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As Christopher Nolan revives ‘The Odyssey,’ a scholar finds links between Homer and the Hebrew Bible
(JTA) — Even before its release on Friday, buzz over Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film adaptation, “The Odyssey,” is introducing a new generation to Homer’s tale of shipwrecks, monsters, gods and the long road home. But what does an ancient Greek epic have to do with Jewish readers — or with the Hebrew Bible?
Quite a bit, says Jacob Howland, a philosopher and classicist who has spent much of his career exploring what has been called the conversation between Athens and Jerusalem. His 1998 book “Plato and the Talmud” was inspired in part by a Talmud study group at his synagogue in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tulsa from 1988 to 2020.
Howland is currently a distinguished visiting professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas, founded in 2023 to put Western civilization and “the American idea” at the center of academia in the Lone Star State. Howland has written extensively on the Greeks, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud for Mosaic, the online magazine of the conservative Jewish think tank and educational philanthropy Tikvah.
In the first of a recent series of essays on the “Odyssey” for Mosaic, Howland asks, “Should Jews Read Homer?” His answer, no surprise, is “yes”: The “Odyssey” and the Hebrew Bible, he writes, “illuminate the enduring questions of human life, including how to bring order and common purpose to the otherwise chaotic relationships between men and women, fathers and sons, familiars and strangers, clans and nations.”
To recap: The “Odyssey” follows the Greek hero Odysseus (Matt Damon in the film) on his 10-year journey home after the Trojan War. Delayed by storms, nymphs, temptations and the whims of the gods, he survives encounters with the Cyclops, the Sirens and the sorceress Circe before finally returning to Ithaca. There, disguised as a beggar, he reunites with his faithful wife, Penelope (Anne Hathaway), and son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), and (spoiler alert) reclaims his kingdom from the suitors who have overrun his household.
As Nolan’s blockbuster brings Odysseus back into the cultural conversation, we spoke with Howland about what Homer and the Bible have in common, how they differ and why both epics are at the center of the conservative discourse around “Western civilization.”
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
As someone who reads the “Odyssey” professionally, are you excited about a new movie production of this?
I am going to see the film. I’ve been encouraged, actually — there’s been an incredible amount of controversy, which is funny, because no one’s seen it yet. But I read that a number of people, including the historian Tom Holland — the “Rest Is History” podcast host, not the actor playing Telemachus — have seen it and given it strong reviews.
I’m fairly confident we won’t get something like “300” — that film about Thermopylae, with its computer-generated monsters, which younger audiences oddly loved but which was, historically, terrible. I think there has to be some attempt, if not at full historical accuracy, then at least a semblance of it in costuming, ships and so on — at a minimum, a gritty reality that transports you into another time and place, even if a hypercritical viewer could point out an anachronistic helmet or two.
I want to talk a little about Athens and Jerusalem, which is how the 20th-century German-Jewish philosopher and conservative icon Leo Strauss described the tension in Western civilization between the Bible and classical Greek philosophy. The “Odyssey” was written down somewhere between 725 and 675 BCE, and the Hebrew Bible was composed primarily between the eighth and second centuries BCE. How aware are these two cultures of each other?
If you’re asking about the time of Homer, it’s all speculation. But I can talk to you about the Talmudic period [roughly the first through fourth centuries CE]. According to Warren Zev Harvey at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the rabbis seemed to have known a lot about Greek philosophy. They just didn’t make that clear in the Talmud. They didn’t want to say, “We’ve studied the Greeks.”
I think it’s safer to talk about the Homeric and the biblical as two fundamentally different approaches — different understandings of the world, of human life, of the divine — and then ask how they differ, how they interact and what overlap they have.
In other words, what are the fruitful comparisons for understanding the differences and similarities between these cultures?
Yes. Athens and Jerusalem are the two oldest, greatest roots of Western civilization. I don’t always agree with everything Leo Strauss says, but he regards those two as a coiled spring, a tension from which the West itself grows. These texts, if we look at their fundamental view of the world, pose a question we have to decide for ourselves — and in some sense the future of our civilization depends on how we decide it.
What are some of the major episodes in the “Odyssey” we can expect to see in Nolan’s film that bear these kinds of comparisons to Jewish texts, and what questions and answers can we derive from them?
