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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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Stop Letting Israel’s Enemies Write the Dictionary
The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
When people chant “From the river to the sea,” they pair it with familiar phrases: “Palestinian” land, “occupied Palestinian territories,” “indigenous Palestinians,” and “settler-colonial Jews.”
Most people argue about the slogans and maps. Far fewer ask a prior question: Who wrote the dictionary that makes those slogans sound plausible?
For decades, Israel’s enemies have understood something many Jews and Israel-supporters have missed: if you control the language, you control the story. Define the key terms and you can turn an ancient indigenous people into supposed foreign invaders and recast repeated wars of annihilation against Israel as “anti-colonial resistance.”
To say that “Palestinian” is a political brand is not to deny that there are real Arabic-speaking people who today live under that name. The question is how this identity was framed and to what end.
During the latter half of the 20th century, “Palestinian” was carefully positioned as the indigenous victim of Zionist “intruders,” even though the Jewish people’s presence in the Land of Israel predates Islam, Arab nationalism, and the modern state system by millennia.
For centuries, under various empires, Jews and Arabs lived in the broader region that Europeans later (and briefly) called “Palestine.”
There was no sovereign “Palestinian” state and no distinct “Palestinian” nationality in the modern sense. Those constructs were shaped in the mid-20th century as part of a strategy to turn repeated Arab attempts to destroy the Jewish State into a moral story of dispossession.
“Palestinian” was not simply discovered; it was branded, a label that let Arab leaders and their allies invert reality: the side that tried, again and again, to wipe out the Jews of Israel would now be cast as the timeless victim of “foreign” Jews who supposedly have no home there at all.
How “occupied Palestinian territories” rewrites history
The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” flows off the tongue so easily that people rarely ask what it means.
Before 1967, Judea and Samaria were annexed by Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian control. Neither Arab state created a sovereign “Palestinian” entity there.
Before that, the area was “owned” by the British Mandate, and before that, the Ottoman Empire. There has never been an independent “Palestinian” state whose recognized sovereign territory Israel is supposedly occupying.
Yet by repeating “occupied Palestinian territories,” these activists import a package deal: that there once was a “Palestinian” state; that the land in question is inherently and exclusively “Palestinian,” despite its deep Jewish history; and that Israel’s presence there is automatically illegal, regardless of how it came about or what the real legal debates are.
The phrase “occupied Palestinian territories” is not neutral; it is a weapon. It erases Jewish indigeneity to places whose Hebrew names — Judea and Samaria — tell their own story. It suggests that Jews crossing an invisible line on the western bank of the Jordan River are “settlers,” while Arabs are always “natives,” no matter when their families arrived. On campus and in much of the media, this vocabulary is treated as settled fact. But that’s not truth — it’s narrative.
From the seminar room to the street
Weaponized language does not stay confined to UN resolutions or academic journals. It shapes how ordinary people think and feel. When a student hears, year after year, that Israel is a “settler-colonial” project oppressing “indigenous Palestinians,” he or she is being given a moral script: Jews are the guilty party; Arab violence is an understandable reaction to “occupation”; and terrorism against Jews is justified “resistance.”
So what can be done? We cannot force hostile actors to abandon terms that serve their agenda. But we can stop doing their work for them.
First, we must recognize that words like “Palestinian,” “occupation,” and “settler-colonialism” are not neutral. They come packaged with stories about history, power, and morality. If those stories are false or one-sided, we have a responsibility to say so.
Second, we should speak accurately about the land itself. Instead of reflexively saying “West Bank,” we can talk about Judea and Samaria, or at least about disputed territories captured in a defensive war, rather than “occupied Palestinian territories.” Rather than treating “Palestinian” as a synonym for indigeneity, we can speak of Arab residents of Judea and Samaria and Arab Israelis, alongside Jewish communities with deep roots there. Third, we should unapologetically affirm Jewish indigeneity. Jews are not recent “European imports” into the Middle East. Our ancestral language, scriptures, and rituals are woven into the geography of Israel itself. The burden of proof should not rest on Jews to justify their presence in Jerusalem, Hebron, or Shiloh.
