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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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Syrian Security Forces Use Gunfire to Disperse Rival Protests in Alawite Heartland
Alawites gather during a protest to demand federalism and the release of detained members of their community, in Latakia, Syria, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Syrian security forces used gunfire on Tuesday to break up two rival groups of demonstrators in the coastal town of Latakia, heartland of the country’s Alawite minority, witnesses and officials said.
Syria has been rocked by several episodes of sectarian violence since longtime leader Bashar al-Assad, who hails from the Muslim Alawite minority, was ousted by a rebel offensive last year and replaced by a Sunni-led government.
Witnesses said hundreds of Alawite protesters had gathered to demand a decentralized political system in Syria and the release of men they say were unjustly detained by the country’s new authorities. Supporters of the government then gathered and began shouting insults at the Alawites.
About an hour into the Alawites’ rally, gunshots were heard in Agriculture Square, one of two town squares where the protesters had gathered, according to two witnesses and videos verified by Reuters. One of the verified videos showed a man lying motionless on the ground with a wound to the head.
There was no immediate official word on casualties.
Noureddine el-Brimo, the head of media relations in Latakia province, told Reuters security forces had fired into the air to disperse the rival protesters, and added that unknown assailants had also fired on civilians and on the security forces.
He gave no further details but witnesses said both protests had broken up by the afternoon.
‘THERE’S NO MORE SECURITY’
The rally had been called for by the head of the Supreme Alawite Islamic Council, Ghazal Ghazal, on Monday. He urged Alawites to protest peacefully.
“We demand to live in security, to go to school safely without kidnapping. This was the only place we used to feel security. Now there’s no more security and we’re exposed to kidnapping and fear,” said Leen, who attended the protest but declined to give her last name out of security concerns.
Nearly 1,500 Alawites were killed by government-linked forces in March after Assad loyalists ambushed state security. Reuters reported that dozens of Alawite women were later kidnapped, though authorities deny they were abducted.
Syria‘s President Ahmed al-Sharaa, a former militant Islamist, has vowed to rule for all Syrians but the country’s nearly 14-year civil war and the bouts of violence over the last year have prompted fears of further instability.
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Zelenskiy Says Ukraine Ready to Move Forward With US-Backed Peace Plan
A rescuer walks next to a body of a resident killed by a Russian missile strike at a compound of the supermarket warehouse, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Kyiv, Nov. 25, 2025. Photo: Press service of the State Emergency Service of Ukraine/Handout via REUTERS
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday that Kyiv was ready to move forward with a US-backed peace deal, and that he was prepared to discuss its sensitive points with US President Donald Trump in talks he said should include European allies.
In a speech to the so-called coalition of the willing, a copy of which was seen by Reuters, Zelenskiy urged European leaders to hash out a framework for deploying a “reassurance force” to Ukraine and to continue supporting Kyiv for as long as Moscow shows no willingness to end its war.
Ukraine had signaled earlier in the day support for the framework of a peace deal with Russia but stressed that sensitive issues needed to be fixed at a meeting between Zelenskiy and Trump.
Kyiv’s message hinted that an intense diplomatic push by the Trump administration could be yielding some fruit but any optimism could be short-lived, especially as Russia stressed it would not let any deal stray too far from its own objectives.
US and Ukrainian negotiators held talks on the latest US-backed peace plan in Geneva on Sunday. US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll then met on Monday and Tuesday with Russian officials in Abu Dhabi, a spokesperson for Driscoll said.
US and Ukrainian officials have been trying to narrow the gaps between them over the plan to end Europe’s deadliest and most devastating conflict since World War II, with Ukraine wary of being strong-armed into accepting a deal largely on the Kremlin’s terms, including territorial concessions.
“Ukraine – after Geneva – supports the framework’s essence, and some of the most sensitive issues remain as points for the discussion between presidents,” a Ukrainian official said.
Zelenskiy could visit the United States in the next few days to finalize a deal with Trump, Kyiv’s national security chief Rustem Umerov said, though no such trip was confirmed from the US side.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on X that over the past week the US had made “tremendous progress towards a peace deal by bringing both Ukraine and Russia to the table.” She added: “There are a few delicate, but not insurmountable, details that must be sorted out and will require further talks between Ukraine, Russia, and the United States.”
Oil prices extended an earlier decline after reports of Ukraine potentially agreeing to a war-ending deal.
Underlining the high stakes for Ukraine, its capital Kyiv was hit by a barrage of missiles and hundreds of drones overnight in a Russian strike that killed at least seven people and again disrupted power and heating systems. Residents were sheltering underground wearing winter jackets, some in tents.
ZELENSKIY: WILL DISCUSS SENSITIVE ISSUES WITH TRUMP
US policy towards the war has zigzagged in recent months.
