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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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Americans helped free Soviet Jewry and the hostages too. It’s time to step up and stop West Bank terror.
For decades, American Jewry has placed the value of tikkun olam at its core. That commitment motivated mass momentum for social justice in many forms, from B’nei Mitzvah projects to Mitzvah Day and long-term campaigns for justice. American Jews have come together again and again to fight for causes beyond politics or religion — and often, you have won.
From calls to congresspeople, to weekly protests and demonstrations, you are a community that knows how to make things happen, how to propel an issue to the top of the agenda. This skillset — and this passion for combating injustice — is needed again now.
The issue of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank must become a top concern for American Jews, and it must fuel collective action. This weekend, we saw it again: four Palestinians and two Israelis killed in deadly clashes. Palestinian homes burned. Mosques torched and vandalized. More raids of Palestinian villages by the IDF, triggered by extremist Jewish settlers’ push to dispossess, claim land, and annex territory.
We see it almost daily — arson, shootings, theft, even murder perpetrated by Jews in the West Bank. In 2025, NGOs active on the ground recorded some 900 incidents of violence, a dramatic increase from previous years. Settlements once evacuated under the disengagement plan are being resettled. Recent legislation supports these efforts with new roads paved for settlers and new army bases to secure settlements. Too often, Israeli soldiers passively or even actively aid settlers in their attacks on Palestinians.
Once, pressure from the U.S. and from Europe was enough to rein in such aggression. No longer.
We can no longer look away while violence, dispossession and even murder happen in the name of the Jewish people. We can no longer stay silent while Palestinian civilians are caught in the crossfire, unable to reach urgent medical care and emergency services. American Jews have the connections, the commitment and the capacity to implement a campaign to end the violence once and for all. The time to act is now.
I know how powerful these campaigns are first hand. In many ways, I am among their beneficiaries. My parents immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union after decades of tireless campaigning by American Jews to allow my family to experience freedom. What started as a small project in the 1950s became a full-fledged movement to end the oppression of Soviet Jews. The result was liberation: the freedom to emigrate to a place where we could live freely as Jews. Next year we will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the historic rally that brought almost a quarter of a million people to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., to demand that then-President Ronald Reagan push Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to free Soviet Jews.
Over the last three years, we Israelis once again witnessed the power of American Jews when you unite behind an issue. That same pressure, that same power, was instrumental in the push for the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that brought the final hostages home. Weekly vigils, protests, and solidarity events across the U.S. insisted that President Donald Trump, and President Joe Biden beforehand, put the release of the hostages at the top of the political agenda.
This next campaign of the American Jewish community must demand an end to Jewish terror in the West Bank. What was once seen as aberrant behavior, the actions of a few bad apples, is hardening into Israeli government policy. Myriad reports, articles and data points show how out of control settler violence has become. Too often, the IDF fails to stop and even assists in the brutality. Legislation passed by the far-right government further cements these land grabs and paves the way for full on annexation of the West Bank.
The American Jewish community has not only the ability but the responsibility to make it stop.
While some American Jews are turning away from Israel, we must call on them, on us all, to do the opposite. We must turn toward Israel, to face down violent settlers in the West Bank and support the Israeli activists and leaders who are fighting for safety and dignity for all.
Many of us are pained to see young adult Jews, in particular, distancing themselves or actively opposing Israel. In the face of settler terror, the devastation in Gaza and the ongoing occupation, they don’t see the values they were taught as core to Jewish identity. We have a choice to make and invite our young people to make it with us: embrace values of human decency, freedom, and justice and advance them in Israel.
Campaigning for a better world, for action, for change, runs through our DNA. It is part of our soul. At this time, as an Israeli, as a two-time beneficiary of these efforts, I am asking you once again for your partnership. Just as American Jews fought for my family’s freedom, and just as you fought to bring our hostages home, I ask you to fight for this, too. We need you to help make this violence and bloodshed stop. You have never stood on the sidelines before. This is your time.
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Netanyahu compares New York with ‘the 1930s’ after Mamdani calls for his arrest
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership with “the 1930s,” escalating a showdown between the two leaders as Netanyahu plans to visit the city in the coming weeks.
The Israeli leader made an evocative reference to the period when the Nazis took over Germany in a Fox News interview on Tuesday, adding that he is “definitely going” to New York for the U.N. General Assembly in September. The planned trip prompted Mamdani, a staunch pro-Palestinian advocate, to explore executing an international arrest warrant against Netanyahu.
Mamdani said last week that his Law Department did not find the city could legally make the arrest, but he challenged the U.S. government to do so, calling Netanyahu “the architect of a horrific genocide against the Palestinian people.” President Donald Trump has rejected the idea of an arrest. The United States is not a party to the International Criminal Court, which has accused Netanyahu of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, and its warrants have no legal power in the U.S.
Netanyahu responded to Mamdani in an interview with Fox News commentator Sean Hannity, a close Trump ally, while visiting Washington, D.C. this week. He called the mayor a “hate-spewing elected official who’s pitting one group of New Yorkers against the other.”
“He’s turning them against New York Jews. I mean, what are we, in the 1930s?,” said Netanyahu.
Since calling for Netanyahu’s arrest, Mamdani has said repeatedly that he does not single out Jews or Israel for punishment.