Finally, communal leaders, journalists, and educators must become more intentional about the language they use. It is not pedantic to insist on accurate terminology. It is strategic.
If we care about truth — and about the safety and legitimacy of the Jewish people — we cannot afford to keep speaking in our adversaries’ vocabulary. In every generation, Jews have had to push back against efforts to write us out of our own story. Today, that effort happens with hashtags, slogans, and selective “human rights” language, as much as with bullets and rockets.
We do not have to accept a dictionary written by those who want to annihilate us. We can tell the truth plainly: Jews are indigenous to the Land of Israel, and we will not surrender that reality to anyone’s branding campaign — no matter how sophisticated their propaganda might be.
David E. Firester, Ph.D., is the Founder and CEO of TRAC Intelligence, LLC, and the author of Failure to Adapt: How Strategic Blindness Undermines Intelligence, Warfare, and Perception (2025).
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The Jewish ‘Bubble’ — and Why It Still Matters for Our Future
Muhlenberg College students leaving for a Birthright Israel trip.
Photo: Facebook via Hillel: Taglit-Birthright Israel.
One of the most revealing questions you can ask a Jewish college student today is not what they think about Israel or how they view campus politics. It is whether they ever lived inside a real Jewish world before arriving at school.
Dan Senor‘s three touchstones — Jewish day school, Jewish summer camp, and a meaningful trip to Israel — turn out to be less about nostalgia than about survival. As antisemitism continues to erupt across America’s elite campuses, the students who remain confident, anchored, and unafraid are almost always those who experienced these “Jewish bubbles” long before anyone tried to tell them what being Jewish should mean.
I saw this long before I became a professor embedded in the world of higher education.
In my essay “High School Should Be Upsetting,” I wrote about attending Akiba Hebrew Academy — a pluralistic Jewish day school outside of Philadelphia — where nothing was uniform and everything required thinking. Some classmates kept kosher; others grabbed pizza and burgers freely. Some welcomed Shabbat with reverence; others barely thought about it. These were not superficial differences. They forced us into the daily work of argument, interpretation, and meaning-making. We learned that Jewish identity can withstand disagreement — that disagreement is itself a generative part of Jewish life. That formation did not insulate me from the world. It prepared me for it.
It also gave me something deeper. As I argued recently in “The Lessons We Were Taught and the Ones Being Forgotten,” Jewish classrooms once fused the study of prophets with photographs of Auschwitz, maps of Israel, and the trembling voices of survivors.
We learned early that justice without memory collapses into performance, that Jewish survival is not just historical but moral, and that being a Jew means carrying responsibility, not merely sentiment. These lessons were not designed to make us comfortable. They were designed to make us serious. That seriousness — an identity rooted in obligation rather than performance — is exactly what steadies young Jews today when campus climates turn hostile or morally confused.
Senor’s intuition about the “bubble” is more than anecdotal. It is empirically true. Jewish day school graduates consistently exhibit higher levels of Jewish literacy, deeper ritual practice, and stronger communal commitment, according to decades of Avi Chai Foundation research.
Jewish summer camps extend that formation into adolescence; the Foundation for Jewish Camp has repeatedly shown that alumni maintain Jewish friendships at dramatically higher rates and build Jewish homes of their own with greater confidence and intention. These friendships become ballast — the quiet, steadying presence of peers who share memory and meaning.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks captured the heart of this when he wrote, “Moses and Aaron epitomize the two great roles in Jewish continuity — horim and morim — parents and teachers. A parent hands on the Jewish heritage to their children; a teacher does likewise to their disciples.” That investment — of presence, attention, and seriousness — is exactly what day schools, camps, youth groups, and Israel programs offer when they are at their best. They do not simply transmit heritage; they cultivate character. They shape conscience. They give young Jews a framework sturdy enough to meet the world without losing themselves.
