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Jonathan Safran Foer’s online flirtation with Natalie Portman inspires a new play
(New York Jewish Week) — When Jewish literary power couple Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss divorced in 2014 — amid rumors that he was in love with his longtime friend Natalie Portman — it captivated the nation.
Well, maybe not the nation, but certainly the literary and media worlds, as well as the hipster set in brownstone Brooklyn. Safran Foer and Krauss were rare literary megastars, whose “extremely loud and incredibly expensive” Park Slope brownstone was the subject of numerous articles (and a hefty dose of envy) when it hit the market for $14.5 million in 2013.
Portman, of course, was an actual megastar, and when the confessional correspondence between the celebrated actress and the “Everything Is Illuminated” writer was later published in 2016 in the New York Times, it elicited a fresh round of jealousy, speculation and eye-rolls from the masses, as well as numerous journalistic “takes” on the topic.
I was a teenager at the time, and had only a vague idea of why any of this mattered. But apparently it stayed with me for nearly a decade, because when I saw “The Wanderers,” a new Off-Broadway play running at the Roundabout Theatre Company, it didn’t take long for me to make the connection between this fictional production and the very real but mysterious drama that occurred between these famous Jewish writers.
“The Wanderers,” directed by Barry Edelstein, follows two couples in two different timelines. In the present day are Abe and Sophie, secular Jews and writers who live in Brooklyn and have been together since they were teenagers. The other storyline, set in the 1970s, centers around Esther and Schmuli, a Hasidic couple living in Satmar Williamsburg. The latter are introduced to the audience on the eve of their wedding, one of the first times they’ve ever been alone together.
Throughout the play, the couples, seemingly from different worlds, try to balance their careers, personal lives, internal desires and family obligations.
Abe (Eddie Kaye Thomas) is a writer who boasts a Pulitzer Prize and several other literary awards. But he struggles with certain aspects of his life — his frayed relationships, mostly — and is hamstrung by an immense ego that is tempered only by a hefty dose of insecurity. As I watched the play, I began to feel like I knew the man, but I couldn’t quite place him. Was he just a stand-in for every genuinely talented, semi-pretentious, self-important male writer living in Brooklyn?
Abe eventually finds an outlet for his woes by striking up an email correspondence with fictional Hollywood actress Julia Cheever (Katie Holmes, the real Hollywood actress), whom he met when she came to a reading of one of his novels. Eventually, he declares his love for her — a pronouncement that essentially goes ignored by the actress. (In the play, Holmes sports a chic brunette bob not unlike a Jewish actress near and dear to our hearts.)
It became pretty clear who served as the inspiration for this play — and when I asked playwright Anna Ziegler about it, she said I was one of the few she had spoken with who had made the connection.
“In the summer of 2016, when I was writing, Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer were writing to each other in a correspondence they published in the New York Times,” she said. “She was promoting a new movie of hers, and I guess they had a previous relationship — that sparked the idea for one of the storylines in the play.”
What’s funny, Ziegler said, was that most audience members haven’t made the connection. “We haven’t really been talking about [Safran Foer and Portman] as one of the inspirations, and not many people have raised it,” she said. “I assumed that that resonance would be there for a certain percentage of the audience but, to be honest, I don’t think it’s there for the vast majority of people.”
At one point in the play, after learning his father died, Abe even says the line “Hineni, here I am,” to ground himself and calm his emotions. It’s a phrase in the Torah that usually translates to “I am ready,” which Abraham says to God before being asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as well as a prayer of humility chanted on Rosh Hashanah. But it’s also, possibly, a nod to Safran Foer’s 2016 novel “Here I Am.”
Neither Krauss nor Safran Foer responded to requests for comment on the play. “For people in my generation and younger, the recognition might be there, but it was also so many years ago now,” said Zielger, 44. “So I guess the only people who remember it are the people on whom it made an impact.”
Which is fine — “The Wanderers” stands on its own even if you don’t know the backstory. Plus, the themes of the play stretch far beyond infidelity: It also explores loneliness, free will and inherited family trauma.
Originally, Ziegler set out to write something about arranged marriages, specifically within the Jewish community. “I had always been kind of fascinated and beguiled by the idea of arranged marriage — thinking about what it would be like spending that first night together, that notion always kind of haunted me,” she said.
“I had these two different plays [one about Portman and Safran Foer and the other about arranged marriages], and they seemed thematically related,” she added. “At some point, I concluded that they really were two strands at the same play and so I started weaving them together.”
Ziegler chose to write about the Hasidic Jewish community in particular because she was “somewhat familiar with that culture and community,” she told me.