One thing that will probably show up is the recognition of Odysseus by his nurse Eurycleia when he returns to Ithaca in disguise — that’s where Homer tells the story of how Odysseus got his scar. As a youth — mid-teens, or thereabouts — Odysseus goes out to hunt a boar. The ordinary way the ancient Greeks hunted a boar: You get about five guys with javelins and a bunch of dogs and a net. The dogs locate the boar, drive it into its lair, and keep it at bay, barking. You set up the net, unleash the dogs, and they harass the boar until it runs out and gets caught in the net. Then a group of men comes in and stabs it.
Instead, Odysseus jumps out in front and rushes the boar himself, to stab it on his own, and that’s when the boar gashes him and gives him his scar.
In my view, this charging, wounding boar is a Homeric image of reality, at least from Odysseus’ perspective. Reality will wound you, and how do you confront it? You go out, and you fight. That’s a premise that explains Odysseus’s behavior through much of the “Odyssey.”
What’s the Hebrew counterpart?
Fundamentally, trust in God — trust that there is an Almighty Creator who has fashioned a world habitable and suitable for human beings, and who will support them if they trust in Him. It’s not that the Hebrews didn’t know reality is wounding — it’s that there’s something above that wounding reality. The boar is an animal; the highest thing for Homer is essentially nature. There are the gods, but what exactly are they?
It’s not that the Jewish tradition doesn’t understand realpolitik. Abraham is a great warrior as well as a man of God. They understand it. But the starting point is trust. Odysseus does not trust. Odysseus is a man of disguises, cunning, cleverness — leveraging every trick.
Along with the charging-boar business, there’s a famous essay by a scholar named George Dimock called “The Name of Odysseus.” Dimock’s essential point: There’s a Greek verb, odusasthai, that means to cause pain to oneself and others, and to be willing to do so. Dimock points out that Odysseus does this in many ways — the Cyclops, whose eye he takes; the suitors, whom he kills; all of it.
By the end of the story, hasn’t he basically sacrificed his entire entourage?
This is incredible, if you look at it. Odysseus leaves Troy with 12 ships, which means around a thousand men. One way or another, they all die. So he takes a generation of young men to Troy and comes back with zero.
Twenty years later, you have the next generation — the noble cream of the crop, 108 suitors from Ithaca and the outlying islands. He kills all of them. So: Another generation of young people gone. Then the fathers of those suitors want revenge, so they make war against him. He would have killed them all too, except that Zeus had Athena intervene, essentially averting a civil war, with a pact of peace afterward.
Now, this begins to get at the real difference between the “Odyssey” and the Bible. After the universal history of Genesis 1 through 11, we get to the patriarchs. God is, in effect, saying: All right, I’m going with this guy Abraham — and remarkably, astonishingly, He says, “Come with me, leave your ways and customs behind, leave your gods, leave your family — we’re just going to go.” At that point, you’re dealing with God’s desire to form community, starting with a family, and it builds from there. Odysseus, by contrast, wants to get back home, but he’s a loner, a man of pain who must endure the world’s harsh reality to find fulfillment.
Let’s talk about the Cyclops, an episode that reveals a lot about the character of Odysseus. A one-eyed giant imprisons Odysseus’s men in a cave and rolls a stone against the entrance so they can’t get out — even if they kill him, they’d still be trapped inside.
Odysseus comes away from the war with Troy into a postwar world, a political crisis, He’s now a grizzled veteran of a bloody, horrible 10-year war. And the first thing he does is sack the city of the Cicones — an actual historical people — killing all the men and enslaving the women. He’s in a nasty mood. Very shortly after, they spot the Cyclops’s island — smoke rising — and decide to go see. They realize a monster must live there: Everything is enormous, racks of cheese stacked way up high. Odysseus says, “Let’s wait and meet this guy.” His men say, “No — let’s just take the stuff and go.” He insists on sitting inside the cave, waiting. It’s insane — he wants to measure himself.
The Cyclops episode is really the antithesis of what’s happening with Abraham and the patriarchs, who are building a family, a tribe, a nation, looking forward. Odysseus just wants to test himself. When the Cyclops returns, Odysseus uses his cleverness, blinds him, and they sneak out under the rams. Then he shouts his own name — which is what gets all his men killed, because the Cyclops is Poseidon’s son, and Poseidon is furious. He identifies himself completely: “I’m Odysseus, I live in Ithaca, here’s my address.” That episode is clearly one in which Odysseus is giving birth to himself — an act of absolute hubris.