Israel trips add something irreplaceable: narrative consciousness. Research on Birthright and other immersive Israel programs shows that participants return with a firmer sense of peoplehood, greater historical awareness, and a deeper understanding that being Jewish is a source of responsibility rather than defensiveness. Students who have walked the streets of Jerusalem or listened to the wind on the Golan Heights are not easily undone by slogans or distortions. They have seen complexity — and beauty — for themselves.
These experiences form a pipeline. Day schools cultivate literacy. Camps cultivate community. Israel cultivates memory. Together, they produce adults who are not bewildered by the demands of identity but strengthened by them. When students have studied texts, lived in Jewish community, and seen Jewish history with their own eyes, they carry an inner architecture that does not collapse when external pressure rises.
That was the theme running through the 2025 Tikvah Jewish Leadership Conference, where Senor spoke to a standing-room crowd. Again and again, speakers returned to the same truth: Jewish continuity will not be secured through slogans or reactive outrage. It will be secured through communities and institutions that form Jews — thickly, relationally, substantively. The future belongs to those who build Jewish life with depth, not performance.
And yet we find ourselves in a moment when the very infrastructure that sustains Jewish identity is thinning. Too many families treat day school as a luxury, camp as optional, Israel trips as politically fraught, and synagogue life as intermittent. Young Jews arrive on campus with warm feelings but thin foundations — a Judaism made of nostalgia rather than knowledge. Then the pressure comes, from peers and professors alike, and the identity that once felt easy suddenly feels fragile.
The greatest threat to young Jews today is not a lack of passion. It is a lack of preparation. Jewish identity cannot be episodic. It cannot survive on aesthetic appreciation or occasional observance. It flourishes when it is lived — daily, joyfully, rigorously, and in the company of others. If we want Jewish students to stand tall under pressure, then we must give them foundations deep enough to bear the weight.
Senor’s questions are diagnostic. They reveal whether a young Jew has ever inhabited a Jewish world strong enough to carry them through a hostile one. They show whether a student possesses not just ancestry but anchoring, not just identity but backbone.
The “bubble” is not a retreat from reality. It is preparation for reality. It is where young Jews learn who they are before others attempt to define them. And at a moment when antisemitism is rising, institutions are wobbling, and confusion is spreading, we should not apologize for strengthening these bubbles. We should expand them — boldly.
If we want confident, resilient, morally serious Jewish adults, we must give them confident, resilient, morally serious Jewish childhoods. Identity does not appear out of thin air. It is formed — deliberately, lovingly, and over time.
The bubble, it turns out, is not the weakness our critics imagine.
It is the most important thing we still know how to build.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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France Claims Palestinian Authority Wants Peace — Here Is Proof It Continues to Support Terrorism
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
Ever since French President Emmanuel Macron recognized a Palestinian state, claiming that Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas “condemns terrorism,” supports “demilitarization,” and shows a “genuine willingness to move forward,” the PA’s official and controlled media outlets continue to constantly glorify terrorists, praise violence, and present “armed struggle,” i.e., terrorism, as the core of Palestinian identity.
Nothing in the PA’s messaging has changed since France supported a Palestinian state. In fact, the months following Macron’s declaration show the exact opposite.
One of the clearest examples came when official PA TV aired a glowing tribute to poet and Fatah member Salah Al-Din Al-Husseini, the writer of one of the Palestinians’ many iconic terror-promotion songs, My Weapon Has Emerged From My Wounds.
The song, which Palestinian Media Watch has documented being broadcast hundreds of times on PA TV and Fatah’s Awdah TV, is a musical celebration of the gun, bloodshed, and “Martyrdom.”
In the new PA TV report, the song was played over archival footage of weapons training while the narrator proudly highlighted its message.
