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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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Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu.
(JTA) — New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared for an interview with “manosphere” podcaster Theo Von, during which he called for the United States to join the International Criminal Court and enforce its arrest warrant for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“If I had my say, the U.S. government would have joined the ICC, honored every single warrant that they issued,” Mamdani said near the end of the 75-minute interview that was posted on Thursday.
“F–k yeah,” Von replied.
The interview came one week after Netanyahu visited the United Nations and delivered a speech during which he called Mamdani an “antisemite” and a supporter of Hamas. (Mamdani has condemned Hamas as a terrorist organization.)
Von, meanwhile, is part of a growing ecosystem of everyman “manosphere” podcasters who host sprawling conversations with a wide array of famous guests — he has hosted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, JD Vance and Mark Zuckerberg — and increasingly are seen as representing a crucial sector of the electorate. He drew an invite to Trump’s inauguration in 2025 after hosting him on the campaign trail the year before.
Since then, Von has become increasingly critical of Israel and pressed the case in his Vance interview that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The International Court of Justice, which is separate from the ICC, is adjudicating charges Israel committed genocide — which the country rejects — but has not issued a ruling. Von has also hosted guests who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews.
At the end of his interview with Mamdani, Von thanked the New York mayor for “talking a little bit about the genocide” during their podcast, noting that “a lot of people are afraid to speak about it in politics.”
“One thing I would just say is, your curiosity is a beautiful thing,” Mamdani told Von.
The chummy conversation was notable, arising as it did out of a meeting between an icon of the libertarian-leaning “manosphere” and a self-declared socialist.
Mamdani decried Israel’s campaign in Gaza during their conversation.
“People talk about a ceasefire — just last week, the Israeli military killed an 11-year-old boy, Palestinian boy in Gaza, in a section that’s considered to be a safe zone,” he said. “This is continuing.”
He also recalled hosting Palestinian families at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, where they told him about “the ways that their lives have been shattered.”
Von asked Mamdani how he keeps people “from misdirecting energy that’s against Israel towards their Jewish friends,” especially as the mayor of the country’s most Jewish city.
Part of that, Mamdani said, is being clear that “no Jewish person in New York City is responsible for the actions of the State of Israel. And if you want to hold anybody accountable, it’s the people who are making those decisions — the prime minister, the State of Israel, also our complicity as American taxpayers knowing how many billions of dollars we have sent in bombs and continue to send.”
Mamdani also pointed to his administration’s official strategy to combat antisemitism, which it released earlier this week, as an effort to both condemn and prevent antisemitism. Some groups said the strategy “failed to address” anti-Israel rhetoric and links between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, while applauding aspects like security funding boosts and Holocaust education expansion.
Finally, he added, it takes “being very clear that critique of the State of Israel, the policy actions, the genocide — that in and of itself is not being antisemitic.”
“Yeah, I agree, speak up about it,” Von said.
Von, who has nearly 700 podcast episodes and more than 4.7 million YouTube subscribers, has interviewed or spoken positively about multiple controversial figures who have spread conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews, including former Fox News personality Tucker Carlson, streamer and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and commentator Candace Owens.
During an episode from this past January with comedian Dave Smith, Von called Fuentes “fascinating” and said, “He’s f–ing brave, dude.”
Von hosted Carlson on his show in December 2025. The two men spoke at length about Israel and Von criticized what he said was a lack of transparency in the control that Israel and corporate interests have over American politics.
“If they would just say, ‘Hey, America is a country that’s owned by Israel,’ or that it’s always been this outpost or this LLC of Israel — or maybe not even of Israel, it could just be of corporate entities, I’m not really sure exactly — but if they would just tell us, you can operate from a place of knowing what’s going on,” Von said.
Pro-Israel lobbies have repeatedly defended their role as no different than any other interest group seeking influence, citing the successes over the years of pro-choice and anti-abortion groups, environmental groups and gun owner groups, among others.