So Odysseus has two competing desires. One is to make his name — to achieve glory and fame through his exploits. The other becomes: I have to get home.
Is there a biblical character who’s a useful compare-and-contrast for this notion of what it means to be a man, or a hero?
There’s Jacob, but let me start with David. The David and Goliath scene is fantastic, because Goliath is a Philistine, and the Philistines came from the Aegean — probably Greek speakers, though some think Crete. So Goliath, in effect, is a Greek. He’s described as enormous, fantastic — and he’s bested by David. David killing Goliath is a version of what scholars of myth call the “wily lad” story — another version is Odysseus with the Cyclops, another big, bad opponent. Interestingly, David hits Goliath right in the middle of the forehead, which is where, on Greek vases, the Cyclops’ eye is depicted.
So Goliath is big and bad, and then there’s Saul, a doofus who says, “You have to wear my armor.” David says, no, I’m not going to do that. David trusts in the Lord. When Odysseus defeats the Cyclops, he says, in effect, “I did this — I am Odysseus.” David says, “No — I trust in the Lord; the Lord protects me.”
And Jacob?
Odysseus is a wrestler, and Jacob is very Odyssean — fighting with Esau, leveraging Esau’s hunger to steal his birthright, scheming with his mother Rebecca, who is also an Odyssean figure, telling him to dress in skins to deceive Isaac. Then Esau wants to kill him, and we get the scene where Jacob wrestles at the Jabbok [River], the night before he has to confront Esau. He’s worried, he’s wounded, he fights this “ish” — this figure, angel, whatever it is — and he’s vulnerable. He’s feeling fear, feeling guilt. He’s holding on and fighting because only if Esau blesses him — which happens the next day — can Jacob let go. In other words: “I have to make it right with my brother.” Then he’s told his name will be Israel — because he strives with God.
So to sum this up: The Jewish hero is vulnerable and trusts in God; the Greek hero can show no vulnerability and can only trust in himself. And yes, there’s Athena and the other gods, but the Greek gods are fickle.
Are there similar comparisons between a female heroine in the “Odyssey” and a biblical character — perhaps Penelope and what she represents versus one of the matriarchs?
Penelope and Rebecca are two strong but very different women. Both are capable, like Odysseus, of enduring deep and lasting pain. Penelope seems more passive, but she has a kind of Odyssean cunning and steely determination. She holds the suitors at bay for three years by delaying marriage until she’s finished weaving the funeral shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. Besides her trick of weaving by day and unraveling by night, the shroud is not just for Laertes. It is for the suitors, and it signifies the burial of an entire epoch — a past slain by the violent passions of the younger generation, no longer constrained by ancestral ways.
While Penelope patiently awaits Odysseus’s return and prepares to bury a dying epoch, Rebecca looks forward, toward the great nation that God had promised to make of Abraham’s offspring. Isaac, doubtless traumatized by his near sacrifice, is the passive partner in their marriage; he stays put when Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for him, while Rebecca jumps at the chance to leave her home. She is physically vigorous (she endures a breach birth of twins, and carries water for all the servant’s camels) and strong in will, and it is she who is endowed with Odyssean cunning. She perceives that it is Jacob, not Esau, who has the toughness and ambition needed to be the bearer of the covenant. It is she who instructs Jacob how to disguise himself as Esau so that Isaac’s blessing will go to him; who takes on herself whatever curse Isaac may put on Jacob; and who instructs Jacob to flee to Beersheba, knowing that she will probably never see him again.
Those are really useful comparisons. But it raises a question, which maybe a rabbi would answer differently than a scholar: Is there a temptation, reading the “Odyssey” and the Bible, to conclude that one worldview, not the quality of the literature but the worldview, is simply better than the other? Does Homer have something to teach Jews about how to be a hero, or a lover, or how to be clever?
I was just teaching Exodus, and we got to the scene where Moses punishes the Israelites for the sin of the Golden Calf — a very Homeric episode, morally messy. Were any of the Levites who did the killing themselves involved in making the calf? Are they only killing people who deserve it, or will innocent people die too? My students find it extreme — 3,000 men killed. My response is: Read Machiavelli, where he says armed prophets succeed and unarmed prophets fail — and that 3,000 is about half a percent of the roughly two million Israelites there. If Moses doesn’t get this under control, they’re all going to die. That’s Greek — that’s realpolitik. But it’s already there in the Jewish tradition too, going back to Abraham.
