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Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it.
NEW YORK (JTA) — Sidney Brustein, Jewish Hamlet?
Anne Kauffman thinks so. She made the comparison in a phone interview about the play she’s directing — a buzzy production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” that opened on Monday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music starring Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan.
“One artistic director who was thinking of doing this [play] was like, ‘You know, it’s not like he’s Hamlet, but…’ And I thought, well, no, actually I think he is like Hamlet!” she said.
She added another take: “I feel like he’s Cary Grant meets Zero Mostel.”
Hansberry saw just two of her works produced on Broadway before her death from cancer at 34 in January 1965. Her first, “A Raisin in the Sun,” which follows a Black family dealing with housing discrimination in Chicago, is widely considered one of the most significant plays of the 20th century. The other, “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” ran for a few months in the fall of 1964 until Hansberry’s death and has only been revived a handful of times since, all outside of New York.
Now, the star power of Isaac and Brosnahan is driving renewed interest in the play, which deals with weighty questions about political activism, self-fulfillment in a capitalist world, and racial and ethnic identity — including mid-century Jewish American identity.
The Brustein character, as Kauffman alluded to, is many things. A resident of Greenwich Village deeply embedded in that historic neighborhood’s 1960s activist and artistic circles, he is somewhat of a creative renaissance man. At the start of the play, his club of sorts (“it was not a nightclub” is a running joke) called “Walden Pond” has just shuttered and he has taken over an alternative newspaper. As the script reads, Brustein is an intellectual “in the truest sense of the word” but “does not wear glasses” — the latter description being a possible jab at his macho tendencies. Formerly an ardent leftist activist, he is now weary of the worth of activism and a bit of a nihilist. He’s in his late 30s and is a musician who often picks up a banjo.
Brustein is also a secular Jew, a fact that he telegraphs at certain key emotional and comedic moments. Others, from friends to his casually antisemitic sister-in-law, frequently reference his identity, too.
At the end of the play’s first half, for example, Brustein brings up the heroes of the Hanukkah story in talking about his existential angst — and his stomach ulcer. He has become belligerent to his wife Iris and to a local politician who wants Brustein’s paper’s endorsement.
“How does one confront the thousand nameless faceless vapors that are the evil of our time? Can a sword pierce it?” Sidney says. “One does not smite evil anymore: one holds one’s gut, thus — and takes a pill. Oh, but to take up the sword of the Maccabees again!”
Hansberry’s decision to center a white Jewish character surprised critics and fans alike in 1964 because many of them expected her to follow “A Raisin in the Sun” with further exploration of issues facing Black Americans, said Joi Gresham, the director of the Lorraine Hansberry Literary Trust.
“The major attack, both critically and on a popular basis, in regards to the play and to its central character was that Lorraine was out of her lane,” Gresham said. “That not only did she not know what she’s talking about, but that she had the nerve to even examine that subject matter.”
Hansberry’s closest collaborator was her former husband Robert Nemiroff, a Jewish New Yorker whom she had divorced in 1962 but maintained an artistic partnership with. Nemiroff was a bit Brustein-like in his pursuits: he edited books, produced and promoted Hansberry’s work, and even wrote songs (one of which made the couple enough money to allow Hansberry to focus on writing “A Raisin in the Sun”). But Gresham — who is Nemiroff’s stepdaughter through his second marriage, to professor Jewell Handy Gresham-Nemiroff — emphasized that his personality was nothing like Brustein’s. While Brustein is brash and mean to Iris, Nemiroff was undyingly supportive of Hansberry and her work, said Gresham, who lived with him and her mother at Nemiroff’s Croton-on-Hudson home — the one he had formerly shared for a time with Hansberry — from age 10 onward.
Instead, Gresham argued, the Brustein character was the result of Hansberry’s deep engagement with Jewish intellectual thought, in part influenced by her relationship with Nemiroff. The pair met at a protest and would bond over their passion for fighting for social justice, which included combating antisemitism. The night before their wedding, they protested the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and they would remain highly involved in the wave of activism that blossomed into the Black-Jewish civil rights alliance.
“Bob and Lorraine met and built a life together at a place where there was a very strong Black-Jewish nexus. There was a very strong interplay and interaction,” Gresham said. “I think Lorraine was very influenced by Bob’s family, the Nemiroffs, who were very radical in their politics. And so there was a way in which she was introduced to the base of Jewish intellectualism and Jewish progressive politics, that she took to heart and she was very passionate about.”
