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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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They traveled to the U.S. as Jewish teens. Here’s how these 4 Israelis see America now.
As the U.S. celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, some past participants in the Bronfman Fellowship, which for three decades has brought a cohort of 17-year-old Israelis to the United States for two weeks each summer, looked back on how their visits — and what they learned about the American experiment — shaped their lives. Here are their stories as told to Talya Zax and Sage Lattman, edited and condensed for clarity.
Oz Bin Nun
Oz is a combat veteran of the Egoz Unit, a former Jewish Agency emissary and co-founder of the “Reserve Duty Servants Forum,” leading strategic advocacy for reservists’ rights.
My first time in the U.S. was through Bronfman, and the most honest way to describe it was life changing. I grew up in a very, very Israeli family — all of my grandparents were born in Israel, which is pretty rare, and my parents don’t really speak English, which is not very common in Israel. I didn’t think I’d be in the U.S. in the future even, so Bronfman for me was the first time that I found myself there.
I’m trying to find the U.S. that I met during my Bronfman journey, but I’m not sure it really exists.
Back then I thought the U.S. was a magical place, but it was also the whole Bronfman idea: you’re driving around, you have the best speakers, you speak with the most interesting people, in a very open-minded, curious and friendly way — more than friends, kind of like allies to your journey. All that framework created a pretty magical experience, and when I got back to Israel I was like, ‘Wow, it really changed something inside me.’ But I came back in 2016, which was also the rise of Trump and a lot of things that I didn’t see in 2015, and I guess a lot of Americans didn’t see as well.
When I think about the U.S., the first thing is some specific smell that Americans aren’t really aware of — something wet in the air, and a lot of things are very green. And almost immediately after that is the sense of room. There is enough room. When you’re going there, you don’t feel that someone else is taking your place, or stepping on your toes. In Israel there is a sense that there is no room; everything is so crowded, and not just physically. There is something about just driving until the horizon — it’s a sense of awe and a sense of freedom.
My wife and I lived for two years in Madison, Wisconsin, not in the classic places, not on the coasts, and to some extent we saw the real America — the beautiful things in it and the problematic things in it. Once you’re driving through America, America makes much more sense. You drive for six or eight or 10 hours and around Southern Illinois, St. Louis, Arkansas you see the signs flip, and the best coffee in Mobile, Alabama has a pride flag. I feel like a citizen of two worlds — and it’s rare to be a citizen of two of the biggest Jewish communities in the world, specifically in a time when they’re spreading apart, and it’s harder and harder to find a common ground.
Alex Rif
Alex is an Israeli-Russian social activist and poet, who is currently a candidate on behalf of the ‘Yashar!’ party with Gadi Eisenkot. She is the founder and former CEO of One Million Lobby, the first and only Israeli non-profit that promotes a better social, economic, state-religious and cultural reality for the 1.2 million Israelis from the former Soviet Union states (IFSU).
I went to the U.S. in 2003, more than 20 years ago, when I was in 11th grade — and I want to jump to the end, which is that yesterday I joined a political party, with Gadi Eisenkot, as a candidate. A lot of the things that Bronfman gave me led me to that, specifically the visit to the U.S., because it was the first time I actually met different communities of Jews.
I come from Soviet Jewry — we came after 70 years of our Jewish culture, stories, heritage, religion being erased — and I didn’t feel connected in Israel to the Israeli Orthodox mainstream. Visiting the U.S. was the first time I saw that there are many ways of being Jewish, and they are all beautiful and profound and meaningful and deep. That was an enormous discovery for me. From the other side, I learned the importance of the connection between Israel and outside of Israel.
I made Aliyah when I was 5, from Ukraine, and like a lot of immigrants I tried to be more Israeli than the Israelis. This trip changed my perspective: there’s a big Jewish peoplehood, and Israel is not the only place. It may be the shelter, the biggest center, but it’s not the only place. It shaped my professional path — for the past 10 years I’ve dedicated my life to the Russian-speaking community in Israel, to issues like conversion and the grandchild clause, which we have to guard, because it’s the only law that gives people who intermarried the chance to come back in a time of need, when antisemitism rises, as we see now in New York.
One of our meetings during the fellowship was with candidates for Congress and people who worked in government — the first time I met high-ranked elected people, and I saw how much good they can do and how much power they have in their hands. It felt like it was in the touch of my hand: if I can meet them, I can be them. It was really empowering, even before I met Israeli officials. I have a picture of myself standing in a meeting room with a U.S. flag, in a very warm coat, at the speaking point, proud and excited — it opened something in my mind.
For me the U.S. is a sister country. Part of my heart is being ripped apart and lives in the U.S. now, with friends who’ve left. The U.S. is the best friend we ever had, and probably ever will have, and we have to do everything we can to save this friendship and this alliance.