So — is the Jewish tradition superior? I think so, and especially for today, because of our circumstances. The United States was at its height after World War II, and now our institutions are collapsing. What do we need? Trust. We need to rebuild. So if you ask which tradition is better, here’s one criterion: What’s the advantage of trust? It’s a kind of youthfulness, a kind of fertility, a kind of generativity — the capacity of the Jews to rebuild what’s been broken, to regrow, to reestablish themselves at every civilizational crisis, is unparalleled in history. The Greeks have a parallel of sorts — there’s a capacity to find a new way forward there too. But it seems to me what we need today is trust — because people are withdrawing their energy from the task of mending the world, because they don’t want to invest their time, energy and hope in something they believe might fail.
If we’re going to save Western civilization, which I do think is in crisis, we need to renew ourselves by looking to the Jewish tradition in particular.
Many people today, especially on the political right, argue that Western civilization is under siege, and the key to its revival is reclaiming its roots in the Ancient Greeks and Christian traditions. I think some Jewish thinkers and think tanks — including Tikvah, where some of your work has appeared — have a lot invested in including Judaism and Jewish ideas among the cornerstones of Western civilization. Is that a natural fit, or was Judaism more of a counterculture that was constantly challenging classical and Christian ideas?
I was a senior fellow at Tikvah, and they brought me on to design Greek and Jewish courses. When I got to the University of Austin [the pro-free inquiry, “anti-woke” liberal arts college whose founders include the Jewish journalist Bari Weiss] I designed their intellectual foundations program — their liberal-education core — and set it up with Genesis, Exodus and so on. I think what Tikvah is trying to do — and what UT Austin is doing too, in the School of Civic Leadership, where I’ll be teaching Genesis and Exodus this fall — and what other universities are trying to do, is give the Jewish tradition its rightful place.
From the founding fathers onward, there’s this notion that America is a chosen land — that we are, in some sense, a chosen people, engaged in a moral, spiritual, political mission. Lincoln, I think, brings this to a kind of perfection — he turns it into a civil religion, speaking to a people who’ve read the Bible, without pushing any particular sectarian version of it. We don’t know which side God is on, but the project isn’t going to work unless we understand ourselves to be on a kind of collective mission, knowing we’ll make mistakes and need to be forgiven.
You’ve written that the Hebrew Bible, like Homer, is one of the “taproots of the great branching oak of Western civilization.” Do you worry about the Christian nationalists who insist Western civilization is intrinsically tied to the Christian faith, and denotes a specifically Christian civilization?
For sure, I think it’s a huge problem. As with anything involving the Jews, I’m horrified by the antisemitism I’ve seen building on the left, now mirrored on the right. Young people in particular are being memed into antisemitism.
It does seem to me that the only way forward is to keep having these conversations — to say, here’s what we’ve inherited, here’s how these texts have shaped who we are as Americans, how we understand things, even if you’re a staunch atheist, the Bible has shaped your thinking about all of this. Only then can we get to a point where more people than just the Jews might say, “Your Christian nationalism, which imagines Christianity came out of nowhere with no real relationship to the Jews except rejection, is fundamentally ill-informed and destructive.”
To return to Nolan’s version of the “Odyssey”: What do you hope it gets right — or, if you’d rather answer the other way, what do you dread it might do to a story of such antiquity and power?
Odysseus, as I’ve indicated, has some questionable qualities as a leader, but he’s a much more complicated, flexible person, better suited to a new reality. I think that’s part of why Homer centered him. He’s a character who can hold two things together at once — maybe more than two: “I want to be an outstanding individual, but my duty is to the community; I want to protect my family and make a name for myself, but I’m willing to do what’s necessary.”
That’s true of the Hebraic heroes too — Abraham surely didn’t think it was a great idea to say his wife Sarah was his sister [when threatened by Pharaoh and King Abimelech] not once but twice, but he had to; otherwise they weren’t getting out of there. You have to hold the necessary and the good together. That requires a complicated person who can juggle both.
