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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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Is Netanyahu dead? Has Tel Aviv been flattened? AI videos are dominating the Iran war.

(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted an unusual video this week: of himself buying coffee at a Jerusalem-area cafe.

It was hardly typical fare for wartime, when Netanyahu can more often be seen giving recorded addresses or touring missile damage within Israel. But the prime minister had come with an important mission: to debunk viral claims of his death.

The claims, which originated on Iranian state media last week, were picked up by social media users on Thursday after Netanyahu gave his first press conference during the war.

Zooming in on details in the seemingly innocuous address, some claimed that Netanyahu had an extra finger on his right hand and missing teeth, signs they said were key tells of AI-generated content.

“Imagine Netanyahu was actually dead this entire past week,” the pro-Palestinian TikTok influencer Guy Christensen wrote in a post on X. “It’s too good to be true but Israel has been using AI generated videos of Netanyahu ever since. One can only hope.”

From the cafe Sataf, Netanyahu issued his response to the conspiracy, posting a video on Sunday of him ordering a coffee, chatting with baristas and telling Israelis that the wars against Iran and Hezbollah in Lebanon were going well.

“They say I’m what?” the caption read. Mocking the idea that he had been killed, he joked, “I’m dying for coffee!” Then, alluding to the speculation about the earlier video, he asks, “Do you want to count the number of fingers?” before holding up each hand with his fingers outstretched.

But rather than quelling the claims of his death, the Israeli leader’s response instead spurred more speculation, with users on social media calling into question details in the video including the physics of his coffee cup. In another video posted by Netanyahu on Monday, some social media users pointed to a clip where a ring seemingly disappears from his hand in one of the frames.

“ISRAEL: ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is still alive. Here’s another AI video of him as proof. Just trust me, goy,’ the antisemitic podcaster Stew Peters wrote in a post on X.

The churn of conspiratorial claims about the Israeli leader’s death, which also included an AI-generated image of him being pulled from rubble, highlights the growing challenge of combating misinformation in an era of artificial intelligence and viral deepfakes, especially during times of conflict.

The war with Iran has produced an absolute flood of fabricated imagery, from AI-generated clips circulated by pro-Iran accounts purporting to show missile strikes flattening Tel Aviv or the capture of American troops by Iranian forces. The Israeli disinformation detection company Cyabra said it identified networks containing tens of thousands of accounts that generated material garnering 145 million views in the first two weeks of the war — almost all pro-Iranian, and mostly on TikTok. (The company said during the last Israel-Iran war, in June 2025, that Iran’s internet outage had quelled disinformation bot farms located there.)

“The campaign did not spread organically. Clear coordination patterns were identified, including repeated narratives, identical videos and captions, fixed hashtag clusters, and synchronized burst posting,” Cyabra said in its report published Friday. “These tactics allowed the network to rapidly flood the information environment and dominate online discussions during key moments of the conflict.”

The videos have left some of Israel’s critics confident that the country has been battered far beyond what has been officially reported.

But even Israeli television has not been immune, airing its own misinformation too — albeit unwittingly.

Channel 12 News last week aired a night-vision clip that it said showed American B-2 stealth bombers over Iran flying in formation with F-18 fighter jets.

Within hours, the clip was identified not as a Pentagon release, as Channel 12 military correspondent Nir Dvori had suggested on air, but as footage from the combat flight simulator Digital Combat Simulator World. Itay Blumental, Dvori’s counterpart at rival public broadcaster Kan, wrote on X that the footage was “indeed incredible, but also lifted from a video game,” sharing the same YouTube clip from March 2023.

During Monday evening’s broadcast, Dvori apologized and said the mistake was “entirely mine,” but did not specify which footage he was referring to, leaving viewers who had missed the earlier segment with little indication of what had gone wrong. The news network also issued an apology, saying it would “examine its procedures.”

The right-wing Channel 14 also aired the clip — more than once.

i24 News made a similar mistake, the Haaretz newspaper reported, airing a video it treated as apparent footage of an American strike on Iran, though the clip was also from Digital Combat Simulator World.

The segments quickly became internet fodder, with social media users lampooning the news networks and posting their own tongue-in-cheek “exclusive war footage.”

Omer Babai, who runs Kan’s social media, posted a GIF on X of shoot ’em up video game Chicken Invaders, saying it showed “American bombers in Iranian skies.”

Another X user quipped: “Nir Dvori: Iran scattered mines across the Strait of Hormuz,” alongside a screenshot of vintage PC game Minesweeper.

A third posted an image of fellow 1990s gaming staple “Digger,” with the caption: “Exclusive footage of Sinwar in the tunnels of Gaza,” referencing the Hamas chief killed by the IDF. Street Fighter and Pac-Man made cameo appearances too.

Channel 14, widely seen as sympathetic towards Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is no stranger to broadcasting dubious footage. Earlier in the war, the channel aired a video it said showed crowds in Tehran appearing to express support for the Israeli premier with chants of “Bibi joon” — a Persian term of affection translated roughly as “dear Bibi.” But the online Israeli fact-checker FakeReporter later said the chant had been generated with artificial intelligence.

But the B2 gaffes are one side of a much wider phenomenon.