A hastily arranged summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska in August raised worries in Kyiv and European capitals that the Trump administration might accept many Russian demands, though the meeting ultimately resulted in more US pressure on Russia.
The 28-point plan that emerged last week caught many in the US government, Kyiv, and Europe alike off-guard and prompted fresh concerns that the Trump administration might be willing to push Ukraine to sign a peace deal heavily tilted toward Moscow.
The plan would require Kyiv to cede territory beyond the almost 20% of Ukraine that Russia has captured since its February 2022 full-scale invasion, as well as accept curbs on its military and bar it from ever joining NATO – conditions Kyiv has long rejected as tantamount to surrender.
The sudden push has raised the pressure on Ukraine and Zelenskiy, who is now at his most vulnerable since the start of the war after a corruption scandal saw two of his ministers dismissed, and as Russia makes battlefield gains.
Zelenskiy could struggle to get Ukrainians to swallow a deal viewed as selling out their interests.
He said on Monday the latest peace plan incorporated “correct” points after talks in Geneva. “The sensitive issues, the most delicate points, I will discuss with President Trump,” Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address.
Zelenskiy said the process of producing a final document would be difficult. Russia‘s unrelenting attacks on Ukraine have left many skeptical about how peace can be achieved soon.
“There was a very loud explosion, our windows were falling apart, we got dressed and ran out,” said Nadiia Horodko, a 39-year-old accountant, after a residential building was struck in Kyiv overnight.
“There was horror, everything was already burning here, and a woman was screaming from the eighth floor, ‘Save the child, the child is on fire!’”
MACRON WARNS AGAINST EUROPEAN CAPITULATION
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said an amended peace plan must reflect the “spirit and letter” of an understanding reached between Putin and Trump at their Alaska summit.
“If the spirit and letter of Anchorage is erased in terms of the key understandings we have established then, of course, it will be a fundamentally different situation [for Russia],” Lavrov warned.
A group of countries supporting Ukraine, which is known as the coalition of the willing and includes Britain and France, was also set to hold a virtual meeting on Tuesday.
“It’s an initiative that goes in the right direction: peace. However, there are aspects of that plan that deserve to be discussed, negotiated, improved,” French President Emmanuel Macron told RTL radio regarding the US-proposed plan. “We want peace, but we don’t want a peace that would be a capitulation.”
In a separate development, Romania scrambled fighter jets to track drones that breached its territory near the border with Ukraine early on Tuesday, and one was still advancing deeper into the NATO-member country, the defense ministry said.
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Hamas Attack Victims Sue Binance for Allegedly Allowing Payments to Terror Group
A logo on the Binance exhibition space at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 15, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Victims of Hamas‘s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel sued Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao, accusing them of facilitating millions of dollars in payments to the Islamist group and other US-designated terrorist organizations.
According to a complaint made public on Monday, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange laundered money for Hamas even after pleading guilty in November 2023 and paying a $4.32 billion criminal penalty for violating federal anti-money-laundering and sanctions laws.
The plaintiffs include 306 American victims of Hamas‘s attack, including relatives of people killed, injured or taken hostage, and subsequent attacks by various groups.
They accused Binance of knowingly enabling Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to move more than $1 billion through its platform, including more than $50 million after the Oct. 7 attack.
Zhao pleaded guilty to anti-money-laundering violations in connection with Binance‘s plea and served a four-month prison sentence. US President Donald Trump pardoned him on Oct. 23.
“Binance intentionally structured itself as a refuge for illicit activity,” the complaint said. “To this day, there is no indication that Binance has meaningfully altered its core business model.”
In a statement, Binance declined to discuss the lawsuit but said “we comply fully with internationally recognized sanctions laws.” A lawyer representing Zhao in related litigation declined to comment.
The lawsuit seeks compensatory and triple damages, among other remedies.
BIG TRANSACTIONS LINKED TO BRAZILIAN LIVESTOCK OPERATOR
According to the complaint, large sums of cryptocurrency went through accounts of people with no obvious financial means to explain them.
They allegedly included a Venezuelan woman who appeared to operate a Brazilian livestock-related company, Fazenda Amazonia, or Amazonia Farm in English.
Her account, opened in 2022 when she was 26, allegedly received more than $177 million in deposits, and more than $130 million in withdrawals were made, the complaint said.
“When a company chooses profit over even the most basic counterterrorism obligations, it must be held accountable – and it will be,” Lee Wolosky, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.
The complaint was filed in North Dakota federal court. It said at least two suspicious transactions went through online addresses in Kindred, North Dakota, which has about 1,000 people.
Binance and Zhao are separately defending against a lawsuit by other attack victims in Manhattan federal court. The lawsuit claims they provided a “clandestine” funding mechanism for Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad to raise money and transact illegal business for several years.
A judge rejected the defendants’ motion to dismiss that case in February.