And I think it’s such a primal story, from the point of view of the human soul and human history. On the individual level, it’s the shape of a life — leaving home and coming back. And it’s the shape of a community too. Biblically, we’re all exiles, all trying to get back to Eden, if you like. The story of human life is trying to make, or recover, or return to a home — on both the individual and the communal level — and it’s a never-ending task. I think Homer knew what he was doing: Read the last page of the “Odyssey”, and you sense there’s a lot of work still to be done. Because it doesn’t end. This is what life is about — and then going forward too, having children, being concerned with their home, helping them make one.
I hope the film shows that.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post As Christopher Nolan revives ‘The Odyssey,’ a scholar finds links between Homer and the Hebrew Bible appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
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‘Time to double down’: Why AIPAC sees El Sayed’s win as a sign to spend still more
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens for an open Michigan Senate seat prompted an immediate split reaction as the Democratic Party endures a historic internal fight over U.S. support for Israel.
To progressives, the result showed that even more than $60 million in outside spending — including more than $30 million by AIPAC, the largest investment it ever made in a single race — could not stop a candidate who made opposition to Israel and its U.S. lobby a defining theme of his campaign.
To AIPAC and its allies, the one-point margin proved that their spending kept what could have been a much bigger defeat within reach and prevented a broader progressive landslide.
The race was widely viewed as the clearest test yet of the Israel advocacy campaign group’s political influence after months of progressive victories by candidates who have condemned Israel and made inflammatory rhetoric — including using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe its conduct. But instead of getting to a decisive verdict, Tuesday’s primary left each camp more convinced than before they are on the right path.
For El-Sayed’s supporters, simply defeating an incumbent backed by the Democratic establishment and AIPAC was historic. Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, known on social media as “Track AIPAC,” declared the primary season “a repudiation of the idea that our democracy is for sale” by the power of grassroots organizing.
Former Rep. Andy Levin — who lost his own primary in 2022 to Stevens because of AIPAC mass spending — said Democratic voters are increasingly frustrated with special-interest money and that El-Sayed effectively turned opposition to AIPAC into a winning political message. “It worked,” he said.
But AIPAC and its allies see no reason to rethink their strategy.
AIPAC President Bernie Kaminetsky struck a defiant tone in an email to members after the race was called on Wednesday morning. “This narrow loss stings,” he wrote, “but her defeat doesn’t change our principled opposition to the dangerous policies El-Sayed wants to bring to the U.S. Senate.”
Kaminetsky called the fight “generational,” telling supporters that the organization remains committed to defeating El-Sayed in November and defending what it contends should be a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. “Our conviction will not be measured in a single race or a single cycle,” Kaminetsky wrote. In a fundraising email, AIPAC used the phrase, “When we get knocked down, we get right up and back in the fight,” before adding: “It’s time to double down.”
That response suggests AIPAC views Michigan less as a repudiation than as evidence that its intervention still mattered — preventing what could have been a far more decisive rejection by voters of the Democratic establishment. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Republican Mike Rogers against El-Sayed. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
However, backing a Republican in one of the nation’s most important swing states would also carry political risks. It would reinforce critics’ argument that AIPAC has effectively picked sides in partisan politics. The group has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The Gaza war has only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
If AIPAC is signaling it will double down, El-Sayed is doing the same. In media appearances Wednesday after clinching the nomination, he gave the progressive base that carried him to victory more red meat.
In a CNN interview Wednesday night, he said his opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel also extends to defensive systems such as Iron Dome, arguing there is no meaningful distinction. “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons,” he said. Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011 and is credited with saving countless lives, intercepting most of the short-range rockets and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilians by Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terror groups. El-Sayed said American tax dollars should be spent on priorities in Michigan rather than “fund foreign militaries.”
CNN commentator Van Jones argued that El-Sayed’s support for a complete military embargo on Israel gave Israel’s advocates a legitimate reason to oppose his candidacy. “This guy is saying that the U.S. government can’t even sell defensive weapons to Israel, which would make Israel completely defenseless,” he said on an election night politics panel. “Now that would be a reason for a group of people who care about Israelis to say this is not our guy.”
Echoes of Mamdani, but a different electorate
The reaction to Tuesday’s results echoed the approach many Jewish organizations and moderates took after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last June.
