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Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it.
NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?
Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.
“One artistic director who was thinking of doing this [play] was like, ‘You know, it’s not like he’s Hamlet, but…’ And I thought, well, no, actually I think he is like Hamlet!” she said.
She added another take: “I feel like he’s Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel.”
Hansberry saw just two of her works produced on Broadway before her death from cancer at 34 in January 1965. Her first, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which follows a Black family dealing with housing discrimination in Chicago, is widely considered one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. The other, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” ran for a few months in the fall of 1964 until Hansberry’s death and has only been revived a handful of times since, all outside of New York.
Now, the star power of Isaac and Brosnahan is driving renewed interest in the play, which deals with weighty questions about political activism, self-fulfillment in a capitalist world, and racial and ethnic identity — including mid-century Jewish American identity.
The Brustein character, as Kauffman alluded to, is many things. A resident of Greenwich Village deeply embedded in that historic neighborhood’s 1960s activist and artistic circles, he is somewhat of a creative renaissance man. At the start of the play, his club of sorts (“it was not a nightclub” is a running joke) called “Walden Pond” has just shuttered and he has taken over an alternative newspaper. As the script reads, Brustein is an intellectual “in the truest sense of the word” but “does not wear glasses” — the latter description being a possible jab at his macho tendencies. Formerly an ardent leftist activist, he is now weary of the worth of activism and a bit of a nihilist. He’s in his late 30s and is a musician who often picks up a banjo.
Brustein is also a secular Jew, a fact that he telegraphs at certain key emotional and comedic moments. Others, from friends to his casually antisemitic sister-in-law, frequently reference his identity, too.
At the end of the play’s first half, for example, Brustein brings up the heroes of the Hanukkah story in talking about his existential angst — and his stomach ulcer. He has become belligerent to his wife Iris and to a local politician who wants Brustein’s paper’s endorsement.
“How does one confront the thousand nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time? Can a sword pierce it?” Sidney says. “One does not smite evil anymore: one holds one’s gut, thus — and takes a pill. Oh, but to take up the sword of the Maccabees again!”
Hansberry’s decision to center a white Jewish character surprised critics and fans alike in 1964 because many of them expected her to follow “A Raisin in the Sun” with further exploration of issues facing Black Americans, said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
“The major attack, both critically and on a popular basis, in regards to the play and to its central character was that Lorraine was out of her lane,” Gresham said. “That not only did she not know what she’s talking about, but that she had the nerve to even examine that subject matter.”
Hansberry’s closest collaborator was her former husband Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker whom she had divorced in 1962 but maintained an artistic partnership with. Nemiroff was a bit Brustein-like in his pursuits: he edited books, produced and promoted Hansberry’s work, and even wrote songs (one of which made the couple enough money to allow Hansberry to focus on writing “A Raisin in the Sun”). But Gresham — who is Nemiroff’s stepdaughter through his second marriage, to professor Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff — emphasized that his personality was nothing like Brustein’s. While Brustein is brash and mean to Iris, Nemiroff was undyingly supportive of Hansberry and her work, said Gresham, who lived with him and her mother at Nemiroff’s Croton-on-Hudson home — the one he had formerly shared for a time with Hansberry — from age 10 onward.
Instead, Gresham argued, the Brustein character was the result of Hansberry’s deep engagement with Jewish intellectual thought, in part influenced by her relationship with Nemiroff. The pair met at a protest and would bond over their passion for fighting for social justice, which included combating antisemitism. The night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and they would remain highly involved in the wave of activism that blossomed into the Black-Jewish civil rights alliance.
“Bob and Lorraine met and built a life together at a place where there was a very strong Black-Jewish nexus. There was a very strong interplay and interaction,” Gresham said. “I think Lorraine was very influenced by Bob’s family, the Nemiroffs, who were very radical in their politics. And so there was a way in which she was introduced to the base of Jewish intellectualism and Jewish progressive politics, that she took to heart and she was very passionate about.”
Robert Nemiroff and Lorraine Hansberry were married from 1953-62. They are shown here in 1959. (Ben Martin/Getty Images)
Hansberry didn’t hesitate to criticize Jewish writers who said controversial things about Black Americans, either. When Norman Podhoretz wrote “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” an explosive 1963 article in Commentary magazine now widely seen as racist, Hansberry responded with a scathing rebuke. She also sparred with Norman Mailer, who once wrote an essay titled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
Gresham said Brustein’s nihilism represents what Hansberry saw in a range of Jewish and non-Jewish white writers, whom she hoped could be kickstarted back into activism. But Hansberry also nodded to the reasons why someone like Brustein could feel defeated in the early 1960s, a decade and a half after World War II.
