerous. It is, daily, a death sentence.
This pattern is neither new nor incidental. For years, the Iranian regime has exercised strict controls over information, suppressing dissent not only through force, but through fear that shapes what can be said — and what must remain unsaid.
Journalists operate under severe restrictions, and ordinary citizens face imprisonment or worse for statements deemed disloyal. In such an environment, even seemingly spontaneous public opinion becomes inseparable from the boundaries imposed by the state. What is presented to the outside world as a civilian voice may, in reality, be a reflection of survival.
This dynamic is further compounded by the regime’s broader strategy, often mirrored by its regional proxies, of embedding military objectives within civilian spaces. The result is a systematic blurring of lines between combatant and non-combatant — one that not only endangers lives, but also distorts how those lives are represented in global narratives. In Iran, what is said cannot be taken at face value—nor should it be presented as such.
So is it legitimate to treat a statement gathered under a system that punishes dissent with death as an authentic expression of public opinion? Or are we, however unintentionally, amplifying the narrative of a regime that controls words?
When the international press publishes quotes without acknowledging the climate of coercion in which they are spoken, it risks becoming a vehicle for propaganda.
Quotation marks are not neutral. They carry the weight of what can be said — and of everything that has been silenced.
In authoritarian regimes, the question is not only whether we are listening — but what, exactly, we are being allowed to hear. By ignoring context, are we helping create the conditions for Iranians to one day speak freely — or are we helping silence them for good?
Nira Broner Worcman is a Brazilian journalist, CEO of Art Presse Communications, and author of A Sisyphean Task (translated from the Brazilian edition, Enxugando Gelo), on media coverage of the war between Israel and terrorist groups. She was a Knight Science Fellow at MIT and earned her master’s degree at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program.
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The Pakistan Gambit: Why Islamabad’s Mediation Should Worry Israel
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Pakistan Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif meet in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Sept. 17, 2025. Photo: Saudi Press Agency/Handout via REUTERS
The two-week ceasefire between the United States and Iran has been widely celebrated as a triumph of Pakistani diplomacy. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has received effusive international praise, and Islamabad has positioned itself as the indispensable broker of a deal that pulled the region back from the edge of catastrophic escalation.
The congratulations, however, are premature. For Israel and for American policymakers thinking seriously about long-term regional security, the architecture of this ceasefire and the identity of its architect should raise as many questions as the ceasefire itself.
Let’s start with what Pakistan actually is in this equation.
Islamabad is not a neutral party in the conventional sense. It shares a long border, and deep cultural and religious ties with Iran. It represents Iranian diplomatic interests in Washington, where Tehran maintains no embassy. It is home to the world’s second-largest Shia Muslim population. It has simultaneously cultivated a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia and maintains a close alliance with China, which is Iran’s largest trading partner — and which, according to reporting, helped bring Tehran to the negotiating table.
Pakistan’s Foreign Minister coordinated with counterparts from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt before flying to Beijing for further consultations. This is not the profile of a disinterested mediator. It is the profile of a state managing an extraordinarily complex set of overlapping interests, some of which are structurally misaligned with the security requirements of the United States and Israel.
Field Marshal Asim Munir’s personal rapport with Donald Trump is real, and it clearly mattered in the final hours before the deadline. But personal rapport is not a substitute for strategic alignment. The same Pakistani military establishment that built this relationship with the Trump White House has also spent decades maintaining ties with actors whose interests are fundamentally hostile to the American-led regional order.
Pakistan does not formally recognize Israel. It has never been part of the Abraham Accords architecture. It has no stake in ensuring that any final agreement with Iran leaves the Jewish State with an enhanced (or acceptable) security environment. Its interest is in ending a war that was disrupting its oil imports, threatening regional stability on its doorstep, and straining an economy already under severe stress. Those are legitimate national interests, but they are Pakistan’s interests, not Israel’s or America’s.
The contradiction at the heart of this ceasefire emerged almost immediately. Sharif declared publicly that the truce covered the conflict everywhere, explicitly including Lebanon. Netanyahu’s office issued a correction within hours, stating clearly that the ceasefire does not extend to Lebanon, where Israel continues operations against Iranian-backed Hezbollah. That is not a minor discrepancy in diplomatic language. It reflects a fundamental divergence in what the parties believe they agreed to.