Still, as a secular Jew, it’s a topic she approached delicately. She hired a cultural consultant and an accent coach for the actors who were both from the community. Ziegler herself, who lives in Brooklyn, spent time in Williamsburg, and read memoirs and watched documentaries.
In the play, the Hasidic wife Esther (Lucy Freyer) struggles to be seen by her community and to feel in control of her life. She doesn’t know where to turn and wonders if she’s fulfilled her potential — as a parent, wife, human and Jew. “One of the great joys of being an actor is being able to learn and dive head first into a community that you ordinarily wouldn’t get to know,” Freyer said.
As the story unfolds, it’s revealed that Esther left the community with her infant son, who grows up to be the renowned Jewish author Abe, who marries his childhood friend Sophie (Sarah Cooper, the comic and actress who broke big with videos mocking Donald Trump). The younger couple is almost entirely secular, yet they grapple with the same search for meaning and belonging, the same doubt as to whether they’ve chosen the right path for themselves — or if it had been chosen for them.
“All five characters, not just Schmuli and Esther, are trying to figure out how can you be happy with what you have, with where you stand in your own skin,” said Dave Klasko, who plays Schmuli.
“We say in the play the Hebrew phrase, ‘Ein ba’al hanes makir b’niso,’ which [Ziegler] poetically translates to ‘We are never aware of the miracles, especially when we are inside them,’” Klasko added. “How can I, in my own life, realize the miracle that I’m living in before I’m on the other side of it?”
For Ziegler, these are very Jewish questions — and the questions of the “Xillennial” generation. “We’re left [with] the complex heritage of feeling chosen, but also self-hating,” said Ziegler, whose previous plays include “Photograph 51,” about Rosalind Franklin, the Jewish X-ray crystallographer who helped Watson and Crick crack the DNA model. “I think this is the most Jewish of my plays, and it’s funny because I’m not that religious, but I have found in my career that there seems to be a hunger for plays about Judaism.”
“At some point in my career, I began to be thought of as a ‘Jewish writer’ — for better or for worse,” she added.
Safran Foer, 46, and Krauss, 48, have also wrestled with the “Jewish writer” term, as well as the play’s big questions of identity, self-doubt and complicated family relationships. In fact, as Ziegler and the actors point out, issues of the play are universal, and have nothing to do with how famous you are, how expensive your home may be, or how strictly you adhere to religious law. The celebrity allusion — plus the chance to see an actual celebrity, Holmes — may be a reason to buy a ticket to see “The Wanderers,” but the timeless message is what will keep you in your seat.
“The Wanderers” is playing at the Roundabout Theatre Company (111 West 46th Street) through April 2. Find tickets and more information here.
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He saved dozens of kids in Auschwitz — he kept it a secret for nearly the rest of his life
Growing up in Israel as the daughter of Holocaust survivors, Judith Richter was taught not to discuss the Shoah. While her mother was very open about her experiences, Richter’s father was more reserved, and Israeli society at the time looked down on European Jews for, as they wrongly assumed, not fighting back. It wasn’t until Richter was an adult that she learned her father had played a critical role in protecting children at Auschwitz-Birkenau — a secret she gleaned not from her father himself but from an article on Josef Mengele in a LIFE magazine that her husband happened to spot in a grocery store.
Erno “Zvi” Spiegel was 29 years old when he was deported from Hungary to Auschwitz along with other members of his family, including his twin sister Magda. As a twin, Spiegel was selected to be a subject for Mengele’s scientific experiments, where he injected subjects with diseases and cancer cells to study their effects on the human body; due to their shared genetics, one twin could serve as a control for the experiment. If one died from the procedure and the other didn’t, the surviving twin would still be killed and subject to an autopsy to understand why they lived.
Mengele also charged Spiegel with looking after the other kids he was experimenting on, whose lives Spiegel would end up saving multiple times. The PBS documentary The Last Twins, directed by Perri Peltz and Matt O’Neill, captures the deep and unexpected relationship Spiegel had with his charges through interviews with the surviving sets of twins from Mengele’s lab along with Spiegel’s family. Uncle Spiegel, as the twins called him, was the only adult that many of the kids trusted during their imprisonment.
When SS physician Heinz Thilo ordered the extermination of all sets of twins, Spiegel was able to intervene by telling Mengele that his subjects were at risk. Sometimes siblings were mistakenly brought in as twins, but Spiegel lied about their birth days so they wouldn’t be sent to the gas chambers. Many recounted how he would teach them math and geography to distract them from their horrific conditions.
When she heard these stories for the first time, Richter told me, she was not surprised her father had put such an emphasis on education, even in the camps.