Mamdani’s campaign roiled the Jewish community more than any mayoral contest in recent memory. He faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But he didn’t back down. Mamdani’s stance on the conflict in Gaza resonated with a majority of voters. He also enjoyed support among progressive and younger Jews who saw his criticism of Israel as compatible with Jewish values of justice. Mamdani was elected in November with just over 50% of the vote and has repeatedly come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests.
Like Mamdani’s rise in New York, El-Sayed’s victory demonstrates that candidates running to the left of the Democratic establishment can overcome intense opposition.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Mamdani said: “I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics.”
But the comparison has limits. New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic, where the primary is often the race that decides the election. Mamdani also benefited from a fractured opposition and an unpopular rival. El-Sayed faces a different political reality. Michigan remains a politically divided state, and Republican Mike Rogers — who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024 — held a small lead versus El-Sayed in several polls conducted before Tuesday’s primary. El-Sayed has no guarantee of winning the general election.
Amid the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome of the Michigan Senate race, neither side is retreating.
El-Sayed’s narrow margin has set up the next phase of the fight over the direction of the Democratic primary and U.S. support for Israel with fodder to claim to speak for a majority of voters and new ammunition.
The test of who’s right won’t end in November. Progressive activists are increasingly turning their attention to toppling Democratic leadership, arguing that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer are too closely aligned with AIPAC and out of step with the party’s base. Schumer embraced El-Sayed only after the primary and said he was looking to lead a “big-tent” party to victory. Jeffries has not publicly weighed in.
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Is it time for a Wendy Wasserstein renaissance?
Is it time for a reassessment of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1997 An American Daughter, which she described as “darker” than her 20th century hits? On Aug. 11, when La Femme Theatre Productions opens the first major New York revival at the Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, audiences will find out.
Wasserstein was among the most commercially successful female theater artists of the 20th century. Along with Lorraine Hansberry and Lillian Hellman, she was one of few women to open a play directly on Broadway. According to an interview with Wasserstein in The Paris Review, she received the biggest advance ever given to a straight play for 1992’s The Sisters Rosensweig. (It lost the Tony for Best Play to Angels in America.)
And yet since her death from cancer at age 55 in 2006, (the same year as Betty Friedan, who scolded her about the end of her 1989 play, The Heidi Chronicles, where Heidi gives up her career to adopt a child) she has been sidelined. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Heidi, and her other big plays, An Uncommon Woman and Others, Isn’t It Romantic?, and The Sisters Rosensweig were considered paradigm changing. They told the stories of elite women navigating the enormous social changes second-wave feminism wrought. No other American playwright so consistently created worlds in which women — Jewish and not — juggled relationships and careers.
Written in the mid-1990s, An American Daughter is different. Sometimes described as Wasserstein’s most political play, it was her first work to be set outside of New York. The Beltway comedy-drama emerged out of her frustration at the backlash against feminism and the scandals tanking women in the Clinton era, such as Hilary’s Cookiegate and Zoe Baird’s Nannygate. And while An American Daughter is, like Wasserstein’s earlier work, autobiographical, it sounds different. Angrier. While Wasserstein was writing it, she was struggling to have a child as her sister, Sandra, was battling cancer. (A year after An American Daughter, she would conceive.)
The Hilary/Zoe figure is Lyssa Dent Hughes, a nominee for surgeon general whose life gets overturned by a media scandal after she admits on camera that she ignored a jury summons. The DC types who line up or fall away include her best friend, her husband, her father, a pro-life senator from Indiana, her best friend, a Black Jewish oncologist, a gay conservative modeled after Andrew Sullivan and a third- wave feminist modeled after Naomi Wolf.
Jean Lichty, the artistic director of La Femme, who plays Lyssa in the revival, believes An American Daughter deserves another look. “This is a deeply felt important play about social, political and class divisions,” she said in an interview.
Maybe so. Although the play’s politics sound quintessentially 1990s, it also anticipates our mob and media driven politics. After Lyssa describes her mother in an interview as “an ordinary Indiana housewife,” women in Indiana turn against her. It doesn’t matter how great her liberal policies are.
