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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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Dozens of Anti-Israel Agitators Charged With Criminal Trespassing Over University of Washington Riot
Event hosted by “Super UW,” a revolutionary student organization that promotes Hamas, jihad, and anti-Zionism, in October 2023. Photo: Chin Hei Leung / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Prosecutors in King County, Washington have filed criminal trespassing charges against 33 students and non-students who illegally occupied the University of Washington’s Interdisciplinary Engineering Building (IEB) during the 2025 spring semester to pressure college officials to boycott Israel, reportedly sparing them from being held accountable for property destruction to the tune of $1 million.
“This is an important step in ensuring accountability for those who perpetrated this occupation, in addition to the suspensions that the students arrested in the building received through the student conduct process,” the University of Washington said in a statement on Tuesday. “We value free speech and expression but also must continue to be a campus community where dangerous, unlawful actions are not tolerated.”
It added, “We appreciate the hard work by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, UW police, and law enforcement partners who investigated a complex case involving a large number of individuals.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, a pro-Hamas student group calling itself “Super UW” raided the IEB in May and refused to leave unless school officials acceded to its demand to terminate the institution’s partnerships with The Boeing Company, whose armaments manufacturing the students identified as a resource aiding Israel’s war to eradicate the Hamas terror group from Gaza.
“We are taking this building amidst the current and renewed wave of the student intifada, following the uprising of student action for Palestine after the heroic victory of Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th,” the group said in a manifesto, referring to Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. “The University of Washington is a direct partner in the genocide of the Palestinian people through its allegiance to its partnership with Boeing. Boeing manufactures the F-15 fighter jets, Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles, and 500-pound bombs which israel [sic] uses to murder entire Palestinian families and destroy Palestinian homes, schools, and mosques.”
The illegal demonstration involved students establishing blockades near the building using bike racks and chairs, burning trash — while setting off sizable fires — that they then left unattended, and calling for violence against the police. Law enforcement officers eventually entered the building equipped with riot gear, including helmets and batons, and proceeded to arrest 33 protesters who later received charges for trespassing, property destruction, disorderly conduct, and conspiracy to commit all three, according to law enforcement statements at the time.
The defendants have been charged by the Kings County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which has not explained its decision to decline to prosecute the full range of alleged crimes committed in May.
The cohort is not the first to evade the severest possible penalties for demonstrations that escalated to a riot.
On Monday, a New York state judge overturned disciplinary sanctions imposed on a group of anti-Israel protesters who illegally occupied Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall and interned janitorial staff while destroying property to protest the Israel-Hamas war.
Twenty-two current and former students, all of whom contested their punishments anonymously, may soon walk away without being held accountable following Judge Gerald Lebovits’s ruling that Columbia’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious.” Lebovits went further, citing the students’ concealment of their identities with masks and keffiyeh scarves as evidence that the university lacked evidence to determine that they were actually in Hamilton Hall despite that they had been arrested on the scene by the New York City Police Department (NYPD).
“In the disciplinary proceedings against the 22 Columbia students, the sole evidence that they were present in Hamilton Hall during its occupation was a report reflecting that petitioners had been arrested,” he wrote. “No evidence was offered in the disciplinary proceedings of actions taken inside Hamilton Hall by any particular student, as opposed to the conduct of the group of occupiers as a whole.”
Lebovits, after arguing that the group should not be disciplined even as he described their infractions, then argued that illegally occupying Hamilton Hall is a “decades-long tradition.”
In a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Wednesday, Columbia University noted that Lebovits’s vacating the disciplinary sanctions does not take effect for 30 days, during which time university lawyers may pursue other legal avenues.
“The order does not take effect for at least 30 days, and no student who was disciplined for the occupation of Hamilton Hall can return to campus at this time,” a university spokesperson said. “Columbia is considering all of its options, including seeking a stay of the order and appealing the decision.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Qatar, Saudi Media Shoot Down Tucker Carlson Conspiracy as ADL Warns Iran Conflict Fueling Online Antisemitism
Tucker Carlson speaks at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, Oct. 21, 2025. Photo: Gage Skidmore/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Two Arab monarchies which remain steadfast in their refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist have nonetheless dismissed conspiratorial claim of Mossad false flag attacks against them alleged by far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson.
The dismissals of Carlson’s assertion came as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report warning that the ongoing US-Israeli military operation against Iran “triggered an immediate online surge of antisemitic, anti-Zionist, and conspiratorial commentary that spanned the ideological spectrum.”
In a Monday video, Carlson asserted that it “hasn’t been reported, but it’s a fact that last night, in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, authorities arrested Mossad agents planning on committing bombings in those countries.”
