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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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In new book, JD Vance says Charlie Kirk warned him about antisemitism on the right
Vice President JD Vance acknowledges a growing strain of anti-Israel sentiment on the American right that has at times slid into outright antisemitism, writing in his new memoir released on Tuesday.
In Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, Vance recounts a conversation with conservative activist Charlie Kirk months before he was fatally shot, in which they spoke about two trends Kirk was observing among young conservatives.
“The first was that they were very angry about Israeli influence in American politics,” Vance writes about the phone call in the summer of 2025. “The second was that some were going from legitimate disagreement with the Israeli government to antisemitism.”
According to Vance, Kirk told him that many younger conservatives believed the United States was allowing Israel too much sway over American foreign policy. Vance quotes Kirk as saying that for some, “that concern is turning to anger, and even Jew hatred.”
The passage offers a revealing glimpse into the debate that has intensified inside President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and the war in Gaza. While support for Israel remains strong among Republican voters, a growing faction of younger Republicans has become more skeptical of foreign intervention generally and increasingly critical of U.S. support for Israel. A recent Politico poll found that 32% of Trump voters below the age of 35 say the U.S. is too closely aligned with Israel’s government, and nearly half of the president’s voters ages 18 to 34 say there should be distance between the two countries.
Vance, who first gained prominence in 2016 with his best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, has often taken a complicated position in that conversation. A supporter of Israel’s right to defend itself, he has also repeatedly said that the U.S. should define its Middle East policy primarily through an “America First” lens.
During the 2024 presidential campaign and after he was elected vice president, Vance said that the interests of the U.S. are “not always identical.” In recent days, amid disagreements between the U.S. and Israel over a deal to end hostilities with Iran, Vance said in interviews with the media, “Even when we’ve been close partners, sometimes we have interests that are perfectly aligned and sometimes we have interests that are misaligned.”
Vance’s associations with right-wing influencers who have trafficked in antisemitism, and his reluctance to disavow them, have also made some American Jews uncomfortable.
On Tuesday, he is expected to appear on a program hosted by Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host who is among conservative figures, including Tucker Carson, Candace Owens, Joe Kent and Nick Fuentes, who accuse “Israel-first” advocates of pushing the United States into war with Iran. “Mark Levin wanted it, it’s his war, Ben Shapiro, Lindsey Graham, Miriam Adelson — that’s obvious,” she said in March. “They are the ones who’ve been pushing us into it.” Vance’s expected appearance drew criticism.
In the memoir, Vance writes that Kirk was working to prevent criticism of Israel from developing into bigotry. “He knew the situation was delicate and complicated, and he treated it with genuine care, appealing to the better angels in all of us,” Vance writes. “He did so in his conversations with the president and me, but also in the ways he engaged his massive following.”
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Trump may be making a classic error in seeking peace with Iran
An assumption has shaped Western thinking about Iran for decades: that the Islamic Republic has similar goals to those of the West, and can therefore be incentivized to integrate into a more stable regional order.
Vice President JD Vance gave that assumption its latest expression when he said a potential new peace agreement between Iran and the United States could “fundamentally transform the Middle East for the next 50 years” — if Iran complies with the deal.
Perhaps he’s right, and Iran is in fact committed, this time, to never again pursuing the creation of nuclear weapons. But the Islamic Republic’s own rhetoric provides serious reasons for skepticism on that front.
Since 1979, the regime has presented itself as the standard-bearer of a revolutionary project. It is not merely a government. It is the self-appointed guardian of a worldview.
That worldview is often expressed through the concept of muqawama, which translates roughly to “resistance.” The term refers to far more than military opposition. It describes a political, religious and civilizational struggle against what the regime views as Western domination, American influence, Israeli sovereignty, and the regional order that emerged during the 20th century.
Ideologies shape behavior. A regime organized around economic growth behaves one way. A regime organized around the concept of revolutionary struggle behaves differently.
Western powers too often forget this truth when it comes to Iran, assuming that its leaders seek prosperity, stability, security and international acceptance. We assume that economic incentives and diplomatic agreements will eventually outweigh ideological commitments.
It is important to distinguish here between the regime and the people it governs. Iran is home to an ancient civilization, a sophisticated culture, and millions of citizens whose aspirations often appear very different from those of their rulers. For nearly half a century, many Iranians have lived under a system they neither created nor freely chose. Waves of protests and dissent have repeatedly suggested that large numbers of Iranians seek a different future — one characterized less by revolutionary struggle and more by ordinary human aspirations like freedom, dignity and connection to the wider world.