“My father taught me since I was very young that while your material possessions, home, even your freedom can be taken away from you, the single asset that cannot be taken away from you is your knowledge,” she said.
After Auschwitz was liberated, Spiegel led the kids on an arduous journey through Eastern Europe helping them return to their homes — or at least, to what was left of them.
Although Spiegel, who died in 1993, never told his own children what he had done during the war, he spoke with LIFE Magazine for their 1981 article on Mengele’s experiments. The LIFE piece didn’t just cause revelations for Spiegel’s family; one of the survivors, Peter Somogyi, saw the issue, prompting him to contact Spiegel. The two reunited for the first time in almost four decades in Boston, and after that, Spiegel arranged meetings with a number of the other surviving twins.
Richter began researching her father’s story and the lives of those he had saved for an academic project. However, when director Peltz’s mom, who had known Richter for years, connected the two women, Richter realized the importance of turning her father’s story into a movie.
Directors O’Neill and Peltz, who had previously worked together on the documentary Can’t Look Away: The Case Against Social Media, knew the project was time sensitive given how few living survivors are left. Since they first started shooting the film almost a decade ago, all but one of their interview subjects has died. O’Neill added that today’s political climate contributed to the urgency of getting the film to the public.
“At a time of rising antisemitism, of misinformation of the Holocaust,” O’Neill said, “it’s an essential time for journalistic work based entirely on indisputable truths to come out.”
Peltz noted that Spiegel’s heroism wasn’t embodied in one grand act, but “in the step by step, day by day.” Although Mengele’s horrific experiments get a brief mention, the filmmakers chose to focus on the uplifting story of how people came together and protected each other in the midst of tragedy.
“Right now, many of us feel overwhelmed by world events, by things that feel out of control,” O’Neill added. “This is a story of hope in a time of horror and of a man who took the small space that he could control and did good within it.”
In 2017, Richter organized a reunion of the survivors in Israel, where they dedicated a plaque to Spiegel and the twins in Jerusalem. Richter said her father’s strong sense of social responsibility had a profound effect on her life. She noted that in the homes of some Holocaust survivors, the “children grow up with a very strong sense of revenge.” Instead, her father taught her that the best response to hatred was to ask herself how she could help other people.
“Erno was a fighter in his own way,” O’Neill said. “He fought the Nazis by teaching the kids to call each other by their names. He fought the Nazis by teaching them geography. He fought the Nazis by giving them humanity in darkness.”
The Last Twins will be available to stream on pbs.org on April 13 and have a broadcast premiere on Monday, June 15 at 10/9c.
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I’m probably going to be on the government’s list of Jews at UPenn
When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 2024, tensions on campus about Israel and Gaza felt hotter than ever. Nearly every week of my senior year, another student or faculty member was being doxxed online for their politics. In the middle of spring finals, police forcibly disbanded the pro-Palestinian encampment in the center of campus. A week later, and four days before graduation, pro-Palestinian activists occupied a campus building, leading to another confrontation with law enforcement and arrests. At graduation, several students whipped out Palestinian flags and signs about justice for Palestine as they walked the stage.
I will once again be a Penn student come fall, having been accepted to the school’s sociology Ph.D. program. Last month, when I returned to campus for the department’s open house, I was surprised that I didn’t notice even a trace of the conflict I had left behind. The fences that had been erected around College Green to prevent a second encampment were gone. There were no cardboard signs about Palestine or Israel on Locust Walk. Talking with my professors and friends still at Penn, they confirmed that pro-Palestinian activism on campus had died down, likely due to a mix of intimidation on the part of the school administration — which only got more intense after the federal government got involved — and a loss of energy in activist spaces.
It’s not that students became completely disconnected: The university still offers clubs for students with a wide range of political perspectives, and courses on Israel and Gaza. But it seemed like the Penn I would be returning to in August had established some semblance of calm, albeit in part due to the university restricting open expression.
Now, the recent ruling that Penn must comply with the federal government’s demand for a list of students and faculty affiliated with Jewish groups and organizations — a sweeping categorization that could include anyone involved in Jewish Studies or Jewish associations regardless of their actual identity — could threaten to bring back the campus wide anxieties when doxxing and harassment were at their highest.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s investigation began in December of 2023, with a stated goal of determining if the university was failing to properly protect Jewish employees from discrimination and harassment. In March 2025, the EEOC asked Penn for membership lists of Jewish campus groups and names of Jewish Studies employees. Penn refused, instead offering to inform all employees about the investigation and how to contact the EEOC if they felt like they had an incident to report. This didn’t satisfy the EEOC, leading to subpoenas, lawsuits and countersuits. And it’s not over yet: Penn has indicated the school plans to appeal the decision forcing the handover of student and faculty names.