Still, I wonder if this production can overcome Wasserstein’s conflicted reputation. The critic Adam Kirsch pointed out years ago that she “is a descendant not just of Neil Simon but of all the family playwrights of the 1950s.” Yet unlike Simon and, say Arthur Miller, during her lifetime, critics derided her for being too glib. About her 1992 play, The Sisters Rosensweig, the critic and director Robert Brustein said “wisecracks come too easily to her.” A 1994 New York Times article wondered how a play about “bickering middle aged Jewish sisters” was selling out.
Some producers judged her plays “too New York,” which she retorted was code for too Jewish. Even worse, magazine features regularly mentioned her giggling, her weight, her single status, and her age, as though they explained something. She’s “pushing 40,” Newsweek proclaimed in 1989. A 1993 New York Magazine profile announced: “She’s finally starting to feel comfortable with herself. She recently lost 40 pounds.” These details remind me of the ones used to discredit Betty Friedan. They point to the way the press collaborated in minimizing women writers well after second-wave feminism supposedly eradicated it.
Moving towards a new way of writing
About the 1997 production of An American Daughter, Wasserstein told an interviewer she had wanted to write something that “was not just Jewish jokes.” And in part because the Jewish comedy and characters in it are darker than, say, The Sisters Rosenswieg, some critics judged it to be her strongest play. But it’s ultimately a strange piece of theater. It seems like it is moving towards another way of writing, which we didn’t get to see because she didn’t live long enough.
Like Heidi Holland, Lyssa, the central figure in An American Daughter is not Jewish. She is a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. And yet the play, which is set during Rosh Hashanah, contains more direct Jewish references than Wasserstein’s earlier ones. The Jewish characters operate differently — the stakes for outsiders trying to be inside are different in political circles of court. But the balancing act feels most acute in one character who is unique in Wasserstein’s oeuvre — Lyssa’s BFF, Judith B. Kaufman, a Black Jewish oncologist (and a convert) who quips that she “has endured every in vitro and hormone treatment known to modern medicine.” (In a 1995 reading of the play, Whoopi Goldberg played this role.)
Wasserstein wrote in the introduction to the published version that Kaufman — one of her few Black characters — is the one “emotionally closest” to her. Daniel Sullivan, who directed the 1997 production, said in an interview that, with Kaufman, “she [Wasserstein] is drawing so much from herself.”
And yet this is not just autobiography plopped on stage. Perhaps she was influenced by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which ran on Broadway in 1992. Regardless, Wasserstein engineers some of the play’s most unnerving tonal swerves around Kaufman, swerves that bind questions of gender to those of race in ways that are unlike anything she had ever written. One minute, Kaufman is confessing to Lyssa her failure to drown herself during the Jewish ritual of Tashlich, the festival of regrets, during Rosh Hashanah. The next she is making a joke. And a few lines later, Lyssa is delivering a harsh rebuke that seems more like something from a play of ideas.
This sequence starts with Kaufman recounting to her friend the ritual where Jews throw breadcrumbs into water to absolve their bad acts. As she tells Lyssa, she throws her muffin top into the Potomac chanting “‘…Oh Lord, my God, the Lord is one, I’ve wasted my life,’ and I jump in.” Then she sees a box of donut holes, which cheers her up. She gets out of the water. But here Lyssa seems to snap: “What gives you the audacity to believe you’ve failed if you can’t make life or stop death?”
The moment seems like more than a friend’s rebuke and more like a white paper on the aftermath of feminism. And it may be what made critics of the 1997 production write sharp critiques such as Wasserstein “doesn’t know entirely where she’s heading or how to get there.” But I think such a hairpin swerve — a moment where it’s not clear if you are supposed to laugh or gasp — is exciting. I think Wasserstein wants me to be unsettled by Kaufman. She wants me to ask what it means to be a Jew and what success and failure mean. Such moments are there to show how desperate women are, how hard they are on each other and themselves. And how in the drive to remake the world, we have misunderstood what’s important. And how although there are fewer ways to live than we think, we still have choices.
Another Jewish character, Lyssa’s philandering professor husband, Walter Abramson, is only slightly less unnerving. He studies the sociology of the elites and declares himself agnostic. (“I was Jewish until I was bar mitzvahed.”) He is the opposite of the callow Scoop Rosenberg in The Heidi Chronicles who abandons Heidi Holland for a Jewish girl. Abramson has amplified his assimilation by marrying a non-Jew. And — I wonder if I’m imagining it —Wasserstein seems to link his philandering to his assimilation.
