Uncategorized
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!’”
—
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.
Uncategorized
Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
The post Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
‘Dirty Dancing’ be damned. A new musical shows another side of the Borscht Belt
When the Woodstock Music and Art Fair defined a generation, Pamela Gray was on the outside looking in — literally.
She was 13 and summering at Dr. Locker’s Bungalow Colony in Mountaindale, New York. She remembers sitting by the pool with her little brother while the moms and bubbies played mahjong and glimpsing some long hair or fringe through the chainlink: hippies headed to Yasgur’s Farm.
“Looking back now, it’s like I literally was on the wrong side of history,” Gray said.
That moment was stamped in her memory for years, along with her attachment to the bungalow colony, where she got her first taste of nature away from the Flatlands in Brooklyn. Since around the time Dirty Dancing came out in 1987, she had struggled to explain to people the working-class version of the Borscht Belt she grew up with, a far cry from the resorts favored by dentists and lawyers.
In the early 1990s, Gray was in film school at UCLA and interning in the writers room on Star Trek: The Next Generation when she endeavored to capture the disappeared world of her youth in a screenplay. She recalled thinking, “I want to be the first person to set a movie in a bungalow colony.’”
I met Gray, a high school friend of my father’s, at a cafe steps away from where her Off-Broadway musical A Walk on the Moon, based on her 1999 film, is in rehearsals. She wore a cat-themed Catskills t-shirt and a Nova Festival dog tag.
She told me she’d seen a documentary about the colonies — narrated by an Attenbourighian Brit, with the same nature doc detachment — and glimpsed one in South Fallsberg in Enemies: A Love Story, but knew she wanted a more substantial tribute.
The script, with a working title of The Blouse Man, became A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn and starring Diane Lane as frustrated young housewife Pearl Kantrowitz, Liev Schreiber as her TV repairman husband, Viggo Mortenson as Pearl’s goyische hippie lover and a 15-year-old Anna Paquin as Pearl’s teenage daughter. It features a pivotal Woodstock sequence, and a glimpse of naked hippies trespassing at the bungalow’s lake.
Gray said there was resistance to the material when the script was being shopped around. She was told films centering women lost money. Some asked if it had to be Jews in the Catskills in the 1960s. For the musical, she’s amped up some of the Jewishness both in casting and content.
Directed by Sheryl Kaller and starring Talia Suskaauer and Max Chernin, the show has been in the works for over a decade, and had a previous run with a different score at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick. It’s set to open in a climate Gray thinks is in need of Jewish stories. Not a Holocaust story, not a story of antisemitism (though some of that has been added) but one about a family, and, importantly, one without much money.
Gray was first approached to sell the rights to her film for a musical adaptation in the 2010s. A librettist and songwriter prepared a presentation to convince her, but she decided she wanted to take the project on herself. She had, in a sense, written musicals before.
Technically, Gray, whose other films include Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep in a singular non-horror outing by director Wes Craven and the legal drama Conviction (also with Goldwyn and starring Hilary Swank), began her life in the theater in middle school.
She wrote The Girl from A.C.N.E. — a parody of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. — for her hygiene class in sixth grade and later, while editor of the yearbook at James Madison High School, penned A Log Day’s Journey into Night an evident sendup of Eugene O’Neill.
Her first brush with an audience hearing her words came when she worked on Sing!, a student-run musical competition for outer borough high schools, which was a stealth incubator of talents like Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka and, at James Madison, where Gray and my dad are alumni, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.
Gray and my dad, Mark a retired optometrist who also writes screenplays, wrote parody lyrics, and probably fought a fair bit as script co-chairs. Gray remembers one year’s production, themed around clothing throughout history, had her kitted out in a French Revolutionary outfit and smacking my dad in the face while he was dressed like Napoleon.
Sing!, had a Borscht Belt Bungalow quality to it. When director Michael Greif was discussing the musical with Gray several years ago, they bonded over Sing!, which he directed at Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway.