During that interview, Von also played a clip of CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss calling Carlson anti-American and anti-Jewish, which elicited laughter from both Von and Carlson. Von then read out an AI-generated overview that described Weiss as “a vocal supporter of Israel.”
“If her allegiance isn’t to America first, how is she the head of an American network?” Von said.
“Well that’s of course an entirely fair question, that you’re not allowed to ask,” Carlson replied.
Von’s conversation with Mamdani this week covered a number of topics including socialism, the achievability of the American Dream and their preferred fish.
When asked about Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, Mamdani explained that he’d been meeting with the prime minister of the Netherlands about an LGBTQ center and the community’s history in New York.
“Then I get back from that meeting and it’s like, ‘Oh by the way, here’s what he was saying at the U.N.’,” Mamdani said.
“It’s so bizarre. Did it feel personal then?” Von asked.
Mamdani replied that “all of this is an attempt to distract from responsibility, name as many people as possible, try and make it into a back and forth.”
He added, “It’s not about me and him. It’s about the fact that he’s the architect of a genocide.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Mamdani joins Theo Von’s podcast. They find common ground in criticizing Netanyahu. appeared first on The Forward.
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A Jewish journalist recorded pro-Palestinian protesters outside services. He was reportedly suspended from his job
(JTA) — TORONTO – A number of Canadian groups are demanding answers in the wake of media reports that the country’s national broadcaster suspended a Jewish reporter after he posted a video of pro-Palestinian protesters outside Yom Kippur services and wrote about his pained reaction.
The reported suspension came after Neil Herland shared footage of protesters gathered outside the Meridian Arts Centre in north Toronto, which on Sept. 20 was hosting Yom Kippur services for The Song Shul.
Herland, who has worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for nearly 30 years, began his post on X, “On Yom Kippur I went to a synagogue service in Toronto and was met by protesters trying to taunt and intimidate me from entering the building.”
A man can be heard yelling “Zionist alert!” through a megaphone, while another masked protester approaches the camera and screams, “You’re going to hell.”
A pro-Palestinian group, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, filed a complaint against Herland with the CBC, saying he had mischaracterized the protest.
“It is clear to CJPME that Mr. Herland was aiding the pro-Israel side of these demonstrations defending Mark Regev’s presence, while smearing these pro-Palestine protesters as antisemitic for their criticisms of Regev’s awful record on Palestinian human rights,” their complaint said, referring to the presence of a former Israeli diplomat at the event.
The Toronto Sun reported the suspension on Sept. 24. CBC declined to confirm the suspension and said reporting had mischaracterized what had happened.
“We don’t comment on internal matters,” a spokesperson said. “That said, we are aware of reporting on this matter which has errors and mischaracterizations but we can’t get into the specifics given the confidentiality of the situation.”
Reached by JTA, Herland declined a request for comment.
A press freedom group decried the reported suspension, however.
“Recording events in a public place and reporting them to the public is not misconduct,” Sheila Gunn Reid, president of the Independent Press Gallery — a non-profit advocating for independent and nongovernmental journalist organizations — said. “It is journalism. It is not the role of a public broadcaster to punish its journalists for doing their jobs to appease activist groups. Its role is to defend their right to report.”
In a thread under his tweet about the protest, Herland noted that “The guest speaker at the Toronto synagogue tonight was an Australian-born university teacher who lives in Israel and once served as Israeli ambassador to the UK. His speech was about making peace in the Middle East. Let’s hope that happens this year.”
He was referring to Regev, formerly the Israeli ambassador to Britain, who gave a talk during Yom Kippur services. Online defenders of the protesters chided Herland for not personally naming the prominent media defender of Israel’s war in Gaza in his post.
Commenters also scored Herland for describing the venue as a synagogue even though the service was held in a public events space.
However, Jewish groups who reviewed the video or otherwise tracked the protest said that Regev’s presence did not seem germane to the protesters’ chants, and noted that synagogues often move to event venues for the High Holidays because of the volume of congregants attending.