One viral clip, shared across X, TikTok and other platforms, appeared to show missiles pounding Tel Aviv and apartment blocks collapsing under a barrage. AFP and several other outlets found it had been generated using AI, citing telltale distortions in cars, rooftops, smoke trails and even the placement of an Israeli flag sans pole. The Grok AI chatbot on X, however, helped amplify the video, with repeated assurances that “the video is real,” AFP reported.

After the video was exposed as AI-generated, an X account under the name Abdulruhman Ismail, one of the first to share the footage in a post that drew 4 million views, said he would leave it up “because the scene reflects, painfully, what Gaza has endured under Israeli bombardment.” He added, “I am keeping this post for transparency. The video may not be real, but the devastation it evokes is real, and it mirrors what Palestinians have lived through.”

During the June 2025 war, pro-Iran accounts similarly circulated fake videos and images claiming to show strikes devastating Tel Aviv as well as Iranian forces downing Israeli F-35s.

Australian wire AAP debunked several fakes from this round of conflict, including a video claiming that an Iranian strike set a CIA facility in Dubai ablaze, as well as a fabricated image purporting to show late Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, dead under a pile of rubble.

A separate fabricated clip that racked up tens of millions of views purported to show the Burj Khalifa engulfed in flames as crowds rushed in its direction.

The Tehran Times also shared false images and false reports of extensive damage to the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain.

Iran’s embassy in Austria posted an AI image of a child’s backpack, claiming it was taken at the Minab school in Iran that was hit on the first day of the war.

Tasnim, the Iranian state-affiliated news agency, shared an AI-generated image on X purporting to show an American radar installation in Qatar destroyed in an Iranian strike, The New York Times reported. The paper said Iran’s propaganda “appears focused more on swaying international audiences,” portraying the “success of Tehran’s counteroffensive in effusive terms.”

But X’s head of product told the BBC that 99% of the accounts spreading AI-generated war videos were trying to “game monetization,” posting sensational content to rack up engagement and qualify for payments through the platform’s creator revenue program. The social media giant announced that it will temporarily suspend creators from the program if they post AI-generated videos of armed conflict without disclosing that they were fake.

British politician George Galloway posted a video last week containing AI imagery in which he narrates that the “apocalypse is burning Tel Aviv,” that the city “now looks like Gaza,” and that air defenses over Tel Aviv are “no longer operational.” He says his information came from friends on “Sheinkin Street, Tel Aviv, near Dizengoff Square.”

Former Israeli spokesman Eylon Levy seized on the canard, posting reaction videos of sun-soaked beach scenes and one of himself at Dizengoff Square, casually sipping an iced coffee with the very much intact plaza behind him.

Some people responded to the video by cheering Levy on, saying that they, too, were enjoying a beautiful day in a mostly intact Tel Aviv. But others resisted the evidence in front of them. “Cheap Jew propaganda,” one commenter wrote. “It’s basically flattened out.”

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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis

(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.

The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.

The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”

Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.

Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.

“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”

Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.

A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”

“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.

The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.

“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.

In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.

Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.

“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.

“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.

CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”

“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.

A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.

The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”

Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.

Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”

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Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza

(JTA) — An Israeli organization headed by a right-wing activist quietly arranged a series of charter flights that evacuated Palestinians from Gaza last year, according to an Associated Press investigation.

The organization, Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli organization founded by Gilad Ach, an Israeli combat reservist and West Bank settler activist, coordinated the flights via another company called Al-Majd, which describes itself on its website as a humanitarian organization “supporting Palestinian lives.”

Among the evacuations facilitated by Ad Kan was a flight in May that transported nearly 60 Palestinians to Indonesia and other locations, as well as two flights in October and November that transported over 300 Palestinians to South Africa.

It was not clear who had planned or paid for the flights. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola decried the evacuations as representing “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and an investigation was launched into one of the flight’s origins.

At the time, President Donald Trump had walked back his proposal to relocate the population in Gaza to other countries amid criticism, despite getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement.

The AP investigation found that Ach had stuck with Trump’s plan after the U.S. president dumped it, publishing a report detailing how he would implement the “voluntary exit.”

The newly revealed origins of the charter flights adds to a history of controversy surrounding small-scale efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza. Last August, France suspended its effort to evacuate Palestinians after a woman who took part in the program was accused of making antisemitic comments online. The same month, the United States also suspended a program designed to give Palestinian medical care after the far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer called the effort a “national security threat.”

Several of the passengers on the South Africa flights told the Associated Press that they were unaware of who was behind the flights, but said they did not care and were more concerned with leaving the besieged territory. (Six Palestinians who spoke to the outlet said they paid up to $2,000 per person for the transportation.)

“There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed,” said a 37-year-old Palestinian who arrived in South Africa in November. “Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue.”

In a statement to the Associated Press, Ach rejected South Africa’s allegations that the evacuations amounted to ethnic cleansing and decried the “profound hypocrisy” of countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees.

“Their continued presence in Gaza, under dire conditions, serves as a tool to pressure Israel internationally and allows Hamas to maintain its rule over this suffering population,” Ach said.

While it was unclear if Ach had coordinated with the Israeli government to facilitate the evacuations, Muayad Saidam, a Palestinian identified on the group’s website as its Gaza humanitarian project manager, told the outlet that travel arrangements for Palestinians must be made with Israeli authorities.

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