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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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The post The legacy of Isaac Babel, Russia’s Jewish Hemingway, is dissected in new Chicago play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘A Whole Civilization Will Die Tonight’ Says Trump as Iran Defies Looming Deadline
An Iranian flag lies amidst the rubble of a building of the Sharif University of Technology, which was damaged in a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, April 7, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
US President Donald Trump threatened that “a whole civilization will die tonight” as Iran showed no sign of accepting his ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, Washington time.
Trump has given Iran until 8 pm in Washington – 3:30 am in Tehran – to end its blockade of Gulf oil or see the US destroy every bridge and power plant in Iran. Iran says it would retaliate against US allies in the Gulf, whose desert cities would be uninhabitable without power or water.
As the clock ticked down on Trump’s deadline, strikes on Iran intensified throughout the day, hitting railway and road bridges, an airport, and a petrochemical plant. US forces attacked targets on Kharg Island, home to Iran‘s main oil export terminal, which Trump has openly mused about seizing.
Iran responded by declaring it would no longer hold back from hitting its Gulf neighbors’ infrastructure and claimed to have carried out fresh strikes on a ship in the Gulf and a huge Saudi petrochemical complex.
TRUMP’S THREATS REACH NEW LEVEL
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website, in a statement directed at a nation that takes pride in being one of the earliest centers of civilization, dating back thousands of years into antiquity.
“However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
With only hours left before the deadline, a senior Iranian source said Tehran was maintaining its refusal to reopen the strait without US concessions that so far were not forthcoming.
Pakistan, which has been the main go-between, was still relaying messages, but Washington had not changed its tone, the source said. If the US carried out Trump’s threat to hit Iran‘s power grid, Tehran would plunge Gulf states including Saudi Arabia into darkness, the source added, a threat that had been conveyed to Washington via Qatar.
Earlier, another senior Iranian source told Reuters that Tehran had rejected a proposal conveyed by intermediaries for a temporary ceasefire.
Talks on a lasting peace could begin only after the US and Israel stop bombing, guarantee not to start again. and offer compensation for damage, the Iranian source said, adding that any settlement must leave Iran in control of the strait, imposing fees for transit.
Despite the intensification of strikes and rhetoric from both sides, global markets were largely paralyzed, hesitant to bet on whether Trump would follow through on his threats or call them off as he has in the past.
Israel launched fresh attacks on Iranian infrastructure ahead of Trump’s deadline. It targeted train tracks and bridges that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said had been used by the Revolutionary Guards to transport operatives, weapons. and raw materials.
It also warned Iranians in a Persian-language social media post that anyone near railways would be in danger.
Power was knocked out in parts of Karaj west of Tehran by a strike on transmission lines and a substation.
PAKISTAN CONTINUES TO TRY TO BROKER TRUCE
Iran responded to an overnight attack on a major petrochemical site with a strike on Saudi Arabia’s huge downstream oil industry site at Jubail, where Western oil firms operate multi-billion-dollar ventures. Video verified by Reuters showed smoke and flames rising.
Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that Tehran would “deprive America and its allies in the region of oil and gas for years.”
“Up to today we have shown great restraint for the sake of good neighborliness and have had some consideration in choosing targets for retaliation,” it said. “But all these restraints have since been removed.”
Some Iranians hoped the threatened escalation could be averted.
“I hope it is another bluff by Trump,” Shima, 37, from the central city of Isfahan, told Reuters by phone.
Trump has abruptly called off similar threats over the past several weeks, citing what he has described as productive negotiations with figures in Iran he has never identified. Tehran has denied any such substantive talks have taken place.
Iran‘s ambassador to Pakistan said “positive and productive endeavors” by Islamabad to mediate an end to the war were “approaching a critical, sensitive stage.”
A proposal conveyed by Pakistan called for a temporary ceasefire and the lifting of Iran‘s effective blockade of the strait, while putting off a broader peace settlement for further talks, according to a source familiar with the plan.