Music was central to Gray’s film, with needledrops from the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company’s cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” The ending has Pearl and her husband, Marty (Schreiber), transition from Dean Martin’s version of “When You’re Smiling” to trying their best to groove to Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” (Gray said it was supposed to be “Light My Fire,” but Ray Manzarek wanted too much money.)
The musical’s new score by AnnMarie Milazzo, a vocal designer and arranger for shows like Spring Awakening and Next to Normal, captures the trapped-in-amber quality of the bungalows, with inspiration from the 1950s in the scenes with adults and, in a sequence with Pearl’s teenage daughter Alison and her summertime beau, a protest song.
“We’re living in a time right now where musicians and music artists are speaking out and talking about politics and talking about women’s rights and talking about antisemitism,” said Kaller, the director, whose parents took her to Catskills hotels as part of their temple bowling league. The show, she says, is “reminding audiences that in 1969, we were doing the same thing.”
A love letter to her parents’ generation and her own coming of age, Gray says the project may be even more personal in this iteration. Scenic and video designer Tal Yarden has incorporated Gray’s home movies into his projections. Also new to the musical is a moment when Alison learns the history of the Catskills, where Jews weren’t always welcome.
Gray said the addition came with “Trump 2,” a reference to his second term, that could also serve as an allusion to the film’s 1999 premiere, where the future president was in attendance.
“I still remembered the exact moment,” Gray said. She was on the aisle, and across from her was my father, their friend Karen and, next to Karen, Donald Trump and a blonde woman who was his date.
“The first thing he did was he ripped all the reserved signs off,” Gray recalled. “When your dad went to go to the bathroom, Trump put his leg up, and he had to climb over him. Is that your dad’s story?”
Not exactly. My dad now maintains that he was going to the lobby to tell Gray’s parents their seats were taken. It’s only when I said this that Gray remembers who the seats were reserved for. She then called Trump a certain Yiddish epithet, meaning pig.
(The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Trump’s presence or actions at the premiere, his enjoyment of the film or any plans to see the musical.)
Though a presidential encore is unlikely, members from Gray’s extended shtetl of Brooklyn are coming, along with a group of children who met at a bungalow colony for Holocaust survivors. (In other Jewish geography, the show’s casting director, Merri Sugarman, has known Kaller since they were around 2 — her parents were also in the bowling league.)
When Gray first wrote a treatment for the musical version of her film, she couldn’t help thinking of the first musical she ever saw: Fiddler on the Roof. It too had a forgotten Jewish milieu, with a self-contained community, an aura of nostalgia and an outside world pressing for change.
“It had to have influenced me, and I’m proud of that influence,” Gray said.
At this point I told her when my father and I saw the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, Charles Kushner, Trump’s mechutan, sat in front of us. What are the odds?
The post ‘Dirty Dancing’ be damned. A new musical shows another side of the Borscht Belt appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
When a Jewish language is lost, we lose more than just words
Always Carry Salt
By Samantha Ellis
Pegasus Books, 288 pages, $29
This charming and important memoir starts with two mothers in a cold London playground talking about where to send their young children to school. One mother says she would like her son to go to a French nursery so he could grow up with two languages, just like her. But then this playground moment takes a surprising turn.
“Why not send him to a nursery in your language?” one mother asks.
“I can’t,” author Samantha Ellis responds. “My language is dead.”
Ellis grew up speaking Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. Her mother tongue isn’t exactly dead, but it is dying, like many Jewish languages that are not Hebrew or Yiddish, and like many of the beautiful Jewish languages spoken by Jews of the Arab world. The Jewish community in Iraq is one of the world’s oldest, dating back to the sixth century B.C.E., when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judea and sent most of the population there into exile in Babylonia. In 1939, Baghdad was at least one-third Jewish. As of Passover 2021, there were reportedly just four elderly Jews left in Iraq.