“You mean diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones? Forget about the Holocaust and worry about — reforms in the traffic court or something?” Brustein says at one point in the play to a local politician running as a reformer.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish scholar of literature who has written on Hansberry, said the resulting Brustein character is a very accurate depiction of a secular Jew at the time — both keenly attuned to prejudice in society and also lacking some understanding of the experience of being Black.
“I was just intoxicated that Hansberry could conjure that world, both so affectionately, but also so clear-sidedly that it seems like she can see the limitations of all of the characters’ perspectives,” he said. “But she also represents them with sympathy and humor.”
Kauffman, who also helmed a revival of the play in Chicago in 2016, is impressed with how “fully fledged” the Brustein character is.
“Who are the cultural icons who have sort of articulated the Jew in our culture in the last 50 years or 60 years, you know?” she said. “Brustein is not a caricature of a Woody Allen character, he’s not even ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ or a Jerry Seinfeld character. He’s a fully drawn character.”
Isaac, who is of mainly Guatemalan and Cuban heritage, has played Jewish characters before, including a formerly Orthodox man in an Israeli director’s remake of the classic film “Scenes From a Marriage.” In the lead-up to this play, he has largely avoided getting caught in headlines focused on the “Jewface” debate, over whether non-Jewish actors should be allowed to play Jewish characters on stage and screen.
But when asked about the responsibility of playing a Jewish character in a New York Times interview, Isaac referenced the fact that he has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side.
“We could play that game: How Jewish are you?” he said to interviewer Alexis Soloski, who is Jewish. “It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.”
When Kauffman directed a version of the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2016, her lead actor had “not a single drop of Jewish heritage…in his blood,” and she said she had to convey “what anger looks like” coming from a Jewish perspective. Working with Isaac has been different — instead of starting at a base of no knowledge, she has been pushing for more of an Ashkenazi sensibility than a Sephardic one.
“I believe that his heritage leans, I’m guessing, more towards Sephardic. And mine is pure Ashkenazi,” she said. “We sort of joke: ‘[The part] is a little bit more Ashkenazi than that, you know what I mean?’ Like, ‘the violence is actually turned towards yourself!’”
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The post Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Israel Becomes World’s 7th Largest Arms Exporter
Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, on display during a visit by US President Joe Biden. Photo: Ariel Hermoni / Ministry of Defense
Israel has become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, steadily increasing its share of global weapons sales even amid a multi-front war and mounting international criticism, according to a new report.
On Monday, the Swedish-based Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) released its latest report on global arms exports, analyzing trends from the last five years (2021–2025) and comparing them with the previous period (2016–2020).
For the first time, Israel has surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s seventh-largest arms exporter, with its share of global weapons sales rising to 4.4 percent in 2021–2025, up from 3.1 percent in the previous period.
“Despite conducting the war in Gaza and attacks in Iran, Lebanon, Qatar, Syria, and Yemen, Israel still managed to increase its share of global arms exports,” Zain Hussain, researcher at SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement.
According to the newly released report, Israel also ranked as the 14th-largest arms importer in the world, acquiring most of its weapons from the United States (68 percent) and Germany (31 percent), with a small share from Italy (1 percent), showing that arms embargoes and international criticism have done little to slow its defense trade.
Overall, the total volume of the global arms trade rose by 9.2 percent in the last five years compared to the previous period, with European nations more than tripling their weapons imports to become the world’s largest arms-importing region amid rising regional tensions with Russia and escalating conflict in the Middle East.
The US continued to be the world’s largest arms exporter in 2021–2025, holding a 42 percent share of global sales, followed by France (9.8 percent), Russia (6.8 percent), Germany (5.7 percent), China (5.6 percent), Italy (5.1 percent), and Israel.
Among Middle Eastern countries, Saudi Arabia leads as the top purchaser of American arms with 12 percent of sales, followed by Qatar and Kuwait, while Israel ranks 12th globally, receiving just 3.1 percent of all US arms exports
SIPRI’s latest report comes as the Jewish state faces growing international pressure, with European states among the most vocally critical and threatening arms embargoes over Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and its military campaign against Iran.
Despite these threats, Israel’s arms exports have continued to grow, solidifying its position as a leading player in the global weapons market.
For example, the UK and Germany have pressed ahead with arms purchases from Israel despite repeated threats and public warnings to suspend defense trade, signaling the limits of international pressure.
Israel now supplies 8.2 percent of British arms purchases, second only to the US, which accounts for 85 percent.
In Israel’s biggest-ever arms export deal, Germany recently acquired the Arrow missile defense system, marking the largest weapons sale in the country’s history.
According to the SIPRI report, Israel’s growth in global arms exports was driven primarily by international sales of air defense systems, even as the country faced heavy domestic demand for weapons amid a multi-front war.
Overall, Israel sold arms to 23 European countries (41 percent of its total exports), 10 Asian countries (40 percent), five in North and Latin America (8.6 percent), and seven African nations.