Iran and Pakistan have an interest in framing the ceasefire as broadly as possible, foreclosing Israeli military options across every front simultaneously. Israel has an interest in preserving its freedom of action in Lebanon, which remains a live theater of operations with direct implications for its northern security. The fact that the broker of this deal publicly endorsed the Iranian and Pakistani interpretation, rather than the Israeli one, tells you something important about where Islamabad’s equities actually lie.
Then there is the deeper problem of what Iran brought to the table. The framework Tehran submitted includes demands for the lifting of all sanctions, release of frozen assets, American military withdrawal from regional bases, war reparations, and explicit recognition of Iran’s right to nuclear enrichment. This is not the negotiating position of a country that has been strategically defeated. It is a maximalist agenda that, if accepted in whole or in part, would leave Iran in a stronger regional position than it occupied before the war began.
The Iranian leadership has been explicit internally that it views the ceasefire as a validation of its wartime objectives. That self-assessment should be taken seriously. Regimes that believe they have won tend to negotiate accordingly.
The Islamabad talks will be shaped by this opening dynamic. The United States enters those negotiations having accepted Iran’s 10-point proposal as a workable basis for discussion, under time pressure, brokered by a state with deep ties to Tehran and no relationship with Israel. The agenda will be set by the parties who designed the framework. Iran’s nuclear file, its ballistic missile program, and its proxy network across the Levant will all be subject to negotiation in an environment that is structurally tilted toward Iranian preferences.
Israel’s task in the coming two weeks is to ensure that Washington understands the distinction between ending a war and ending a threat. A ceasefire that reopens the Strait of Hormuz while leaving Iran’s centrifuges operational is not a security achievement. It is a commercial arrangement with an existential footnote. A final agreement that includes American military retrenchment from the region under Iranian pressure is not stability. It is the precondition for the next conflict, fought under worse conditions.
Pakistan may have earned its diplomatic moment. But the morning and days after a ceasefire is when the real negotiation begins, and Israel cannot afford to let Islamabad write the terms.
Amine Ayoub, a fellow at the Middle East Forum, is a policy analyst and writer based in Morocco. Follow him on X: @amineayoubx
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How South Africa Embraced Iran — and Isolated Its Own People
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in Chatsworth, South Africa, May 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Rogan Ward
It’s sometimes tough to be a proud South African. Not because of the place or her people, but because the African National Congress (ANC), the political party that leads our current “government of national unity” and which was once the party of Nelson Mandela, has become an abject embarrassment — and destroyed the ideals it was founded on.
On the domestic front, they have led the country into ruin, as massive levels of governmental incompetence and corruption have led to literally crumbling infrastructure, ruinous public institutions, massive wealth inequality, and one of the highest violent crime rates in the world.
And yet, however disgraceful the ANC has been in local matters, they’re even worse in foreign policy, where the government has aligned itself with the absolute worst, most despotic regimes on the planet. But more than cozying up to Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China, it’s the ANC’s close relationship with the Islamic Republic of Iran (and its proxies) that is the darkest stain on its increasingly tarnished reputation.
The ANC and the Islamic Republic: Brothers in Arms
The ANC and the Islamic Republic have over the years built a relationship that is almost romantic in its intensity and faithfulness. Never has the ANC had a bad word to say about the regime, and never has the regime failed to correspond in kind. Though, of course, the ANC’s loyalty is not entirely freely given reports that it clearly enjoys some financial support from the Islamic Republic.
Either way, whether out of misplaced loyalty to their “fellow revolutionaries” or mercenary self-interest, the ANC has stood by the Islamic Republic through thick and thin; through its nuclear ambitions, its persecution of religious minorities, and its mass murder of tens of thousands of innocent protesters.