Robert Nemiroff and Lorraine Hansberry were married from 1953-62. They are shown here in 1959. (Ben Martin/Getty Images)
Hansberry didn’t hesitate to criticize Jewish writers who said controversial things about Black Americans, either. When Norman Podhoretz wrote “My Negro Problem — And Ours,” an explosive 1963 article in Commentary magazine now widely seen as racist, Hansberry responded with a scathing rebuke. She also sparred with Norman Mailer, who once wrote an essay titled “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”
Gresham said Brustein’s nihilism represents what Hansberry saw in a range of Jewish and non-Jewish white writers, whom she hoped could be kickstarted back into activism. But Hansberry also nodded to the reasons why someone like Brustein could feel defeated in the early 1960s, a decade and a half after World War II.
“You mean diddle around with the little things since we can’t do anything about the big ones? Forget about the Holocaust and worry about — reforms in the traffic court or something?” Brustein says at one point in the play to a local politician running as a reformer.
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, a Jewish scholar of literature who has written on Hansberry, said the resulting Brustein character is a very accurate depiction of a secular Jew at the time — both keenly attuned to prejudice in society and also lacking some understanding of the experience of being Black.
“I was just intoxicated that Hansberry could conjure that world, both so affectionately, but also so clear-sidedly that it seems like she can see the limitations of all of the characters’ perspectives,” he said. “But she also represents them with sympathy and humor.”
Kauffman, who also helmed a revival of the play in Chicago in 2016, is impressed with how “fully fledged” the Brustein character is.
“Who are the cultural icons who have sort of articulated the Jew in our culture in the last 50 years or 60 years, you know?” she said. “Brustein is not a caricature of a Woody Allen character, he’s not even ‘Curb your Enthusiasm’ or a Jerry Seinfeld character. He’s a fully drawn character.”
Isaac, who is of mainly Guatemalan and Cuban heritage, has played Jewish characters before, including a formerly Orthodox man in an Israeli director’s remake of the classic film “Scenes From a Marriage.” In the lead-up to this play, he has largely avoided getting caught in headlines focused on the “Jewface” debate, over whether non-Jewish actors should be allowed to play Jewish characters on stage and screen.
But when asked about the responsibility of playing a Jewish character in a New York Times interview, Isaac referenced the fact that he has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side.
“We could play that game: How Jewish are you?” he said to interviewer Alexis Soloski, who is Jewish. “It is part of my family, part of my life. I feel the responsibility to not feel like a phony. That’s the responsibility, to feel like I can say these things, do these things and feel like I’m doing it honestly and truthfully.”
When Kauffman directed a version of the play at the Goodman Theater in Chicago in 2016, her lead actor had “not a single drop of Jewish heritage…in his blood,” and she said she had to convey “what anger looks like” coming from a Jewish perspective. Working with Isaac has been different — instead of starting at a base of no knowledge, she has been pushing for more of an Ashkenazi sensibility than a Sephardic one.
“I believe that his heritage leans, I’m guessing, more towards Sephardic. And mine is pure Ashkenazi,” she said. “We sort of joke: ‘[The part] is a little bit more Ashkenazi than that, you know what I mean?’ Like, ‘the violence is actually turned towards yourself!’”
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The post Lorraine Hansberry’s second play had a white Jewish protagonist. Oscar Isaac and Rachel Brosnahan are reviving it. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Democrats to weigh resolution condemning AIPAC, fueling concerns about ‘undercurrent of antisemitism’
(JTA) — The Democratic National Committee is set to consider a resolution at a meeting next week that “condemns the growing influence” of AIPAC.
The resolution also condemns large-scale outside spending in elections generally but calls out only the pro-Israel lobby specifically, even as other lobbies are pouring similar sums into trying to influence election outcomes.
The meeting is being held during an election cycle in which rejecting AIPAC support has become a defining issue in Democratic races. It also comes amid concerns from some Jewish Democrats — including ones critical of AIPAC — that the group’s emergence as a bogeyman in American politics is inappropriate or even antisemitic.
“I do think there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified,” Rep. Dan Goldman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last month. Goldman has accepted an endorsement from AIPAC as he seeks a third term, but says he won’t take money from corporate PACs in this election.
The resolution, which is subject to amendments before it is voted on, specifically names AIPAC and its super PAC, United Democracy Project, as having been “one of the largest outside spenders in Democratic contests” in 2024. It also refers broadly to other “corporate money PACs” and sources of “dark money,” though it does not name any specific groups.