Although the EEOC’s jurisdiction is workplace discrimination, some of the lists the EEOC are asking for include students. One such group is those who were involved in confidential listening sessions conducted by the university’s antisemitism task force where Jewish students shared their experiences on campus.
I’ll go ahead and get ahead of the EEOC and make it known that I attended one of these listening sessions. Their confidentiality made them one of the few places on campus where Jewish students could feel comfortable openly discussing their feelings about the situation in Israel and Gaza as well as events at Penn. It was the administration’s way of giving Jews room to be vulnerable — and now the government is weaponizing it against the university.
The irony is stark. Under the auspices of protecting the interests of Jewish students and faculty, the EEOC is threatening the sanctity of the spaces where Jewish students and faculty feel safe.
For me, it’s hard not to feel like part of how we got here is that different political camps of the Jewish community could never seem to figure out how to speak to one another after Oct. 7. There was never really a clear idea of what Jewish students wanted political activity on campus to look like, with some advocating for a complete ban of encampments and anti-Israel referendums and others fully supporting them. Ultimately, I think what most people wanted on campus was a sense of civility, the feeling that screaming matches between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students wouldn’t constantly erupt in the middle of campus, but different factions were too busy arguing with each other to make a well-thought-out plan for how to achieve that.
The faculty who originally complained to the EEOC clearly thought getting the federal government involved was the catch-all solution. But instead, after two of the four classes of undergraduate students who lived through the conflict have graduated, and students are talking to each other in organized dialogue, the EEOC wants to revisit old wounds. The EEOC has discretion when it comes to what steps they choose to take, including issuing a subpoena and determining how to gather information they believe is necessary to their investigation. They have decided to use that discretion to gather information in a way that resurfaces generational trauma for Jews.
After such a period of divisiveness at Penn, it’s telling that an unidentified professor told the student paper The Daily Pennsylvanian that “a remarkably ideologically, religiously, and politically diverse array of organizations and individuals have united” against the subpoena. I didn’t always see eye to eye with the Penn Hillel leadership while I was an undergraduate student, but I agree with their assertion, in the statement they released last week that, “accountability in the face of discrimination is essential, but it must not be achieved by compromising the security of any minority community.”
Despite all the anxiety and frustration this development has provoked, I am choosing to look on the bright side: It seems like Penn’s Jews have finally found something they can unite over.
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Iran’s regime is obsessed with Jeffrey Epstein
In the hours leading up to the recent ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran, pro-regime AI-generated videos flooded social media. In one widely circulated clip, a Lego version of Donald Trump is shown desperately pleading with Iran for a ceasefire. The response comes in the form of a ballistic missile with the words “in memory of the victims of Epstein’s Island” written on it, hurling toward U.S. allies in the region.
Another video shows a terrified Trump in bed with young girls, having a nightmare of an Iranian missile barrage before waking and agreeing to ceasefire terms while eating a taco — a reference to the acronym “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”).
These videos are just some of the dozens released by media organizations affiliated with the Iranian regime that invoke pedophile sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein in its anti-Western propaganda.
“The IRGC is very happy to use him in every venue they have—in media, newspapers, speeches,” said Saeid Golkar, an Iranian-born expert on the Iran regime’s propaganda, using the acronym for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Everything they are talking about, especially right now, goes back to the corruption of the West and Epstein.”
Golkar, who grew up exposed to regime messaging, said the fixation on Epstein reflects a broader ideological goal: convincing Iranians that the West is a place of moral decay.
“From the beginning, one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic’s ideology was anti-Westernism and portraying the West as a corrupt place,” he said. “There is no respect for families or values … no limitation for sexual interaction. I remember the phrase ‘living like pigs’ — that they are living together like animals. That was a big concept.”
Golkar says the Epstein files released by the U.S. Department of Justice earlier this year have been a “gift” to the regime, offering a concrete example of the Western immorality it hopes to present to its people. When Iranians express a desire for a “normal life” without Sharia law or morality police, the regime invokes Epstein.
“They say, ‘You don’t want a normal life — you want a corrupted life…. These people don’t care about your freedom. They are a group of pedophiles.’” This, despite the fact that girls can be legally married in Iran at the age of 13, and even younger with the approval of a male guardian and judge.
The Baal game
One of the most prominent features of pro-regime rallies in Iran is the burning of Baal statues. The figure of Baal — meaning “lord” in ancient Semitic languages — is referenced in the Old Testament as a rival to the God of the Israelites. Historically, Baal was a fertility deity associated with rain and agricultural prosperity. Later interpretations and conspiracy theorists came to portray the worship of Baal as tied to sexual deviance and child sacrifice.