The South African government was one of the few around the world to mourn the death of Ali Khamenei — and even as it has effectively cut diplomatic ties with Israel, even refusing the offer of Israeli NGOs to help solve the country’s water problems and to help fix our decrepit national health services, it proudly hosts all sorts of senior Iranian regime officials and maintains ever close ties to the Iranian embassy here.
Unsurprisingly, the ANC’s years-long relationship with the Islamic Republic intensified almost exponentially in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023. South Africa and the ANC immediately shifted the focus from the Israeli victims, to Palestinians who it said were experiencing “genocide,” “war crimes,” and “apartheid” before Israel’s defensive war even started.
Aside from taking Israel to international court, the ANC supported all of the attacks taken by Iran and its proxies against Israel. And then came the current war between Iran and the combined forces of the United States and Israel, and things took a bit of a turn once again.
Of Moral Bankruptcy and Terrible Alliances
To those of us paying attention, it’s been all but impossible to miss how different the ANC’s role has been in this war. The Islamic Republic clearly hasn’t used the ANC to constantly legitimize its cause or to propagate its propaganda in the way it did during the Gaza war. It doesn’t need to.
The ANC has already played its role perfectly in turning Israel into the ultimate aggressor on the world stage, and with President Trump’s historically low popularity both at home and abroad, the Islamic Republic may have already won what may be the most crucial battle for its survival: the war over public opinion.
And yet, even as the ANC tries to walk a fine line in not alienating Washington completely and has tried to present itself as a neutral party in the war — even offering to mediate talks between the Islamic Republic and the US — its allegiances remain as clear as ever.
Though it’s hardly the first liberal-democratic government to chafe with the Trump administration, the ANC-captured Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO) has seemingly done everything in its power to antagonize Trump. Don’t get me wrong, Trump being Trump, a lot of this is his fault, especially with his insistence on there being a “white genocide” happening in South Africa and being decidedly undiplomatic in his thoughts on the ANC. But he’s also right about certain things. There really is no “white genocide” — as President Ramaphosa pointed out correctly, it’s not a question of race but of a high crime rate that targets everyone equally (this is somehow good news?) — but Trump is hardly imagining the ANC’s incompetence or its troubling tight relationships with the enemies of the free world.
The simple, inescapable truth is that the ANC is far more tolerant of tyrants and Islamist theocracies than it is of its fellow liberal-democracies.
Regardless of what you think of the current war in Iran, the ANC’s behavior towards the Islamic Republic since it massacred its own citizens by the tens of thousands over just a couple of days, has been nothing less than disgraceful.
It has also created an environment in South Africa where institutions fall directly in line with its terrible foreign policy. The University of Pretoria, for example, has stoked all kinds of controversy for its decision to “platform” the Islamic Republic’s ambassador to South Africa, while the University of Cape Town has decided to bestow an honorary doctorate on Imtiaz Sooliman, the “philanthropist” and founder of Gift of the Givers, known for his antisemitic statements — and especially his concerning ties to various radical Islamist groups.
A Million Wrongs Make a Right?
There is, however, a silver lining or two in all of this. The ANC is such an unmitigated train wreck at this point that it might be good that it is currently standing so fully on the wrong side of history. It has shown itself to be so wildly incompetent, corrupt, and morally twisted that it would almost be worse if it stood with America and Israel in all of this.
More hopefully, South Africa itself may benefit most from the ANC’s dreadful alliances, ironically. Ten years ago, the thought of the ANC losing power in the country was all but unthinkable — but given what’s happened over the past decade, that might be changing.
What is truly miraculous about all this, though, is that despite everything, South Africa genuinely remains a great place to be a Jew. Yes, there is still some antisemitism and like all Diaspora communities we still need armed security at our shuls, schools, and communal events, but despite the ANC’s best efforts to ingratiate itself to our very worst enemies, there is far less antisemitism here than in most countries and, at least within broadly Jewish and/or cosmopolitan areas, seldom any real need to hide our Jewishness.
And it is of the greatest of all possible ironies that we largely have the ANC to thank for this. At least the version of it that was around in 1994 — that crafted such an inclusive constitution and did its very best to engender a society where bigotry of any sort is entirely unacceptable. Except, of course, to sing “Kill the Boer.”