Committee member Allison Minnerly, who introduced the resolution, told the Intercept, a left-wing outlet, that formally distancing the Democratic party from AIPAC “could be one step toward” winning back voters who “might really not have felt represented or seen when it came to Gaza or seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict.” Minnerly also introduced a resolution last August calling for an arms embargo on Israel, which was defeated.
A recent NBC poll found that 57% of Democratic voters have a negative view of Israel, compared to 13% who have a positive view of the country.
Meanwhile, a growing number of the party’s congressional candidates — and politicians thought to be seeking its 2028 presidential nomination — are swearing off AIPAC, and crossing its red line of supporting conditions on military aid to Israel.
The group has also spawned opposition online. Track AIPAC, the social media watchdog that posts politicians’ pro-Israel lobbying campaign donation numbers, has amassed 442,000 followers on X since 2024.
At town halls and candidate forums, politicians on the campaign trail are often being asked whether they would accept an endorsement or donations from the group.
Alana Zeitchik, an Israeli-American advocate and writer, said she understands that candidates might be asked about AIPAC in those types of settings, and said that she personally “would love to hear candidates” reject all special interest and corporate dollars. But when they hone in on AIPAC “on their own accord,” she said, she views it as “a political strategy to feed the beast, this hyper-obsession with AIPAC.”
The proposed DNC resolution voices concern over “massive outside spending” on candidates based on their foreign policy positions, pointing specifically to AIPAC’s $14 million spend in a single Illinois primary. The threat of those expenditures “raises concerns about undue influence over democratic debate and policymaking,” the resolution reads, and in “shaping Democratic party positions.”
The resolution condemns “the growing influence of dark money and corporate-backed independent expenditures in Democratic elections.”
AIPAC has remained a major spender in this year’s midterm elections. The group, which is operating with the aim of electing a majority pro-Israel Congress, recently shelled out around $22 million in support of four Illinois candidates, three of whom it backed through shell PACs under different names. Two of its four preferred candidates won.
While it narrows in on AIPAC, the DNC resolution does not address other types of high-spending special interest groups, such as real estate lobbying groups or the burgeoning landscape of pro-AI PACs.
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, who has previously received AIPAC donations but is rejecting all PAC money this year, told Politico last week that the particular attention paid to AIPAC has been “problematic.”
“There are Iranian Americans that bundle money. There are Turkish Americans that bundle money. There are a lot of ethnic groups that bundle money, and often for things that I don’t agree with. But somehow AIPAC seems to be drawing a lot of attention, and that’s problematic to me,” Booker said. “[AIPAC] is not the problem in America. The problem in America is money in politics.”
Adam Carlson, head of the progressive polling form Zenith Research, poked fun at Booker’s comments with a facetious tweet that dismissed Booker’s concerns, and pointed out the lack of an AIPAC-sized group for Iranian and Turkish Americans.
“Cory’s right. I am sick and tired of the mainstream media refusing to report on PERSIAPAC and TURKPAC spending hundreds of millions of dollars meddling in primaries to boost their preferred candidates,” wrote Carlson, who is Jewish. “It’s an antisemitic double standard, and he’s a hero for pointing it out.”
Goldman, like Booker, says he isn’t taking corporate PAC money in this election, but he did accept AIPAC’s endorsement. Goldman is currently facing a primary challenge from Brad Lander, a Jewish progressive whose attacks against Goldman have centered the congressman’s AIPAC endorsement.
While the DNC’s proposed resolution suggests that AIPAC is shaping Democratic party positions, Goldman asserted that his views are independent from his endorsements.
“I have personally pushed AIPAC very much to recognize that it is an organization that supports first and foremost the State of Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship, but that does not mean that they should be unwavering in their support for the Israeli government,” he said.
He added, “I am going to continue to operate independently, based on my own understanding and nuanced view of the situation, and work towards a peace in the region and two-state solution and security for Israel.”
Other Democrats have said they turned down AIPAC because of foreign policy disagreements. In Illinois, Rep. La Shawn Ford said he met with UDP but did not receive its endorsement because he was unwilling to meet its requirement of supporting unconditional military aid to Israel.
Zeitchik said she is not a fan of AIPAC’s “really dirty” tactics, which have included spending on attack ads against pro-Israel politicians because they are open to conditioning military aid — but she, too, has concerns about the particular attention paid to it.
“I think that the hyper-obsession with AIPAC amongst progressives, and making AIPAC the bogeyman, the problem, has an undercurrent of what I’d call an antisemitic worldview, or an antisemitic reaction,” Zeitchik said.
Joel Petlin, the school district superintendent in the heavily Jewish village of Kiryas Joel, outside New York City, wrote that the DNC’s proposed resolution “singles out AIPAC for doing precisely what many other lobby groups are doing every day.”