Israel’s intelligence agency reportedly played a critical role in the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran on Saturday, but there is no evidence to suggest Mossad agents were arrested this week for operations against Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
“Why would the Israelis be committing bombings in Gulf countries, which are also being attacked by Iran? Aren’t they on the same side?” Carlson asked, insisting that “Israel wants to hurt Iran, and Qatar, and the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Oman, and Kuwait.”
Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) signed the Abraham Accords in September 2020 to normalize relations with Israel, and the three countries have enhanced ties since then.
On Tuesday, Majed Al-Ansari, a spokesman for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, responded to a reporter’s request to confirm Carlson’s claim. He refused to do so, answering he “has no information about any cells of the Israeli intelligence service Mossad at the moment.”
However, Qatar’s State Security Service separately announced the arrest of two cells it said were operating on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Then on Thursday, the Saudi Arabian state-owned Al Arabiya news outlet reported that it has “learned from its sources that claims alleging that Saudi Arabia and Qatar had arrested Mossad agents planting bombs in Gulf countries are baseless and untrue.”
Reports widely circulated this week that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman privately petitioned US President Donald Trump for months to strike Iran, a position that would align with Israel’s stated goal of trying to dismantle Iran’s military capabilities.
Carlson has previously praised Qatar and its House of Thani monarchy, which has ruled the country since 1851. The former Fox News host announced on Dec. 7, 2025, that he had purchased property in the country, and dismissed charges that Qatari funding had influenced his turn toward anti-Israel commentary, speculations which had circulated among right-wing figures and earned him the epithet “Tucker Qatarlson,” popularized by conservative talk radio host Mark Levin and former far-right Florida congressional candidate Laura Loomer.
Interviewing Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani at the Doha Forum, Carlson said, “I have been criticized as being a tool of Qatar, and I just want to say, which you already know, which is I have never taken anything from your country and don’t plan to.”
Qatar has long aligned itself with Hamas and its ideological wellspring, the Muslim Brotherhood, providing a safe haven for the leadership of both organizations. Thani’s choice to support the revolutionary Islamist group and its terrorist wing in Gaza has exacerbated tensions with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both which regard the Brotherhood as an existential threat.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the ADL released a report documenting how Carlson’s anti-Mossad conspiracy theory accompanied torrents of online Jew-hate. Researchers noted Carlson’s comments in particular, writing that he “further portrayed Jewish influence in the US as a hidden, malevolent force driving the country toward war through deception and ‘demonic’ control, and made unsubstantiated claims about Gulf states arresting ‘Mossad’ agents planning bombings.”
The ADL further captured how Carlson “used his response to the attacks in Iran as an opportunity to again promote the antisemitic conspiracy theory of Israeli involvement in 9/11.”
The report describes how in his Monday podcast Carlson “advanced a number of antisemitic conspiracy theories, including that Israel had foreknowledge of 9/11 and has orchestrated US involvement in other conflicts through manufactured intelligence, while framing Israel as covertly manipulating American foreign policy for its own agenda.”
Far-Right podcaster Candace Owens promoted this conspiracy theory on Tuesday when she shared a video of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu countering the charge that Israel targeted civilians, saying “you see the difference. The tyrants of Tehran target civilians. We target the tyrants of Tehran to protect civilians.”
Owens wrote on top of the video: “You murdered 3,000 Americans on 9/11. For starters.”
The ADL’s researchers spotlighted Owens’ role in boosting antisemitic voices.
“Actors like the neo-Nazi Aryan Freedom Network, right-wing online provocateur ‘Sneako,’ and controversial streamer Hasan Piker in particular appeared across multiple high-reach posts, including those amplified by figures with millions of followers, like Owens,” the report stated.
Owens also shared a deep fake image created with artificial intelligence that promoted antisemitism. The report featured a screenshot of Owens writing “Operation Epstein Fury fully explained:” to introduce a reposting of an image showing Trump wearing a white Israel hat, standing in front of two large Israeli flags, and speaking from a podium with the slogan “Operation Epstein Fury.”
The text accompanying the image, written by an account called “TooWhitetoTweet,” reads “It’s not complicated. American goyim are blowing up Iranian goyim because America is controlled by the people who call us goyim and Iran isn’t. Operation Epstein fury helps achieve Greater Epstein in the Middle East.”
“Operation Epic Fury” is the name the US has given to its military campaign against Iran. Owens’ play on words appears to be a reference to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whose Jewish heritage has been exploited as a pretext to openly express hatred toward Jews, amplifying conspiracy theories that falsely attribute the sex abuse scandal entirely to the Jewish community. Some anti-Israel voices have falsely claimed that Trump launched strikes against Iran at the behest of the Jewish state.