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I was sexually abused at my synagogue as a child. Here’s how our community can protect others from that horror
This week, I settled a lawsuit that I filed nearly five years ago against the synagogue in New Jersey where I was sexually abused in the 1990s while learning to read Torah. The settlement agreement is significant because of its restorative focus, which I designed intentionally to help make my childhood community a safer place for children. Here is my full story.
I am glad to see these developments. But it should not have taken years of litigation to force a synagogue to implement protective measures that should be part of the work of every Jewish organization that counts children as part of its community.
My experience, and the enablement of my abuser by multiple Jewish institutions, fuels my passion to advocate for change in how Jewish institutions approach child safety.
Many Jewish institutions still struggle to follow basic policies and procedures for handling these kinds of incidents when they are put to the test — although, in recent years, more have proactively adopted policies and procedures and implemented training programs that help.
But safeguarding Jewish institutions from child predators requires more than a set of rules. It requires that Jewish leaders have an informed understanding of the topic, and more importantly, have the courage to speak up and make difficult decisions. The Jewish community desperately needs more of both.
Here’s what needs to be done.
Appreciate the danger within
Combating child sex abuse starts with understanding that 93% of sex crimes committed against children are perpetrated by someone the child knows and trusts. Jewish institutions must begin to reckon more thoroughly with that fact.
On a recent visit to a Jewish day school, an administrator told me that she runs background checks on everyone who enters campus, including every vendor and contractor, without fail. When I asked if she ran a background check on me, she demurred.
I understand why. But Jewish institutions need to find a way to effuse warmth and community without shortcutting safety.
Train kids and parents, not just teachers
One way to begin this work is to bring children and parents into abuse prevention training, in which teachers are already generally required to participate. This kind of training teaches us how to recognize grooming behavior, which is prevalent in most cases of child sex abuse.
Professional training also helps parents learn how to talk to their children about sensitive topics, which reduces a predator’s ability to prey on a child’s natural curiosity. My own children’s day school recently hired ChildUSA to audit its child safety policies. Later, it conducted age-appropriate student training, followed by an abuse prevention workshop for parents. It’s an easy but highly effective example that all day schools should follow, yet few do.
Draw clearer lines
Another way that we can reduce child sex abuse is by better defining red lines, and by proactively responding to inappropriate behavior.
A few years ago, I alerted a Chabad rebbetzin that a regular congregant watched pornography on his cell phone during Rosh Hashanah services. “It only happened once,” she said, and besides, “he has dementia — where’s your compassion!” Other colleagues breathed a sigh of relief — “at least he didn’t touch anyone.”
Our instinct is to try and explain malbehavior through an innocent lense, but when it comes to sexual boundaries, we should resist that urge. Sexual predators intentionally push both physical and conversational boundaries to normalize their behavior. We need to recognize boundary-pushing and appreciate its role as a grooming tactic.
Prioritize the safety and wellbeing of survivors
Yes, our tradition teaches us to be slow to judgment and quick to compassion. It’s a wise dictate, but not one appropriately applied to convicted child abusers, especially as data shows they often reoffend. The Orthodox community in Englewood, New Jersey allowed my abuser to fully participate in communal life long after discovering he had hidden multiple convictions. Some leaders admonished their community as insufficiently compassionate for having concerns about his involvement.
Their mistake: practicing more compassion for a child abuser than for his victims.
Predators tend to find many ways to get close to their victims, and often frequent multiple communities to maximize their pool of victims and to avoid detection of their behavior. These are both textbook characteristics of how my abuser has long operated. Jewish leaders need to speak up, both within their own communities, and when they know predators have moved to new ones.
Conduct transparent investigations
When faced with a case of suspected abuse, it’s imperative that institutions conduct a transparent, independent investigation, and disclose its entire contents, redacting only information that could identify a victim.
Too often, Jewish institutions conduct internal reviews, only disclosing a summary rather than exposing the entire process to public scrutiny. Such exercises often allow an institution to maintain legal privilege over the contents of the report, thus preventing its contents from being used against it.
These investigations are, therefore, largely performative. Putting children first means Jewish institutions should commit to complete transparency to allow the public to fully understand what occurred and how it was handled, and to ensure that conflicts are properly managed.
Prioritize accountability
Holding Jewish institutional leadership accountable for their actions — and inaction — is needed to ensure that child safety is handled professionally. Accountability means articulating standards of expected conduct, and taking remedial action — like relieving bad actors of their jobs — when conduct falls below the standard.
Community members, lay leadership, and the professional organizations that provide the backbone for institutional Jewish leadership — such as the Rabbinical Assembly — need to be more proactive in holding clergy accountable.
If you sit on the board of a day school, camp or synagogue, you must ask whether your institution is doing everything possible to create a safe environment for kids.