Lior Soroka
Lior is a freelance journalist and screenwriter based in Tel Aviv. He reports for The Washington Post, covering the conflict in the Middle East. He is currently writing a play for the Haifa Theatre and co-writing a television series.
It was pretty long ago — back in 1999. I was a teenager then, in 11th grade, and it was a very unique experience going to meet the Jewish communities in the States. In Israel the boundaries of Judaism are very clear: there is a clear boundary whether you’re secular, or religious, or ultra-Orthodox. It felt like in the States there are more possibilities to experience your Jewishness. Part of it, I think, is because in Israel, Judaism and the state are intertwined. You feel that in recent years, even the tension between the different denominations is growing, and I felt it less while I visited the States.
As a Jewish person who lives in Israel, I always felt this deep connection between Israel and the diaspora. It always felt like Israel can be a safe place for Jews, and the Jewish community abroad is also there to support Israel from afar. But recently, since the war broke out, I think a lot of things have changed. Many Jews abroad and in Israel are asking about the path that Israel is taking in the last years, and how it influenced this unique relationship between Israel and the diaspora. Israel needs to remember it, so it won’t lose this strong ally we have with the Jews who live in the States — because some of them are saying they don’t want anything to do with Israel now. It’s becoming harder to identify yourself as a Zionist or pro-Israeli. We don’t need to take this relationship as granted, because we can really lose it.
As a journalist, the main thing is to be curious, and my visit taught me a lot about how things work in the States — it was a first glimpse into American politics and the connection between Jews and the United States. We visited D.C. and met some Congress people, we went to the Holocaust Museum, we met different denominations in New York. It’s better when you see things with your own eyes.
The most meaningful part was a meeting at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the LGBTQ+ community in New York. As a teenager in the closet at 17, to see how Judaism and being gay can go together was very meaningful. A couple of years afterward I came back by myself for a huge Yom Kippur service, thousands of LGBTQ Jews gathering together. In Israel you hear people like Bezalel Smotrich saying these things cannot go together — and in the States, you see how it can work, and does work.”
Hadas Semo
Hadas, 20, studied at Ulpana Tzvia Afula. After national service at Amal High School in Ashdod, she began working in the field of education as a youth counselor.
It was about January 2023, and it was just a wonderful experience. I’d never been abroad before. Everything about the program made it more special, because it was all about our identity as Jews. At the meetings with the people who were from America and were Jews — I was mesmerized most of the time. That’s what stood out to me the most.
Before, I didn’t really think about what the U.S. meant to me; I felt like it was something not connected to me in any way. But when I came there, I felt connected, because I saw the Jews there — it’s not only Israel that has this special energy and this special history. That was the first time I felt like this and saw it with my own eyes, and I feel the connection now. I saw New York as this big city from the movies, so I was very excited, and everything just felt magical.
In my experience as an Israeli Ethiopian, a Black Israeli, I had some thoughts and conflicts being in the program. It’s one thing to be Black in the world and another to be Black in Israel itself, because of all the difficulties we have with racism and fitting into society. When I came to Bronfman I was myself, I sometimes felt a little unconnected to the people, because everyone was a specific type of energy, the way they grew up, and a little white. It was always in my head: I’m a Black Ethiopian in this group. I was the only one — you can tell just by looking. I started wondering who I would be in the U.S., whether I’d just be seen as a Black person there — what they see is what they see, nobody knows I’m a Jew.
In the U.S., the manager of the fellowship arranged a meeting for me with a former fellow who’s biracial, and she told me about her experience as a half-Black Jew in America — the conflicts, the things that come with it. I felt like I needed someone who was like me, who understood me. We had so much fun, and something clicked. It helped me accept who I am and where I am, and understand that no matter what and who and how I am, I’m good as I am — it doesn’t matter the color, or where I came from, or what happened to me before.
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Why I yelled at God on Kol Nidre
Last Kol Nidre, I yelled at God.
My husband was in the hospital. He had been since the day after Rosh Hashanah. I sat in services and thought of a friend of mine’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac: that it had been a test that Abraham had failed, because the whole point was that Abraham was supposed to argue back, and that’s why Abraham and God don’t speak after that moment. “You want me to argue back? Fine,” I snapped in my head to the God I otherwise think of as a metaphor. “Give him back to me.” I choked back tears as the congregation prayed to be inscribed in the Book of Life.