But Iran‘s 10-point response, as reported by IRNA news agency on Monday, would require a permanent end to the war, the lifting of sanctions, and a promise of reconstruction of Iranian sites damaged by the Israeli-US strikes.
It would also include a new mechanism to govern passage through the strait – previously an open international waterway through which a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas typically passed. Since the US and Israel attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Iran has effectively closed it to most ships.
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In her inspired and inspiring history of the Jewish Bund, Molly Crabapple has found her anti-Zionist heroes for our time
Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund
By Molly Crabapple
One World, 453 pages, $32
The week of Passover, north Brooklyn bus riders found something unusual at several bus shelters. Swapped out for paid ads were quotes including one translated from a 1938 essay in Tsukunft, a Yiddish literary monthly once published by the Forward Association.
“If a Jewish state should arise in Palestine,” it read, “its spiritual climate will be eternal fear of the external enemy (Arabs); eternal struggle for every bit of ground with the internal enemy (Arabs); and an untiring struggle for the extermination of the language and culture of the non-Hebraized Jews of Palestine. Is this a climate in which freedom, democracy and progress can grow?”
There are pithier anti-Zionist slogans graffitied in Brooklyn, but this quote was from Henryk Erlich, a leader of the Jewish Labor Bund, a staunchly anti-Zionist socialist party founded in Vilna in 1897 that became the most influential political party among prewar Eastern European Jews.
The bus shelter takeover was part of a guerrilla ad campaign for Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Labor Bund, a new book by the artist, activist and writer Molly Crabapple. The campaign, which started the same week the Justice Department sued Harvard University, accusing it of tolerating antisemitism by failing to crack down on anti-Zionist student protesters, also included wheatpasted posters of a model in fishnets holding Crabapple’s book.
The Trump administration and leading American Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and American Jewish Committee argue that opposing Zionism, defined as Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, is antisemitic; Crabapple’s response is a 400-page Jewish history lesson.
Before World War II, most Jews were not Zionists. Many Orthodox communities felt that forming a Jewish state was heresy, others thought the mass migration of 9 million Jews from a hostile Europe was impractical. The Bund’s opposition to Zionism was not religious or pragmatic; it was ideological. Bundists argued that the future of Jews was linked to all workers, and they should stay and fight repression in Europe, not leave. They called this form of solidarity doikayt, Yiddish for here-ness, as opposed to Zionism’s there-ness.
Crabapple places the Bund, initially an outlawed group in Tsarist Russia, at the center of both the failed 1905 and successful 1917 revolutions. In interwar Poland, as a legal party, it became the most powerful Jewish political movement, even winning seats in municipal elections, and during the Holocaust, Bundists became ghetto fighters and partisans. But the Bund was purged by Stalin, who killed Erlich four years after his Tsukunft essay, and decimated by the Nazis. In postwar America, the Bund was mostly forgotten.
Crabapple, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and an Occupy Wall Street alumna, learned of the Bund through a watercolor by her great-grandfather the artist Sam Rothbort. The painting, set in the Belarusian shtetl of his youth, shows a young woman in a blue dress throwing a rock through a cottage window. The caption reads: “Itka, the Bundist.”
In her 2018 New York Review of Books essay “My Great-Grandfather the Bundist,” Crabapple recounts discovering that Rothbort’s activism in Tsarist Russia forced him to flee to New York in 1904.
Since the publication of her article, Crabapple spent six years learning Yiddish, visited the former centers of Eastern Europe Jewish life, and dug through obscure Yiddish socialist tomes to produce her book. During the same time, Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel responded by killing over 70,000 in Gaza in attacks which many, including the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, have called a genocide. At the time of this writing, Israel is occupying southern Lebanon and along with the United States is at war with Iran. For the first time, Gallup polls show more Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, and an increasing number of younger Jews have rejected Zionism outright and are rediscovering the Bund.
Crabapple’s book is written for this moment. More than translating Bundist theory from Yiddish, she puts it into the language of today’s left. When Julius Martov declared in 1894 “that Jewish workers were oppressed both as workers and as Jews, as a race and a class,” Crabapple explains that he was invoking what the modern-day scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls “intersectionality” and was a form of “identity politics.”