He added, “If this resolution passes, the DNC can finally stop calling themselves ‘the big tent party,’ because it clearly isn’t large enough for American Jews.”
Similar accounts to Track AIPAC have popped up online, though none have taken off in the same way. Oil PACs Tracker was founded in 2021 and has 43,000 followers. An account called Melt ICE, which tracks candidates’ stance on ICE, has garnered 3,000 followers since being created in January.
Zeitchik said she appreciates how congressional candidates such as Jack Schlossberg, who is running in New York’s 12th Congressional District, have approached the issue by rejecting all special interest money without harping specifically on AIPAC.
“When I see Israel become a wedge issue, and politicians continue to push and make it a wedge issue — that, to me, is alarming,” she said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Democrats to weigh resolution condemning AIPAC, fueling concerns about ‘undercurrent of antisemitism’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Stitched in faith, woven in memory, these precious artifacts bind Jews to their history
The red stitching has long since faded, and the hand-woven linen has softened from white to ivory. Embroidered with a menorah, a double-headed eagle, a lion, and a Magen David, the 18th-century Torah binder is simple in design yet rich in history.
The binder is among 25 artifacts from London’s Memorial Scrolls Trust making their American debut in Fordham University’s “Binders of the Covenant” exhibition. Aside from showing how these functional objects, beautified, in keeping with hiddur mitzvah (beautifying a ritual object) the exhibition reveals the binders’ dual purpose: securing parchment Torah scrolls while symbolically binding families to their community.
“The binders allow us to see the artistic expression of the devotion; of how they reflect traditional values of Jewish identity, like going toward the Torah, toward the chuppah, and doing good deeds. But there is also an acknowledgement of local identity like in the Hapsburg double eagle or a German flag,” Magda Teter, a chaired professor of History and Judaic Studies at Fordham, told me.
Though women were historically excluded from reading or carrying the Torah, they were the primary creators of these binders. Through intricate needlework, they forged a physical connection to the sacred text. The collection includes a binder created by a grieving husband for his late wife, Esther, and another inscribed by a mother celebrating her daughter’s birth.
“It shows that women managed to get close to the Torah, they are bound to the Torah even if their physical bodies were not allowed to do that,” Teter said.
The history of these binders is rooted in survival.
Between the 14th and 20th centuries, Ashkenazi parents in Central Europe swaddled newborn boys in linen strips called wimples. Women embroidered them with religious and secular symbols. When a boy began formal Torah studies around age three, the family donated the wimple to the synagogue to be reused during milestones, such as a recovery from illness or the Shabbat before a wedding.
“It’s a collective story of community. Seeing these artifacts brings history to life,” guest curator Warren Klein said.
Over time, the creation of these binders evolved as women moved beyond traditional linen and cotton to incorporate silk, leather and velvet, reflective of Bohemian artistic traditions.
An intricately decorated 18th century binder featuring intricate leatherwork flowers, embroidery and beads on plum-colored velvet is a prime example.
“It shows an exchange of artistic ideas,” Klein said.
Over time, production shifted from hand-embroidery to sewing machines and paint. The inscriptions shifted as well, as German, Czech, and Yiddish frequently replaced traditional Hebrew.
Visitors to the exhibit will note the lingering shadow of the Shoah. A 1922 binder depicts a Magen David alongside a German flag; a display of pride in both Jewish and national Jewish identity created just two decades before the Holocaust.
Embroidered in canary-yellow silk thread on linen, a 1918 Bar Mitzvah binder for Ludwig Rosenzweig serves as a reminder of this era. On Oct. 26, 1942, Rosenzweig, his wife, and child were murdered at Auschwitz. Today, these binders remain the only physical witnesses to such interrupted lives.
“You can’t escape the loss but in order to appreciate the loss you need to understand the life. Those binders bring the people to life; they capture the moments of joy and celebration, and of course death. The binders create communal memory,” Teter said.
The tradition of hand-sewn binders has faded over the last half-century. Families are more apt to commemorate a child’s birth with the donation of engraved silver Judaica or prayer books with commemorative bookplates.
Yet, rather than lament this change, the exhibit brings the practice of creating binders to the present with the display of contemporary works by fabric artist Rachel Kanter.
“These community binders show vibrancy,” Teter said. “They show that Jewish life is ongoing,”
The post Stitched in faith, woven in memory, these precious artifacts bind Jews to their history appeared first on The Forward.