Viewed through the lens of muqawama, Iran’s nuclear program, ballistic missile program, proxy armies and regional interventions cease to look like products of separate policies. They become parts of a coherent strategy, manifestations of the same underlying vision: the transformation of the existing regional order.
The obvious question, then, is whether that vision has changed. And if it hasn’t, what does Iranian compliance with this new deal actually mean?
After all, one can honor the terms of an agreement while remaining fully committed to objectives that lie beyond the agreement’s reach. Iran has done so plenty of times in the recent past.
In 2018, Israeli intelligence agents removed a vast archive of nuclear documents from a secret warehouse near Tehran. The archive contained detailed records of weapons-related research and planning, suggesting that the regime viewed this knowledge as valuable, worth preserving and potentially applicable in the future.
Over the years, inspectors evaluating Iran’s nuclear capabilities have repeatedly encountered inconsistencies between Iran’s declarations about its efforts and the evidence before them. Each episode, by itself, may be explainable. Taken together, they paint a picture of a regime that has consistently viewed transparency as something to be managed rather than embraced.
Fordow, the infamous nuclear enrichment facility buried beneath a mountain, was designed by people expecting confrontation. Facilities intended to withstand intensive military attacks — as Fordow has — reveal something about the assumptions of those who build them.
Western policymakers often view negotiations as a path toward resolution. Iran tends, in contrast, to treat them as a strategic opportunity. Every round of talks creates opportunities to reposition and advance. Every agreement creates new debates about interpretation and enforcement that the regime can turn to its advantage.
It may be less useful to think in terms of bad faith than in terms of incentives. The issue is understanding the ambitions of the regime as it understands them. And there are reasons to doubt whether U.S. negotiators hammering out the details of this agreement understand those ambitions correctly.
This raises grave concerns for Israel, which is not a party to the new ceasefire. The nuclear issue is primary, but the ballistic missile program and satellite armies of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis are all pressing problems for the Jewish state. A deal that fails to engage with all parts of that picture will leave Israel in danger.
The United States can afford strategic patience. It sits behind two oceans, far from Iran. Israel cannot. A nation smaller than New Jersey has little margin for catastrophic error. If American assumptions prove mistaken, American policy can be revised. If Israeli assumptions prove mistaken, the consequences are potentially fatal.
This is why many Israelis have expressed outrage at this ceasefire. They’re wondering: If the ideology remains intact; if the missile programs remain intact; if Hezbollah remains intact; if the regime’s revolutionary ambitions remain intact, what exactly has been resolved?
Near-term tension reduction has repeatedly served as a substitute for resolving the underlying threat from Iran’s radical regime. Sanctions relief following the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by then-President Barack Obama eased pressure on the regime while leaving its governing vision untouched. The underlying problem remained.
Muqawama is not merely resistance to particular policies. It is resistance as an organizing principle. Any agreement that ignores that reality risks confusing tactical restraint with strategic change.
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Trump-backed Oklahoma congressional candidate supports Israel — and says the Antichrist will be Jewish
(JTA) — A pro-Israel pastor who inveighs against “sharia law” and wants Jews to accept Jesus is the favored candidate in a crowded congressional primary in Oklahoma on Tuesday.
Jackson Lahmeyer, the founder of Pastors for Trump and a political activist from the Tulsa area, secured the president’s endorsement ahead of Tuesday’s primary for the state’s solidly Republican 1st District House seat. Other big GOP endorsements soon followed, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, helping to pull Lahmeyer away from the other nine candidates vying for the nomination.
Much of Lahmeyer’s national profile has been defined by his regular invocations of “sharia law,” traditional Muslim doctrine often used as a right-wing shock tactic. One of his campaign platforms is “Ensuring That Sharia Law Never Takes Root In Our Nation.”
On Sunday, Lahmeyer also responded to allegations published by the Daily Mail that he had cheated on his wife, writing in a post on X that “this matter was already dealt with privately between me and my wife, Kendra, through counsel and prayer with God and spiritual advisors.”
Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District is home to a thriving Jewish community — one that has recently urged Jews from Canada to take up residence — as well as multiple large Jewish organizations including Schusterman Family Philanthropies.
Multiple representatives of the Jewish Federation of Tulsa declined to comment on Lahmeyer’s candidacy. But it’s clear that if elected, he will bring to Congress some specific ideas about Jews.