“The protesters claimed to have been demonstrating against the speaker, but I don’t recall seeing anything that particularly said they were targeting [Regev],” Rochelle Direnfeld, senior criminal counsel for the Alliance of Canadians Combatting Antisemitism, said in an interview. “It seemed to be much more general against Jews and supporters of Israel.”
Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic, Direnfeld said, but the protesters’ apparent targeting of worshipers was worrying. “It’s not okay to blame Canadian Jews for what’s going on in the Middle East,” Direnfeld said. “Given what [the protesters] were saying to the people trying to enter the building for services, that’s what they were doing.”
Simon Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith Canada, said the protests on Judaism’s holiest day amounted to intimidation. “It is deplorable that members of the Jewish community are subject to these incessant acts of hatred and intimidation,” he said. “It is especially alarming when these protesters target members of the community as they enter their houses of worship, in this instance on Kol Nidre, the holiest night of the year.”
Wolle said the CBC needed to explain its reported disciplinary measures. “Neil Herland had every right to document his lived experience, and the very idea that he would face disciplinary action for that is deeply concerning,” he said. “As Canada’s public broadcaster, the CBC owes the public an explanation for its inexplicable treatment of Mr. Herland.”
Vivian Bercovici, a lawyer as well as former ambassador of Canada to Israel and a CBC board member, said the alleged discipline Herland has faced is cause for concern.
“Herland didn’t say anything derogatory, rude or inappropriate,” said Bercovici. “He told us what was happening in a very clear and factual way, and so I think that the CBC owes us an explanation as to why that post was so egregious.”
Herland’s tweet thread also included a post noting that his late father was an Austrian Jew who survived the Holocaust in Romania, and that he “came to Canada as a refugee. This year I got an Austrian passport, in case Canada becomes unsafe for me as a Jew. I fear that moment is approaching, here in Canada and elsewhere.”
Herland’s expression of his own distress at the alleged harassment is not usual practice for reporters, but it is also not unheard of.
His comments echo those of many Canadian Jews, who increasingly are saying they do not feel safe in the country and even considering taking up potential offers to move to the United States as refugees.
Direnfeld said the incident reflected what is becoming a pervasive complaint among Canadian Jews that the authorities are not doing enough to decrease tensions. The police practice of deescalation was failing, she said.
“De-escalation can quickly turn into capitulation, which only serves to embolden these protesters to continue,” she said. “We’re now seeing the fruits of that capitulation in conduct such as what happened in Belleville,” she continued, referring to a gunman who tried to attack the Sons of Jacob synagogue on Yom Kippur but was killed in a shootout with police.
Bercovici said the protest was no less distressing because the Meridian Arts Centre is an events space.
“A synagogue can be anywhere, and there are a lot of religious groups that rent space over specific holidays because they don’t have their own building,” she said. “That’s just a fatuous, ridiculous argument.”
Herland has posted only once to X since his reported suspension: A photo of Shabbat candles on Friday, Sept. 25.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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A great Jewish intellectual understood the Kafkaesque horror of Tennessee’s botched execution
Two days ago, the state of Tennessee tried to kill Christa Pike, the Death Row prisoner who, in 1995, was found guilty of the torture and murder of her classmate Colleen Slemmer. After spending more than 30 years on death row, Pike was strapped to a prison gurney and, as journalists watched through a window, an execution team cycled through at least a half-dozen syringes before finding a vein suitable for the injection of pentobarbital.
Or so they thought.
After Pike herself tried to help the team find a vein, they injected her with a supposedly lethal dose of the barbiturate. Though it caused an intense burning sensation in Pike’s arm, the dose failed to do its job, leading the executioners to empty a second dose into what they thought was a vein but turned out to be the surrounding tissue. Shortly thereafter, a curtain was drawn across the window and, for an hour, the journalists heard Pike continue to breathe and snore. Pike’s legal team eventually learned that their client, barely but still stubbornly alive, had been rushed to the emergency room of a nearby hospital.