I had really been looking forward to those High Holidays. More specifically, I was looking forward to filling out the little prompts that Reboot sends out every year during the Days of Awe encouraging you to reflect on the year that was and the year that is to come. The year before last, I had written a lot about how badly I wanted a baby. Last year, I had one. My husband and I had welcomed our wonderful son into the world several weeks prior. And unlike most things in life, having a baby was as good as I thought it would be. Better, even. Some days I thought I would crack in half from so much happiness. Not all day, every day, of course. In week 10, in a little postpartum discussion group I’d brought him to, I cried at how much he cried. But the overwhelming mood was one of unbelievable happiness and gratitude. I was looking forward to taking stock of, and basking in, my joy over the course of those 10 days.
On Rosh Hashanah, we brought him to a service for babies and small children. I came home and drank tea with honey and cuddled him and watched the little video I had taken of him cooing as I encouraged him to “say” “Shanah Tovah” and he smiled.
In the next room, my husband was in pain. That night, he was sick. The next day, he went to the hospital. We thought he’d be home that afternoon. Instead, he was there for three weeks. The last of those was largely spent in the ICU, which is where we celebrated our five year wedding anniversary and our son turning three months old. The latent kidney issues we’d always known he had had were now acute. He would be on dialysis and would need a kidney transplant.
For the first couple of months, this seemed strangely manageable. He went to dialysis but he also still went to the office for work. We could still go up and back to New York City from our home in Washington, DC to see our families. We spent Thanksgiving and the holidays with them. We still talked about things like buying a bigger place and going on vacation to different countries and having a second baby.
Then, in the winter, his eyes became yellow. After several months and a genetic test we learned that he had a rare genetic mutation. It was responsible for his diabetes and his kidney issues and, we learned in the spring, for his liver issues, too. He would need not a kidney transplant from a live donor but a kidney and liver transplant from a deceased one.
It took several additional hospital stays to get that answer. Each time, he lost more weight and developed health complications even as the doctors aimed to solve the big ones. I wrote my little articles at various bedsides. I sometimes feel powerless in writing about antisemitism and illiberalism, but that was nothing next to the frustration I felt at my failure to move him through medical morass more quickly, or to magically make him well again.
I made compromises in my head. I would give up this or that. I would take on more of the childcare or housework or whatever else by myself because he couldn’t. I pushed my book deadline back. I pushed it back again. Fine. Take it. Just let me keep my family.
In all of this, our son did not remain a crying 10-week-old. He became, despite everything, a very happy baby, and his every little development—crawling and clapping and cruising—made me happy, too. I watched as he played with his toy cars and flipped through his board books, giggling to himself, and as he grabbed his stuffed Grover in his little hands with dimples on the knuckles. Once, while I was putting him down to sleep, he grinned then blew a raspberry at me. I blew one back. We went on like that, quietly in the dark, making funny noises with our lips and tongues. My husband was in one of his many hospital stays that night and I marveled at how this moment of perfect wonder could be happening amidst my despair.
Our son made everything easier to navigate: I had a purpose and also a daily package of the affirmation of life and mischief. The contrast also made everything hurt. Our baby was so good. Why couldn’t everything be?
I made myself ask for, and accept, help. One friend accompanied my husband to medical appointments when I couldn’t be there. Others babysat our son. Another took our dog to the animal hospital one morning so that I could take our baby to his music class. People baked challah and cooked dinners and sent money for groceries and I hated saying yes but was so grateful that there was so much to say yes to. It won’t always be like this, my husband told me. He said that one day one of our friends will need help and we will know how to be there for them. I tried to remember that it would not be us asking for help forever, and that, in any case, asking for and receiving help was also part of what it meant to have built and be part of a community. That this, too, was what it meant to have a life that is part of a larger whole.
Various people mentioned the Book of Job to me. In some ways, I felt strangely jealous of Job, who at least has the opportunity to argue with the power responsible for his misfortune. If God appeared before me to taunt me, I wouldn’t just sit there and take it, I said. Someone told me that was the whole point. No one was showing up to take the blame because part of what was frustrating was that there was no one, really, to blame. Lots of people told me how unfair this all was. Of course it was. But so what? It wasn’t fair and that was that. Lots of things aren’t fair. Our situation was still more fair than many. The country and the world felt like they were falling apart. I wasn’t special. Lots of people yell at God on Kol Nidre and every other day. Or ask or beg God. And the universe and genetics and their husbands’ doctors, too.
The other thing about the Book of Job, I realized, is that Job had been happy. Did that past happiness make it more painful for him to sit there and listen to God talk about how He, and not Job, had made the oceans? Who cares who made the oceans? Job loved his wife and his children and then they were gone. Some people told me that all of this would make me appreciate what I had. But I had appreciated my little family.
What I had failed to appreciate, despite worrying theoretically about health as much as I did during pregnancy, was how little I had had to think about health in a terrifying and tangible way. An Uber driver on one of my seemingly countless trips to the hospital (why hadn’t I learned to drive?) told me that you have 1000 problems until you get sick, and then you just have one. I wanted to call my other 999 problems back. I missed them. I wished I could go back to when I thought there were books besides the Book of Life.