Navigating the upheaval of a generation
Wasserstein’s Jewish roots were, like many Jewish artists and writers born after the Holocaust, complex. She was born in 1950 in Flatbush, the youngest child of immigrant parents. Her father, Morris, ran a successful textile factory with his brother and patented velveteen. In Wasserstein’s telling, her mother, Lola, sounds like a cliché, making Wendy take dance lessons and comparing her unfavorably to her conventionally successful siblings, Georgette, and Bruce, who would become a financier. Less cliché are two half siblings ‚ the children of her mothers previous marriage to her uncle ‚ Sandra, and a developmentally disabled half-brother Abner who she first met in her twenties.
The family moved to the Upper East Side when Wasserstein was 12. She attended The Calhoun School, where she wrote skits to get out of Phys Ed. Next was Mt. Holyoke, where she got terrible grades. In 1973, she was accepted to The David Geffen School of Drama. She was the only female playwright in her class. “I decided I wanted to see an all-women’s curtain call,” she recalled at a moment when hyper-masculine playwrights were all the rage. “There were an awful lot of would-be Sam Shepards, and Wendy felt a little left out,” her friend, the playwright Chris Durang, told The Paris Review.
In 1989, after The Heidi Chronicles won a Pulitzer and a Tony for best play (the next woman to win the Tony for Best Play would be Bess Wohl, whose 2026 play, Liberation, about second-wave feminism, closed early) radical feminist journalists and scholars scorned Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy, charged her of ridiculing the movement, of writing heroines who were more acted upon than acting. Although after her death some reconsidered when the last major revival of Heidi in 2015, closed early, The New York Times proclaimed that the ideal of “having it all” no longer captured anything about the zeitgeist.
It’s true that Lyssa doesn’t so much rail against the unfairness of the media circus destroying her as tolerate it. Until she doesn’t. (Some critics of previous productions called her a cipher and others that the play was too topical.) But to me it’s real. Moreover, I can’t think of another play showing middle-aged women in a larger context than The Family Drama. Much less one dealing with the backlash against second-wave feminism with multiple Jewish characters.
Moreover, Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy may be old-fashioned but few American playwrights deal so frankly with daughters — including Jewish daughters —navigating the upheaval of the 60s and 70s and sometimes ending up alone. Wasserstein never underestimates the cost of sticking to your principles. Lena Dunham has said she was fascinated by Heidi.
An old play in a new era
Wasserstein herself thought the negative reviews of An American Daughter were sexist. In 1997, most of the first night theater critics were men. Newsday’s Linda Winer, the only one to review An American Daughter positively, described it as reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw. I think a better comparison is the one Wasserstein herself made. She called Henrik Ibsen her “postfeminist muse.” Like Ibsen’s characters, Wasserstein’s can seem like symbols one minute and real people the next. They often wind up alone with their convictions.
It will be interesting to see how the play is received now, when the chief critics at The New York Times and The New Yorker are women. And interesting too to see how audiences respond to it in a postfeminist world where Jewish plays of the moment are about Oct. 7 or the Holocaust.
Plus ça change is the point of view of Jean Lichty, who became interested in the play after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. “I was devastated by Hillary. I was twice as devastated by Kamala,” she said in an interview, adding that the play’s rage appealed to her.
Lichty stresses that the cast is older in this production. “I think that raises the stakes.”
But the big difference is that the script is revised from the 1997 one, especially Act II. The production weaves together eight drafts that Wasserstein did during rehearsals of the play in regional productions, including Chicago’s Organic Theatre, and the 2000 teleplay starring Christine Lahti. (It’s worth mentioning that, even revised, the regional productions received mixed reviews.)
The Wasserstein estate approved the changes and Andre Bishop, the former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and co-executor of the estate, came to rehearsal and gave notes.
Maybe the most notable change is that whereas in the 1997 New York production, Lyssa stays with her cheating husband, the 2026 version ends with the two female friends.
JUDITH: What will you do now?
LYSSA: I don’t know. Same as you. Rise and continue.
She is quoting a letter from Ulysses S. Grant to his wife, Julia Dent Grant, for whom Lyssa is named.
If this ending seems ambivalent it is also real. It gives a consolation that doesn’t seem phony: You have to live with regrets and compromises and go on.
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