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California College Employee Calling Jewish Professor ‘Colonizer’ Was Antisemitic, Investigation Finds
Sign reading “Welcome to City College of San Francisco” above glass entry doors with building number 88, San Francisco, California, Aug. 29, 2025. Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
A City College of San Francisco (CCSF) staff member who called a Jewish professor a “colonizer” among other verbal attacks engaged in unlawful harassment and discrimination based on the academic’s Jewish identity, according to an independent investigation into the incident.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the StandWithUs Saidoff Legal Center, two Jewish advocacy groups, on Tuesday celebrated the upholding of a disciplinary investigation’s finding as a “significant victory” for Jewish faculty and students.
“The outcome establishes a critical precedent for how universities must evaluate conduct often mischaracterized as political speech but that, in context, targets Jewish identity,” the groups said in a statement.
The investigation stemmed from a series of incidents which escalated to an explosive May 2025 confrontation in which CCSF employee Maria Salazar-Colon, president of the local Service Employees International Union (SEIU) union, allegedly launched a volley of anti-Jewish invective at computer science professor Abigail Bornstein. Calling Bornstein a “colonizer” and telling her to “shut the f—k up,” Salazar-Colon converted the professor’s name into a sobriquet by denouncing her as “Dumb-stein” during the public comment portion in a meeting of the community college’s board of trustees, according to the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs.
That utterance, combined with other comments related to Israel, indicated Salazar-Colon’s awareness of Bornstein’s Jewishness and her willingness to degrade her over it, the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs said — noting that a trivial discussion on college “governance,” not politics or the Middle East conflict, set the staff member off.
Salazar-Colon allegedly continued targeting Bornstein through email, denouncing her again as a “colonizer” and making other crude statements. The conduct drove the professor off campus. She reported the alleged harassment to the CCSF administration and filed a criminal complaint with the local police.
However, Salazar-Colon hit back, filing her own grievance in response to allege that she was the victim. Meanwhile, the college hired a law firm as a third-party investigator to look into the matter. Its findings were conclusive, determining not only that Salazar-Colon was fully culpable but that her conduct, rising to “workplace violence,” was intentionally discriminatory against a Jewish colleague.
CCSF ultimately dismissed Salazar-Colon’s “retaliatory” complaint, but the finality of its decision hung on the opinion of the college trustees. Salazar-Colon filed an appeal with the body. It took no action, crystallizing, the Brandeis Center and StandWithUs said, a consensus on the “seriousness of the underlying conduct and the strength of support for the [third-party investigator’s] findings.”
On Monday, Brandeis Center staff litigation attorney Deena Margolies told The Algemeiner that, in this case, justice prevailed but that many other Jewish members of academia suffer similar indignities.
“The college did the right thing here. They brought in an independent investigator. They made clear that this was about discrimination based on Bornstein’s protected identity, that being Jewish — not union advocacy — and that’s important and a necessary distinction that we don’t often see being recognized,” Margolies said. “I’m seeing many more of these disciplinary matters in the employee context, and I notice that what often happens is that when a Jewish professor or staff member is targeted or files a complaint, there is often a cross complaint, a baseless complaint which is retaliatory. And yet, they always end up coming through.”
CCSF will be taking disciplinary action. against Salazar-Colon.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, antisemitism promoted by university employees often disguises itself as politics, complicating higher education institutions’ response to it.
In September, a survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN) found that staff and faculty accelerated the “antisemitism” crisis on US college campuses by politicizing the classroom, promoting anti-Israel bias, and even discriminating against Jewish colleagues. It found that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it.
Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent). Additionally, 50 percent of respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
Administrative officials responded inconsistently to antisemitic hatred, affording additional rationale to the downstream of hatred. More than half (53.1 percent) of respondents described their university’s response to incidents involving antisemitism or anti-Israel bias as “very” or “somewhat” unhelpful, and a striking 77.3 percent thought the same of their professional academic associations. In totality, alleged faculty misconduct and administrative dereliction combined to degrade the professional experiences of Jewish professors, as many reported “worsening mental and physical health, increased self-censorship, fear for personal safety,” and a sense that the destruction of their careers and reputations was imminent.
“Antisemitism cannot and should not be downplayed as political, academic, or workplace disagreement. Antisemitism is, clearly and concretely, insidious discrimination,” Brandeis Center chairman Kenneth Marcus, a former US assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in a statement released with the news of the outcome of the CCSF incident. “Institutions have both the authority and the obligation to intervene, and we are hopeful that these outcomes encourage those who wish to report incidents of antisemitism to come forward without fear of retaliation.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.