When he was finally listed for his transplant, we were told it would be a matter of weeks, soon, any day now. Days came and days went and he did not get the call. He ended up in the hospital for a week at a time, twice, for relatively minor complications. The doctors told us how sorry they were that he was there. I thought, but did not say, that the more time he spent in the hospital for reasons that weren’t a transplant and recovery, the harder it was to believe that things would ever get better.
On one of those hospital evenings, we asked each other how much more of this we could take. We wondered aloud whether he would ever get his transplant. And then, hours later, he got the call. About a day later, he had his surgery. Eleven hours after the procedure started, the surgeon told me that it was over and that my husband was fine.
For the first week, I waited every day for some surprise piece of bad news to come. The first week turned into a second week, at the end of which he came home. The first few days were very hard — recovery is a long and arduous process — but I watched my husband work his way back into walking again with a cane at one end of the room while, at the other, our son, armed with only a toy lion in each hand and evolutionary instinct, started to take wobbly steps.
I know this is not the end of the story, and I may never stop expecting things to once again become perilous. We are still in the middle and I don’t know how it will end and nobody can tell me. But I also know now that it is no small thing that a story gets to continue.
I have such grief for the year I thought I was going to have and didn’t. I have such jealousy toward people who get to be parents of babies and not have to think about medical crises. And I feel such joy when I think of our son’s playfulness and curiosity and even his stubborn streak and how he gets it from his father.
I don’t really know what I will take with me from this year into the next, but I know that, as we near these High Holidays, I’ve been thinking of the other story of the season: not Abraham and Isaac, but Jonah. I understand the story differently now.
Often people told me that they didn’t know how I was keeping it together. They wouldn’t be able to, they said. But I knew that they would. They would for the same reason I was able to: I had no other choice. I had to for my husband and my son and, yes, for myself. For as long as you’re alive, you have to keep it together, keep pressing forward, keep pushing, pushing, pushing, heaving yourself out of the belly of the giant fish. “You may not like cold water,” my mother told me the night before my husband had his surgery, “But if your boat is sinking, you need to jump and swim.”
We swim. We try to hold onto light in the dark and we wait for joy to come in the morning. Some days, the joy is just that there is another morning. It hurts so much. But to hold onto yourself and each other and jump and swim is also, I think, what it means to be in love, and to care and be cared for. It is, in other words, what it means to be inscribed in the Book of Life.
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Adidas apologizes for campaign with Israeli veteran amputee after calls to boycott
(JTA) — Adidas has apologized for featuring an Israeli former soldier and amputee in a campaign advertising its service for people with missing legs, which sparked calls for a boycott.
Shalev Biton, who lost his left leg during the 2021 Israel-Gaza conflict, appeared in a promotional video for the sportswear company’s Single Shoe service. The program was introduced in Europe earlier this year to allow amputees to buy just one shoe.
The campaign, filmed in Hebrew, showed Biton trying on a single sneaker at a store in Israel and running outside. It did not mention his army service or how he lost his leg. Biton was in a military vehicle that was hit by a missile while on a protective patrol of villages on the Israeli side of the Gaza border, according to Israel’s Channel 12.
After the video circulated widely online, pro-Palestinian activists called for a boycott of Adidas, referencing Gaza’s high number of amputees created by Israeli attacks since October 2023.
Adidas apologized for the campaign on Monday in a statement on the Adidas Arabia Instagram account.
“We recognize that an image used in a recent local activation has raised concerns and strong reactions,” the company said. “It was never our intent to cause offence, and we apologize for anyone affected. We acknowledge the concerns that have been raised and are taking the feedback seriously.”
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, said the apology from Adidas was insufficient and demanded that the company “immediately remove the Israeli soldier from all Adidas promotional material and channels.”
“Those ‘affected’ are millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, its illegal military occupation of Palestinian territory, and its decades long settler-colonial apartheid regime,” PACBI said in a statement.
Biton said on his Instagram account that he received “an insane wave of hate” over recent days. In an appeal for support, he told viewers, “I want to feel that you are here with me.”
Gaza has recorded over 5,000 limb amputations due to traumatic injuries, according to a May report from the World Health Organization. The United Nations reports that it has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world.
Adidas weathered another controversy in 2024 for advertising sneakers based on a model first released during the 1972 Munich Olympics, when 11 Israeli athletes were killed by a Palestinian terrorist group. The company faced backlash from Israel and various Jewish groups for choosing Bella Hadid, a Palestinian-American model and vocal pro-Palestinian advocate, to front the campaign. Adidas subsequently dropped Hadid, prompting criticism from pro-Palestinian voices.
Adidas and Biton could not immediately be reached for further details.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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