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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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The post Jonathan Safran Foer’s online flirtation with Natalie Portman inspires a new play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually
A group of Jewish Theological Seminary students were furious with the chancellor’s position on Jewish statehood. In protest, they draped flags around campus before graduation, which the administration removed before the ceremony.
The year was 1948. The flags were Israeli. And the dissenting students were protesting Chancellor Louis Finkelstein’s refusal to make support for Jewish statehood part of academic commencement. Some students even arranged for the bells at nearby Union Theological Seminary to play “Hatikvah,” the Israeli national anthem, after JTS officials declined to include it in commencement.
As a historian of American Zionism, I have been thinking about that episode while reading the many vitriolic reactions to a few JTS undergraduates who spoke out in opposition to the seminary’s decision to welcome Israeli President Isaac Herzog as this year’s graduation speaker. Once again, a JTS commencement has become a battleground over Israel, but the sides are now reversed.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the right moment to extend an invitation to Herzog to speak at commencement. What deserves attention is the outraged reaction to a group of students raising objections, and the speed with which those students’ concerns have been cast as a deviation from the historical contours of mainstream American Jewish politics.
A recent Times of Israel blog post, for example, argued that the mere fact that JTS students raised concerns about Herzog was a rupture with Judaism. “Jewish survival without sovereignty is fragile,” wrote the author, Menachem Creditor, adding that “the founders of JTS did not need to debate the necessity of Jewish self-determination,” and that Herzog “represents the state of Israel and the Jewish people.”
These claims erase JTS’s long and sophisticated engagement with Jewish nationalism and the conception of Jewish peoplehood. Reading American Zionism backward risks collapsing peoplehood and statehood, and creating traditions to ratify present assumptions out of a past that never existed.
The relationship between Zionism and JTS was nuanced from the start. Both founding president Sabato Morais and the seminary’s third chancellor, Cyrus Adler, opposed Zionism on religious grounds. Morais believed the restoration of Jewish sovereignty could only come through divine intervention at the dawn of a messianic era. Adler thought of the growth of a non-religious community in the land of Israel “as the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”
Solomon Schechter, as chancellor, brought a measure of support for the Zionist movement to JTS; shaped by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-am, Schechter insisted that Zionism transcended statehood. Its primary aim, he argued, was the national regeneration of global Judaism, not the creation of a secular state that would hollow out Jewish life from within.
And the controversies over the 1948 graduation exercises revealed how far Louis Finkelstein stood from political Zionism, even after the establishment of Israel. Where some Zionists celebrated sovereignty, Finkelstein remained focused on the Jewish character of the land and its people. That orientation drew him toward Judah Magnes’s binational vision — that of a federated framework in which Jews and Arabs would each hold recognized rights and a measure of national autonomy within a single shared political entity.
This reticence to conflate Judaism, Zionism and Jewish sovereignty was not limited to the seminary’s chancellors.
Henrietta Szold, JTS’s first female student, a central figure in its intellectual orbit, and the founder of Hadassah, similarly supported a binational vision from her new home in Jerusalem. Mordecai Kaplan — a longtime JTS faculty member, committed Zionist, and one of the most influential American Jewish thinkers of the 20th century — expressed concern throughout his career about the mistake of equating Jewish nationhood with Jewish statehood. In Judaism as a Civilization, he called for a “more ethical conception of nationhood fundamentally as a cultural rather than as a political relationship.”
After Israel’s founding, Kaplan went further, arguing to David Ben-Gurion in 1958 that “the basic assumption that the state of Israel is a Jewish state is itself open to question.” The Israeli government’s task, he insisted, was to establish “a modern state, not a Jewish state, an Israeli state, not a Jewish state.”
These questions did not disappear even as JTS evolved under new leadership.
Gerson Cohen, whose chancellorship beginning in 1972 marked a shift toward a more pro-statist posture, embraced the state’s significance for Jewish life and identity in ways his predecessors had not. Yet even Cohen insisted that commitment to Judaism must rest “not on political statehood or upon geography but solely on the idea of covenant and commitment to ethos.” He argued that a flourishing diaspora was a necessity for Jewish civilization as a whole, not adjunct to Israeli interests.
His successor, Chancellor Emeritus Ismar Schorsch, was more direct, saying in a recent warning that Jews must ensure that “Judaism qua religion is not submerged and shredded by the power of the Jewish state.”
One can disagree with any of these perspectives. In fact, the disagreement itself is the point.
The leaders who built JTS debated Jewish self-determination, Zionism and statehood while living through the Holocaust, the collapse of European Jewish life, existential danger in Palestine, and the precarious birth of the state of Israel. They were not naïve about antisemitism, indifferent to Jewish survival, or ignorant of Jewish sources. Nor were they unsophisticated about Zionism.
Instead, they offered a more demanding account of Zionism: one that affirmed a Jewish homeland and insisted that Jewish power remain answerable to Jewish ethics, all without diminishing Jewish life in the diaspora.
This is precisely the perspective that has been crowded out of our contemporary discourse, not because these questions were answered, but because the space to ask them has collapsed. As the boundaries of acceptable Zionist discourse have narrowed, issues that arose from within Zionism itself — the potential dangers of equating the Israeli state with the Jewish people, the risks of elevating political statehood above other ethical and communal commitments, and the need to have diaspora Jewish life be seen as carrying independent religious and moral weight — have come to be treated as anti-Zionist rather than part of a living internal debate.
The furor over the JTS undergraduates’ letter objecting to Herzog is a troubling sign that, across American Jewish life, it has become harder to think honestly about the risks of treating support for the state of Israel not merely as a Jewish commitment, but as one that takes precedence over other all other Jewish commitments. When the past is rewritten so that the equation of peoplehood and statehood appears inevitable, American Jews are left with a false choice: either embrace the state as an unquestioned and unquestionable expression of Jewish identity, or abandon Jewish life altogether.
JTS has offered its students a richer education because, in its halls, the relationship between the Jewish people and the Jewish state has been debated and contested. That discourse is not a failure of Jewish commitment, but an expression of it. The sustained engagement with the hardest questions of Zionism is one of the best things JTS has given American Jewish life, and one of the most important gifts it still has to offer.
The post Debating Zionism is good for Jews, actually appeared first on The Forward.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.
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UK Police Charge Two Men in Connection with Filming Antisemitic TikTok Videos
The TikTok logo is pictured outside the company’s US head office in Culver City, California, US, Sep. 15, 2020. Photo: REUTERS
British police have charged two men with religiously aggravated harassment offenses after they were alleged to have traveled to a Jewish area of north London to film antisemitic social media videos.
The two men, Adam Bedoui, 20, and Abdelkader Amir Bousloub, 21, are due to appear at Thames Magistrates’ Court, a statement from the Crown Prosecution Service said on Saturday.