To tell the Bund story, Crabapple focuses on a cast of characters including Erlich’s wife, the poet and activist Sophia Dubnow; the militant leader Bernard Goldstein; the famous ghetto smuggler Vladka Meed (nee Feigele Peltel); and her own great-grandfather Sam Rothbort. In some instances, she relies on memoirs; for Rothbort, she interprets the hundreds of paintings and sculptures in her great-aunt’s Brooklyn home and pulls on genealogical threads from her mother’s shoebox of family papers.
Crabapple, whose artwork is in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Rubin Museum, and has posters currently on display at the Poster House, introduces each character with an ink drawing portrait. Her artwork tends to lay bare her political perspective. She renders Donald Trump grotesque, while her sketches of Bundists are more similar to her portraits that glorify leftist icons like Luigi Mangione, the accused assassin of the United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson.
When asked in 2020 on the progressive Jewish podcast Treyf if progressives were engaging with a “romanticized fantasy of the Bund,” she didn’t disagree. “There’s actually a great value to simplified and aesthetic symbols in politics,” she said. “The fantasy of the Bund that I see is a muscly Jewish guy in a newsboy cap saying ‘fuck the Zionists’ with one middle finger while the other hand punches a Nazi.”
Here Where We Live Is Our Country is not a caricature of the Bund, nor a work of fan fiction; it’s a deeply researched portrait, but at its core lies this romantic vision. The Bund ran soup kitchens, sports programs and day camps, and promoted the Yiddish language, but Crabapple is most attracted to their street-fighting militancy. And her narrative can be one-sided. The Erlich quote in the book and on the bus shelter was part of a public debate with his father-in-law, the historian Simon Dubnow. Dubnow’s response goes untold.
But there are plenty of academic texts that dissect 90-year-old political debates. Crabapple’s book is different, and better for it. Here Where We Live Is Our Country reads like an epic novel with the Bundists as its tragic heroes.
Crabapple, as narrator, relates her experiences protesting at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street encampment, canvassing housing projects with the DSA, reporting from the West Bank and Gaza, and traveling through war-torn Ukraine. The personal interjections remind the reader that this is not a dispassionate history. Naomi Klein’s blurb praises the book as “a portal to an irresistible, lost world,” but Crabapple’s goal is not to write an elegy. She calls the Bund’s history a “candle to illuminate the tumultuous present” and hopes her book “serves as a guide to our urgent moment.” She decouples Zionism from Jewishness and shows that anti-Zionism alone is not antisemitic, but she leaves largely unresolved the question of what the Bund’s example demands of us today.
The Bund organized eastern European Jewish workers who lacked basic civil rights. Today’s challenge is less about Jewish empowerment, than it is about how Jews wield power, vis-a-vis the state of Israel and its military. In the book, however, Israel barely appears as an actual place where millions of Jews and Palestinians live. Instead, Israel is seen through the prism of its founding ideology, Zionism — one which pre-war Bundists argued adopted the worst quality of European ethno-nationalism.
As the Erlich quote argues, a Jewish state in Israel was destined to repeat endless cycles of violence and tribalism. In this view, the socialist kibbutzes that seduced leftists like a young Bernie Sanders or the overtures of peace and coexistence by Liberal Zionists like Yitzhak Rabin, are all illusions. For Crabapple, the inescapable reality of Zionism is instead the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu, the violent settlers, and increasingly brutal wars and occupation.
The antidote is the Bundists’ concept of solidarity — where Jews join with the workers of the world but, unlike in Communism, hold on to their Jewish identity. One of the quotes Crabapple returns to several times is from the Socialist Congressman and Bundist ally Meyer London in 1905, where he inverts the story of Exodus: “Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives for liberty? They pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt.”
The quote, like Crabapple’s book, is poetic and noble. It goes against everything I learned in Hebrew School, yet somehow reflects Jewish values in its call to be empathetic to the oppressed, because we “were once a stranger in a strange land.”