Do you have a child safety policy? Does your board include people with a background in child safety and abuse prevention? Have you participated in abuse prevention training?
If your institution is dealing with a sensitive matter, are you working with professionals who have experience in abuse prevention? If your institution mishandled a case, have you owned up to it?
And finally, if you’re reading this and survived being sexually abused as a child, I believe you and I support you. It’s not your fault. And you have the right to speak up and be heard at the time of your choosing.
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This Jewish philosopher knows our politics are absurd — and why that’s a good thing
Should we survive the next three years, the odds are good we will look back on Donald Trump’s second presidency as the “Years of Living Absurdly.” This, at least, is the view of media outlets, ranging from the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times to The Daily Beast and The Guardian, on the dizzying variety of the president’s words and actions.
But there is the politically absurd and, well, the philosophically absurd. For the latter, a good place to start is with the contemporary philosopher Thomas Nagel, who was born to German-Jewish refugees living in prewar Belgrade who then immigrated to the United States after the war’s end. Perhaps understandably, Nagel had an ironic take on the word.
In 1970, this professor of philosophy at New York University, perhaps best known for his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”, published “The Absurd,” an essay which could be thought of as “What Is It Like to Be in an Absurd World?” In a dozen sharp and snappy pages, Nagel makes the case — unusual for most professional philosophers who treat the “absurd” with either skepticism or scorn — that “absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.”
Of course, when we hear the word “absurd,” some of us tend to think of Albert Camus. That we do so is not at all absurd. After all, when he was still an unknown 20-something, he declared that “the feeling of absurdity can strike us in the face at any street corner.” In other words, at one point or another in most of our lives, we have reason to look to the skies and ask what the reason is to our lives — and fail to receive an answer.
“The absurd is born,” Camus writes, “from this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.”
The young Camus eventually found the reason in rebelling against this absurd condition, finding meaning not beyond, but in this world. Yet Nagel did not fall for this youthful and heroic response. “It seems to me,” he drily observes, “romantic and slightly self-pitying.” But he nevertheless acknowledged that Camus was on to something essential and enduring. It is simply that our absurdity “warrants neither that much distress nor that much defiance.”
Though I fell hard for Camus, I wonder if Nagel is on to something important. He suggests that we think of the absurd as a form of epistemological skepticism. By this, he means our unbreakable habit of taking the world, and everything which constitutes it, for granted. We cannot help but do so even though we can always provide excellent philosophical reasons for not doing so. You know the familiar variations on this tune. For example, how do I know that what I unthinkingly take for reality is not a dream (or nightmare)? Or, for that matter, how do I know what I unconsciously take for my embodied or physical self is not simply an electrical impulse sent to a brain floating in a vat? And so on.
Despite these skeptical doubts that reason cannot satisfactorily answer, I nevertheless experience the table where I am now sitting as very real and not a dream. And I live my life as if “I” am the white-haired figure I see in the mirror, one who also enjoys life. Nagel quotes a famous line by the Scottish skeptic, David Hume: “Since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices…I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and I am merry with friends.” As for the skeptical speculations, they are filed away for another day of philosophizing.
To think absurdly, Nagel suggests, is not unlike to think skeptically. It happens when we question not the reality of the world, but instead the seriousness with which we treat it. While I might well insist on the very real possibility that life is meaningless — a position I underscore in my existentialism class with all the gravitas an aging academic can muster — I confess that, phony that I am, I do take my life very seriously. And, moreover, this is what I wish my students would do.
When we step away, if only mentally and momentarily, from the world we take so seriously, Nagel believes we win something important — namely, the ability “to appreciate the cosmic unimportance” of our situation. By “transcending ourselves in thought,” we adopt a view from above — an ironic perspective — that provides the critical distance necessary to take our lives less seriously.
We can and must, as Camus argues, rebel against an unjust and unraveling world. The situation in which we find ourselves as a nation — one at the mercy of a merciless and monstrous ego — is existentially important. But is it not, from a certain perspective, also absurdly unimportant? This is the gift of ironic distance; by “making us spectators of our own lives,” we can smile at the spectacle in which we all have roles.
But irony, if I understand Nagel rightly, is also a burden. Our late-night comics are masters at slicing the men and women who run our country down to size, but here is the rub: While we are busy delighting in the deflation of these oversized egos, we are also delighting in the inflation of our own. We take comfort in our superior smarts and morals, but as we all discover sooner or later, this comfort proves as lasting as a May fly.
As the philosopher Alexander Nehamas has suggested, true irony, or at least the irony practiced by Plato in his dialogues, is meant not only to knock the fools in power down a peg or two, but also those who are busy laughing — e.g., you and me. In an age which pits one half of the country against the other, no lesson — one that teaches modesty and humility — seems more vital.
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