While Pike’s physical prognosis is uncertain, there is nothing uncertain about the ethical diagnosis of this event. At least this would be the case for two earlier journalists who wrote at length on the death penalty: Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Long after they both became celebrated novelists and intellectuals, the two men each wrote essays on state-sanctioned killing, which were combined and published in France with the title Réflexions sur la peine capitale, or Reflections on the Death Penalty.
These reflections are as relevant in our own age of drug-induced executions as in Koestler and Camus’ era of where the delivery system of death was a noose or the guillotine.
Born into a secular Jewish family in Budapest, Koestler was, as the phrase goes, a child of his century, one convulsed by catastrophic wars, murderous ideologies, and multiple genocides. Described by his friend George Orwell as an “outstanding figure” of his time, Koestler, like Orwell, fought in and reported on the Spanish Civil War. As a member of the Spanish republican forces, he was captured by Franco’s intelligence service and sentenced to death — a fate Koestler escaped when, after several months of imprisonment, he was released in a prisoner exchange.
Yet this experience deeply marked him. In the mid-1950s, he rallied to the campaign to end capital punishment in Great Britain, penning the essay “Reflections on Hanging.” Serialized in two newspapers, the essay galvanized public opinion and played a pivotal role in the parliamentary vote that, while not entirely abolishing the death penalty, severely limited it. Given the clarity and ferocity of Koestler’s writing — which, Rebecca West observed, was as historically misleading as it was rhetorically moving — this sea change in the public’s attitude and parliament’s position is not surprising.
One passage seems especially relevant for the recent events in Tennessee. “There is indeed a Kafkaesque horror attached to an execution,” Koestler writes, “which goes beyond the mere fear of death or pain or indignity. It is connected not with the brutality but with the macabre, cold-blooded politeness of the ceremony, in which the person whose neck is going to be broken is supposed to collaborate in a nice, sensible manner, as if it were a matter of a minor surgical operation…it is present in the delinquent’s knowledge that in the embarrassed stares of the officials he is already mirrored as a dead man with a blue face and ruptured vertebrae; and that what for him is the final, violent termination of life is for them merely an unpleasant duty, followed by a sigh of relief and a plate of bacon and eggs.”
Did the unnamed doctor, I wonder, stare with embarrassment as he repeatedly tried but failed at killing the — perhaps this is not the best word — patient? How, I also wonder, should readers respond to the description of Pike’s attempted execution? (With embarrassment, I admit while I was revulsed, I also continued sipping from a mug of coffee as I read the New York Times’ account.)
We can guess how Lucien Camus might have responded. His son, Albert Camus, told and retold the story in his writings of his father who, having witnessed a public execution by guillotine, returned to the house, vomited in the sink, and never spoke about the experience. In the essay “Reflections on the Guillotine,” which accompanied Koestler’s, Camus suggested that rather than telling the condemned man or woman that they will pay the ultimate price or their debt to society for their crime, they instead be told the truth. “If you kill you will be imprisoned for months and years, torn between impossible death and constantly renewed terror, we shall slip into your cell…tie your hands behind your back [and] bind your arms with a strap to that you are forced to stoop [and] then carry you through the corridors [and] seize you by the seat of your pants and throw you on a board [then] let fall from a height of seven feet a 120 pound blade that will slice off your head like a razor.”
What, then, did the judge overseeing the 1995 trial tell Christa Pike when the sentence was rendered? The delivery system for death then was the electric chair and, to the judge’s credit, she did inform Pike that she would be subjected to a degree of electroshock sufficient to kill her. I do not know when the agent of death shifted from electroshock to pentobarbital nor do I know if a judge explained to Pike how the drug would act on her brain and organs to bring about her death. But I am pretty certain that none of the judges informed Pike of one legal scholar’s assessment of this form of death: “It is not the most humane, it is the most humane-looking.” I am even more certain they did not inform her, in case she survived another botched execution by the state of Tennessee, which boasts a history of such botches, that her brain would be irreversibly damaged.
Finally, I am most certain that, whether strangled by a tightened noose, decapitated by a sharpened blade, or injected by what was possibly an expired dose of pentobarbital, the sheer barbarism exercised by officials wearing white coats remains constant.
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