Reflecting on a 1938 Erlich speech about the rise of Nazism, where he calls on Polish Jews to stand in solidarity with the same people who had carried out pogroms across their country, Crabapple writes: “This was it. There was only Egypt, the Bund knew, and they were stuck with the Egyptians. They were people first, not Jews or goys.” It is a beautiful and heartbreaking line, knowing what came next.
This tragic solidarity is presented as a point of inspiration, but how? The 2023 Jewish Voices for Peace cease-fire protest that filled Grand Central Terminal is offered as an example of Bundist-like solidarity in action, but Crabapple, who has supported a cultural boycott of Israel, stops short of prescribing what this anti-Zionism should mean today.
Vast numbers of Jews, including Bundists, did leave Egypt and cross into Israel — not not because of ideology or religion, but because of history. American labor leader David Dubinsky, who is featured in the book, was exiled to Siberia by the Tsar and escaped to New York, where he co-founded the Jewish Labor Committee in 1934, providing Bundists critical support during the Holocaust.
In his memoirs, Dubinsky recalls telling David Ben-Gurion after the war, “even though I am sympathetic to the creation of Israel, I am not a Zionist.” He then spent decades steering American labor to support Israel financially and politically.
Crabapple also includes Vladka Meed, the celebrated ghetto smuggler, drawing on her memoir Both Sides of the Wall, the proceeds of whose English edition were donated to the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel, where Meed led groups of Americans on educational trips.
The historian David Slucki in his 2012 book, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945, finds that over time the Bund came to terms with the state of Israel; the Bund’s World Coordinating Committee accepted it as an important Jewish community, but not the sole political and cultural center, and eventually advocated a two-state solution.
It’s hard to imagine the Bund simply “Standing with Israel” today. But nearly half of Americans under 30 describe Hamas as a militant resistance group rather than a terrorist organization, and anti-Zionism has been taken up by far right antisemites. Crabapple doesn’t spell out what the Bundist response would be today; she leaves that to the reader. What she does is resurrect a buried political tradition in a way her Bundist heroes would appreciate: not just in book form, but in the streets for everyday Brooklyn bus riders.
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Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction
(JTA) — After nearly two decades of legal sparring, a town on Long Island has been ordered to pay a local Chabad center $19 million, settling claims that officials unlawfully blocked the construction of a synagogue on its rabbi’s property.
Rabbi Aaron Konikov and Lubavitch of Old Westbury sued the Village of Old Westbury in 2008, after the village passed a law in 2001 governing places of worship as Konikov sought to build a synagogue on his property.
Local officials enacted the law two years after Konikov planned a ceremony to announce a new building on the land where he already operates a synagogue. They decreed that houses of worship could be built only on plots of 12 acres or more. Konikov owns a 9-acre plot.
In October, U.S. District Judge Gary Brown ruled that the 2001 ordinance “unconstitutionally discriminates against the free exercise of religion and is therefore facially invalid.”
Old Westbury agreed to pay the plaintiffs in the suit $19 million as part of a consent decree, which was signed by Brown on March 18, Newsday reported this week.
“This consent decree may not be modified, changed or amended except in writing signed by each of the parties approved by the court,” Brown wrote. “Each party participated fully in the negotiation and drafting of the terms of this decree, and any ambiguity shall not be construed against any party.”
Kornikov did not respond to requests for comment on Monday. But he may soon be switching into construction mode for his long hoped-for synagogue, for which preliminary plans show a 20,875-square-foot building and an adjacent parking lot.
The $19 million payment will be made by the village’s insurance providers, and Lubavitch of Old Westbury has until Jan. 15, 2027, to apply for a special-use permit from the village to build a synagogue, according to Newsday.
The ruling marks a notable victory for emissaries of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, who have often been met with legal challenges when establishing centers. Last July, the Village of Atlantic Beach in New York agreed to pay Chabad of the Beaches $950,000 to settle a legal battle over the construction of a new community center.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Long Island town ordered to pay $19M after blocking Chabad synagogue construction appeared first on The Forward.