“The Antichrist will be a political leader of Jewish descent,” he told a livestream of his church on Oct. 8, 2024, a day after the one-year anniversary of Hamas’ attack on Israel. “That is how the Jews will worship him.”
During his sermon, Lahmeyer based the claim on his reading of biblical prophecy, arguing that the Antichrist will “speak great blasphemy” and will “have no regard for the gods of his fathers.”
Lahmeyer’s preaching about the Jewish Antichrist has also sparked concern among some Jewish voters.
“Jackson, I am appalled at this post. I’m Jewish. I supported you[r] run for office at every turn. I have children and grandchildren. Antisemitism is at an all time high. I’m scared for them. This is abhorrent,” one X user wrote in response to a February 2023 post on X by Lahmeyer claiming the Antichrist will be “Jewish” and a “homosexual.”
Lahmeyer pushed back on the response, replying to the user that “This is not anti-Semitic AT ALL. The Christ is Jewish. Scripture indicates that the Antichrist will also be Jewish.”
Despite those apocalyptic beliefs, Lahmeyer has repeatedly framed support for Israel as a key tenet of his faith, reflecting a Christian Zionist worldview that sees Jewish return to Israel as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
“I stand with the Jewish people because God almighty stands with the Jewish people,” Lahmeyer said in an Oct. 9, 2025 post dismissing claims he had been paid by the Israeli government to post pro-Israel content. “So those of you who are out there saying I’m getting $7,000 a post, I wish that were true, but you’re an idiot and you’re wrong.”
Matthew Taylor, a scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, & Jewish Studies, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Lahmeyer’s statements about Jews and Israel reflect a typical strain of Christian Zionism.
“He’s pro-Israel in this very particular sense of he has a strong attachment to a theological conception of Israel,” Taylor said. “When it comes to questions about the Antichrist and whether the Antichrist is Jewish or not, that’s all pretty standard speculation within modern evangelicalism.”
Those views, once largely confined to Lahmeyer’s reach as a storefront pastor, have followed him into a larger political arena as he has transformed from a fringe activist into a political contender with presidential backing.
“It is my Great Honor to endorse MAGA Warrior, Jackson Lahmeyer, who is running to represent the fantastic people of Oklahoma’s 1st Congressional District, and has been with me from the very beginning of our Movement to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social Monday reaffirming his endorsement of Lahmeyer.
Trump praised Lahmeyer’s role in founding “Pastors for Trump,” which he launched in 2022 to organize evangelical pastors around getting Trump reelected. The same year, Lahmeyer lost his Republican primary bid to unseat Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, whom he called a “coward” for not backing Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Lahmeyer, who did not return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for an interview, is a member of the White House Faith Office and Trump’s National Faith Advisory Board.
He has been cultivating relationships with the Trumps for years. In addition to backing the president’s election claims, Lahmeyer has hosted the president’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr., as well as FBI Director Kash Patel at his church and on podcast episodes.
Lahmeyer’s rise coincides with a growing movement of conservative Christians and right-wing influencers who have been increasingly critical of Israel and the U.S.-Israel alliance.
During an event marking the second anniversary of Oct. 7 titled “The Case for Israel,” Lahmeyer addressed the growing prominence of anti-Israel figures on the Christian right, including Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens.
“Both Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, they’re Roman Catholics, so to them the church has replaced the Jewish people, the state of Israel, and that is why they can make these claims,” Lahmeyer said.
But Lahmeyer has stopped short of condemning Carlson’s rhetoric, despite criticism from Trump and evangelical members of his administration including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee.
“Some very influential leaders, all of whom I like — Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor Greene — have taken a very controversial stance in regards to the nation of Israel,” Lahmeyer told NPR in November.
Taylor said the fallout over Israel within the MAGA coalition between Christian antisemites, such as Carlson and Owens, and Christian philosemites, such as Huckabee, placed Lahmeyer in a precarious position as he seeks office.
White evangelicals show widespread support for Israel, with 72% reporting a positive opinion of the Jewish state according to an April 2025 poll by the Pew Research Center, but among Republicans under 50, positive sentiments about Israel have dropped in recent years, falling from 63% reporting a positive view in 2022 to 48% in 2025.
“A lot of young evangelicals are moving away from Zionism, and becoming less sympathetic with the state of Israel, both theologically and just in terms of world events, and the war in Gaza,” Taylor said. “So I think it’s a very complicated place that he’s in, trying to kind of run as a politician in this moment where MAGA is fracturing over some of the things he could be very publicly identified with.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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