A popular online conspiracy theory ties Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators to Baal, pointing to a viral document from the Epstein files that appears to show bank transfer details with the name “Baal.name” listed where a financial institution would typically appear. They interpret this as evidence that Epstein maintained an account connected to the deity, suggesting he may have worshiped Baal or been involved in ritual abuse. Popular right-wing influencer Candace Owens weighed in with a video titled, “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” where she referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies.” It has almost 3 million views.
Fact-checkers have disputed the interpretation of the bank document, noting that “Baal.name” is likely a misreading or formatting artifact of “Bank Name,” and that the actual account name — Clearlake Centre, LLC — is clearly identified elsewhere in the record.
On numerous occasions, the Iranian regime has staged the burning of Baal statues in major cities during pro-regime rallies, sometimes even coordinating multiple burnings across the country. Mehr News Agency, a state-owned Iranian news network, reported on one such rally in early February, writing: “Participants set fire to the symbolic Baal idol, describing the act as a representation of condemnation over crimes linked to Jeffrey Epstein’s island, where children were abused.”
These events are often accompanied by chants of “Death to America,” “Death to Israel,” or “God is Great.” In some cases, the statues have been marked with a painted Star of David.
The Baal figure has also appeared in many of the AI-generated videos circulating online amidst the war. In one, created by pro-regime media organization Explosive Media, Lego versions of a drunken Pete Hegseth and Trump are paired with a rap track: “We hitting the Baal-worshipping Epstein Island crew, the ones who hurt the kids. Revenge for every American soul you and Trump’s dirty crew oppressed and did. We taking payback for the girls you broke.”
Though Explosive Media claims it is not directly affiliated with the Iranian government, Golkar said he has seen evidence suggesting it operates as part of the IRGC’s media apparatus. The regime has also acknowledged granting tiered internet access to select individuals tasked with amplifying official messaging. In early March, government spokesperson Fatemeh Mohajerani said full internet access had been given to those “who can carry the voice of the government further.” Explosive Media, which says it has 2.5 million followers across Iranian messaging platforms, has cited its status as a media organization to explain its continued access. This has prompted experts like Moustafa Ayad, a researcher with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue, to raise questions about how closely it is connected with the state.
Another video, played on Iranian state TV, depicts figures the regime frames as victims of the West — a Native American man, a Gazan child, an Epstein victim, and former Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US strike in 2019 — gazing skyward as an Iranian missile strikes the Statue of Liberty. In this version, the statue is reimagined as Baal holding a Talmud. Upon impact, both sink into the Hudson River.
The Epstein fixation extends beyond rallies and social media. Golkar said Epstein is frequently referenced in official Basij (a plainclothes paramilitary volunteer militia in Iran) and IRGC materials, as well as in speeches by Iranian officials. Just two days before his assassination, Ali Larijani, Iran’s top security official, posted on X, “It has been reported that what remains of Epstein’s network is working to prepare a conspiracy aimed at fabricating an incident similar to the September 11 attacks, in preparation for accusing Iran of being behind it.”
In another post in response to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Laranjani posted on X, “Mr. Hegseth! Our leaders have been, and still are, among the people. But your leaders? On Epstein’s island!”
The Epstein War?
These propaganda videos are largely made in English. With Iran still in a media blackout, the Iranian people may not be their intended audience.
Shaping global perception through media is a key part of the Iranian war strategy. In a meeting with a group of Iranian poets in 2024, Ayatollah Khamenei, who was assassinated on the first day of the war, stated, “All war is a media war. Whichever actor has greater media influence will achieve their goals.”
The IRGC has spent years building a media apparatus designed to do just that. IRGC-affiliated production studios, media-focused university programs, and cultural centers are dedicated to training and refining propaganda content. Iran also outsources some of its media production to countries more attuned to Western cultural cues, particularly Pakistan.
A key element of the regime’s narrative is the claim that the Trump administration initiated the war to distract from the Epstein files. This theory has also circulated on both the left and the right in the United States.
In Washington D.C., posters cover the streets referring to the War in Iran, formally titled Operation Epic Fury, as Operation Epstein Fury.
U.S. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky posted on X shortly after the war began, garnering over 250 thousand likes, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away, any more than the Dow going above 50,000 will.”
The popular podcaster Joe Rogan espoused the theory on a recent episode, stating, “Look, the Epstein files comes out — we go to war with Iran. It’s a good way to get people to stop talking about certain things.”
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