The lyrics openly endorse the ideology of permanent armed struggle and blood sacrifice, followed by Al-Husseini himself reciting another poem praising the “blood of the Martyr” as “music” and a force that “shakes the enemies”:
From my wounds, my weapon has emerged
Oh, our revolution, my weapon has emerged
There is no force in the world that can remove the weapon from my hand
There is no force in the world that can remove the weapon from my hand
My weapon has emerged
My weapon has emerged
He who offers his blood does not care if his blood flows upon the ground
As the weapon of the revolution is in my hand, so my presence will be forced [upon Israel]
My weapon has emerged
My weapon has emerged
Poet Salah Al-Din Al-Husseini: “The blood of the Martyr — O my song — shines above the peaks, the blood of the Martyr is music, the sacrifice shakes the enemies.”
[Official PA TV, The Story of a Homeland, Nov. 23, 2025]
In addition, senior PA and Fatah leaders, such as Jibril Rajoub and Laila Ghannam, have continued holding mass rallies devoted entirely to honoring convicted terrorist murderers.
These rallies are shown on official PA TV, and the terrorist prisoners are called “national icons,” “a source of pride and glory for all our people,” and authors of “an epic of heroism.”
The PA reporters frame these terrorists as “important leaders” under Israeli “aggression,” further presenting the murderers as victims and heroes simultaneously, which is a classic component of PA terror promotion.
Official PA TV newsreader: “In response to the call of the Fatah Movement… residents and family members of prisoners [i.e. terrorists] participated in several districts in rallies to express support and solidarity with the prisoners… and the prisoner leaders inside the occupation’s prisons, foremost among them leader Marwan Barghouti. In El-Bireh a popular procession took place, attended by several members of the Fatah Central Committee and the [Fatah] Revolutionary Council.”
Fatah Central Committee Secretary Jibril Rajoub: “[This is a rally of support] for the prisoners and their family members, as these people are national icons deeply rooted in the consciousness of all the Palestinians.”
Visual:
The poster shows terrorist prisoner Marwan Barghouti making a “V” for “victory.”
Text on poster: “Freedom for heroic prisoner Marwan Barghouti”
Official PA TV reporter: “Participants in this support rally raised banners and pictures of leader symbol Barghouti…z’
Ramallah and El-Bireh District Governor Laila Ghannam: “Marwan is the symbol of the Palestinian prisoner… The Palestinian people supports the prisoners who are a source of pride and glory for all our people …”
Official PA TV reporter: “The occupation regime is taking aggressive steps against the prisoners and their important leaders, who are writing an epic of heroism.” [emphasis added]
Visual:
The posters feature terrorist prisoner Walid Daqqa, who murdered one person and terrorist prisoner Jum’a Adam, who murdered five.
Text on poster on left: “The Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: Freedom for prisoner Walid Nimr Daqqa”
Text on poster on right: “Palestinian Prisoners’ Club: Freedom for prisoner Jum’a Ibrahim Adam”
[Official PA TV News, Aug. 20, 2025]
Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida praised a Jenin rally organized by Fatah, the PLO factions, the Prisoners’ Club, and the Commission of Prisoners’ Affairs — all PA-funded or PA-aligned bodies — and celebrated the terrorist prisoners by calling them “knights” who are “awaiting the breaking of their chains”:
At the entrance to the old market of Jenin … the rally was colored with images of the symbols of the prisoners’ movement, foremost among them Fatah Central Committee member Marwan Barghouti, Fatah Secretary in Jenin Ata Abu Rmeileh, journalist Ali Al-Samoudi, and dozens of knights awaiting the breaking of their chains.
[Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 1, 2025]
Macron and other Western leaders claimed Abbas condemns terrorism.
The ongoing glorification of terrorist murderers as heroes, icons, symbols, “knights,” and “leaders,” combined with PA TV’s public celebration of armed struggle and “Martyrdom,” shows clearly that the PA has no interest in rejecting terror and has implemented no reforms whatsoever regarding its terror promotion. It is the same terror ideology that the PA has promoted for decades.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.