The ADL’s researchers documented the depth of this “Operation Epstein Fury” rebranding, finding “over 35,000 mentions and 28,000 unique authors on X by 4:00 PM ET on February 28 alone, growing to over 91,000 mentions from more than 60,000 unique authors about 48 hours later. The phrase is rapidly being weaponized by extremist actors to advance antisemitic tropes.”
On Sunday, Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and national director, wrote on X: “Now the same old prejudiced voices such as Hassan Piker, Candace Owens, Stew Peters, and others with millions of followers are capitalizing on this moment to spew ugly antisemitism and spread vile conspiracy theories. You can argue about the merits of the conflict or how the campaign has been conducted, but people of goodwill can do so without resorting to antisemitism and rejecting bigots in our midst.”
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Argentine Prosecutor Seeks Indictment of 10 Suspects — Including Iran’s New IRGC Chief — in 1994 AMIA Bombing Case
People hold images of the victims of the 1994 bombing attack on the Argentine Israeli Mutual Association (AMIA) community center, marking the 30th anniversary of the attack, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Irina Dambrauskas
The lead prosecutor in the case of the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association (AMIA) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires on Wednesday requested the indictment of 10 Iranian and Lebanese nationals suspected of involvement in the deadly attack.
Among those named was Ahmad Vahidi, who on Sunday was appointed the new head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), an Iranian military force and internationally designated terrorist organization. He replaced Mohammad Pakpour, who was killed last week during the US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which has resulted in the death of several high-ranking officials.
In 1994, Vahidi commanded the IRGC’s Quds Force, which is responsible for managing Iran’s proxies and terrorist operations abroad. Argentine President Javier Milei designated the force as a foreign terrorist organization in January, as the country’s Jewish community marked the 11th anniversary of the death of prosecutor Alberto Nisman, who investigated the AMIA bombing.
“What I asked was for authorities to move swiftly against the 10 defendants so a trial in absentia can be held as soon as possible and the public can see the evidence the Argentine state has compiled over the past 30 years,” the current Argentine prosecutor on the case, Sebastian Basso, told local news outlet Radio Mitre.
The 10 suspects set to stand trial include former Iranian and Lebanese ministers and diplomats, all of whom are subject to international arrest warrants issued by Argentina for their alleged roles in the country’s deadliest terrorist attack, which killed 85 people and wounded more than 300.
Last year, Basso — who took over the case after the 2015 murder of his predecessor, Nisman — also requested that federal Judge Daniel Rafecas issue national and international arrest warrants for Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over his alleged involvement in the attack.
Basso’s legal action marked a significant departure from Argentina’s previous stance in the case, under which the Iranian leader was regarded as having diplomatic immunity.
Khamenei was also killed during Saturday’s US-Israeli strikes targeting senior Iranian leadership in Tehran.
Since 2006, Argentine authorities have sought the arrest of eight Iranians — including former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who died in 2017 — yet more than three decades after the deadly bombing, all suspects remain still at large.
Despite Interpol issuing red notices for their arrest, neither Iran nor Lebanon has granted their extradition, allowing the suspects to remain beyond the reach of Argentine authorities.
“It was them who carried out the attack,” Basso said. “They are puppets of Iran and both the masterminds and perpetrators behind the bombing.”
According to Basso, the investigation unit made contact in 2025 with a group of Iranian dissidents who provided inside information that helped advance the case.
“That was vital for us, because it allowed us to reconstruct what happened in Iran, understand how the regime works, and how Hezbollah was created and sustained,” the Argentine prosecutor said.
Last year, Argentina ordered, for the first time, that suspects be tried in absentia following a legal change in March that removed the requirement for defendants to be physically present in court.
Despite Argentina’s longstanding belief that Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah terrorist group carried out the devastating attack at Iran’s request, the 1994 bombing has never been claimed or officially solved.
Meanwhile, Tehran has consistently denied any involvement and has refused to arrest or extradite any suspects.
To this day, the decades-long investigation into the terrorist attack has been plagued by allegations of witness tampering, evidence manipulation, cover-ups, and annulled trials.
In 2006, former prosecutor Nisman formally charged Iran for orchestrating the attack and Hezbollah for carrying it out.
Nine years later, he accused former Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — currently under house arrest on corruption charges — of attempting to cover up the crime and block efforts to extradite the suspects behind the AMIA atrocity in return for Iranian oil.
Nisman was killed later that year, and to this day, both his case and murder remain unresolved and under ongoing investigation.
The alleged cover-up was reportedly formalized through the memorandum of understanding signed in 2013 between Kirchner’s government and Iranian authorities, with the stated goal of cooperating to investigate the AMIA bombing.
However, Milei, who took office in 2023, branded Iran “an enemy” of his country last year and has expressed strong support for his country’s Jewish community and the State of Israel.