“Ghosts walk the pages of almost every Iraqi Jewish book I have read,” Ellis writes.
Always Carry Salt is about language, food, family, and above all, a way of being. Ellis, whose other books include How to Be a Heroine and Take Courage, as well as plays like How to Date a Feminist, struggles with the fact that she is not wholly bilingual. She herself is part of why her language is dying. But then, after the birth of her son, she wants to pass Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic, and all the history and recipes it carries, onto him, and eventually, to us.
Food as a Way Into a Culture
I loved reading the many Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic idioms about the heart, like ekel kallsi, or “he ate my heart.”
Ellis often reserves the starring role for words related to food. When she wants to tell us that everything feels upside down or inside out, she says we are living eeyun al balangan, “in the days of the aubergines.”
While trying to describe a dish Iraqi Jews eat, she turns to etymology and history, and sometimes to literature. Before offering her recipe for makhboose, or date cookies, she expounds upon The Epic of Gilgamesh in which bread is said to make the wild man, Enkidu, human. She then goes on to discuss a rolling pin that can imprint your dough with a Cuneiform passage from Gilgamesh.
As you might guess, this book is not linear; it has its own rhythm and its own way of presenting a story as Ellis investigates complicated subjects like why some languages are dying, the deep roots of contemporary antisemitism, and the lasting effects of the Farhud — the massacre of Jews in Baghdad in 1941.
“Farhud” means “the breakdown of order.” It was once called a “pogrom,” but Ellis quotes her grandmother’s cousin, historian Sylvia Haim, who once asked, “Why use the Russian word, pogrom, when we have a perfectly good word of our own?”
By the time Ellis asks her grandmother, who lived through the Farhud at age 11, to describe the massacre in 1941— during which “for thirty days, Baghdad’s Jews stayed at home, terrified, listening to Rashid Ali and the mufti broadcast antisemitism. Swastikas and violence filled the streets,” permanently transforming Iraqi Jews’ sense of safety after thousands of years there— readers understand it’s not just about the loss of physical lives but also about the beginning of the diffusion of a community and an entire culture.
Ellis is the child of a father whose family fled shortly after the Farhud, when around 180 Jews were murdered, and many Jewish women were raped, along with thousands injured, and a mother whose family tried desperately to stay in Iraq, thinking it would get better. And so just in the lives of her parents, she is able to offer an important window into how Iraqi Jews were treated after the Farhud, and then, after the establishment of the State of Israel.
She explains that in the early decades of the 20th century, Zionism was seen as an Ashkenazi priority. But eventually, as various harrowing episodes make clear, it became increasingly dangerous to be Jewish in Iraq. According to a law passed in March 1950, Jews could leave, but they had to renounce their Iraqi citizenship, becoming stateless on their exit.
Then came the financial devastation. In March 1951, “when the denaturalization law was about to expire and 125,000 Jews had registered to leave, the Iraqi government met in secret and passed another law: they would seize property, money and assets from all 125,000 Jews, as well as any Jews who had already left Iraq,” Ellis writes. “The law came into force overnight, leaving many Iraqi Jews destitute and starving, relying on charity as they waited for the planes to come.” Only a few thousand Jews stayed behind in Iraq, including Ellis’s mother’s family.
While it has always been a criminal offense in Iraq to have any connection with Israel, as of 2021, having any association with Israel is punishable by death. This means it is deeply dangerous for Ellis and other Iraqi Jews to visit Iraq; she cannot even go on a heritage tour.
But despite all this history, or perhaps, because of it, Ellis is trying to hold onto words and ways of framing the world. She is also racing against time. She knows that what makes a language “endangered” is when mothers don’t teach it to children. She knows that the Jews who grew up in Baghdad are dying out. And while trying to pass along Judeo-Iraqi-Arabic to her own British-Iraqi son, she manages to pass along the story of a community to the world.
The post When a Jewish language is lost, we lose more than just words appeared first on The Forward.