“My interest in executing that warrant is not specific to Benjamin Netanyahu, but to anyone who they put a warrant towards for war crimes and crimes against humanity,” Mamdani said to reporters last week, adding that he also described Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel as a “horrific war crime.”
In a separate press conference on Monday, Mamdani said his characterizations of Netanyahu as a war criminal “were not even frankly personal assessments, they were objective facts.”
Mamdani’s views are increasingly popular in the United States, with a new survey from The Economist/YouGov showing that nearly half of Americans believe the country should arrest Netanyahu. 49% of respondents said the U.S. should enforce the ICC warrant, while 27% said “no” and 23% were unsure.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio also backed Mamdani’s statements. “I think he drew attention to the fact that Netanyahu is literally a war criminal,” de Blasio said in a Fox News interview on Monday. “This guy’s policies led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian children, and that defines a war crime to me and to so many people around the world.”
Major Jewish groups have fiercely criticized Mamdani’s arrest ambitions. The UJA-Federation of New York accused him of “distortions and disinformation.”
“At a time of rising antisemitism, repeatedly singling out and vilifying the world’s only Jewish state for perceived political benefit is repugnant, puts Jews at greater risk — and leaves many Jewish New Yorkers feeling targeted and unwelcome in the city we call home,” the federation said in a statement.
On Tuesday, Netanyahu slipped into the White House through a side door for a meeting with Trump that did not include public face time. Pundits theorized that the low-profile affair reflected how unpopular Netanyahu has grown in the United States amid the Iran and Gaza wars, making it politically risky for Trump to be seen with him, as the president’s approval also sinks to a new low.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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London’s Hackney council gives initial nod to ending 58-year twinning with Haifa after emotional debate
(JTA) — LONDON – It was one kippah vs. a sea of keffiyehs, as Hackney Council gave initial approval on Tuesday night to begin the process of ending its nearly six-decade twinning relationship with the northern Israeli city of Haifa.
The motion, brought by the Green Party-led administration, was voted on and approved after councilors argued passionately for almost 30 minutes over whether ending the relationship was a moral imperative in light of the war in Gaza or that it would undermine one of the borough’s longest-standing examples of coexistence and dialogue.
The final tally, which has yet to be made public,follows the Green Party’s sweeping victory in Hackney’s May 7 local elections, when it won control of the council for the first time, capturing 42 of the borough’s 57 seats. Labour, which had controlled Hackney for more than two decades, was reduced to nine seats, while the Conservatives held six.
Hackney is an inner London borough, home to one of Britain’s largest Jewish communities alongside a substantial Muslim population. According to the council’s own report, which cites estimates from the Interlink Foundation, Hackney’s Orthodox Jewish community numbers between 27,405 and 29,460, or between 11.7% and 12.5% of the borough’s population. According to the 2021 census, Hackney’s Jewish population is 6.7% while its Muslim population is 13.3%.
The passage of the vote does not mean that the council will immediately sever ties with Haifa, which it has been twinned with since 1968. Instead, the council voted to begin the formal process, including writing to the mayor of Haifa, conducting an equalities impact assessment, and establishing a cross-party working group before a final decision is brought before the full council.
Introducing the proposal, Green councilor Sam Mathys said the move fulfilled a central manifesto pledge made during the election campaign.
“For decades, we have witnessed human rights abuses committed by the State of Israel against the Palestinian people, which has escalated to a horrifying and unprecedented scale over the past years,” she said, adding, “We want civic partnerships that are about fostering peace, justice, and equality.”
The council report notes that Haifa was originally selected because of its “harmonious multicultural, multi-faith populations and good records in community relations.” Over the past three decades, the relationship has centered on links between Hackney’s Homerton University Hospital and Haifa’s Rambam Medical Center, rather than broader civic exchanges.
Conservative councilor and Orthodox Jew Simche Steinberger argued the proposal ignored both the history and practical benefits of the partnership.
“You’ve not spoken to any of the six Jewish councilors about it,” he said. Citing medical exchanges between the two hospitals, he added, “It’s probably the only twinning which actually does something because I remember a few years ago where the doctors from Haifa Hospital were here in Homerton teaching them what to do.”
He argued that councilors had been elected “for local issues, not for national issues,” and called the proposal “a disgrace,” before urging them to withdraw the motion.
Labour councilor Ben Lucas likewise opposed the proposal despite saying his party was “unequivocal in our abhorrence of the devastation and violence in Gaza caused by the Israeli government” and “we utterly condemn the Hamas terrorist attacks.”
“The Labour group in all good conscience cannot support this paper,” he said.
Lucas described the twinning agreement as having been forged in 1968 in a spirit of working-class solidarity, a partnership that was “multi-faith, multi-ethnic, and built most notably on the noble idea of medical cooperation.”
He added, “Haifa is not perfect, but for those who want peace, it represents a model of coexistence, a fighting chance for peace.” He also noted that the Israeli city was home to “socialists and greens, aghast at the conflict and fighting for lasting solutions.”
“You’re punishing a people for the actions of a government,” he said, calling the proposal “a performative gesture.” He added, “Let’s be bridge builders, not burners.”
Former deputy mayor Anntoinette Bramble, speaking for Labour, also argued that twinning existed to preserve relationships precisely when disagreements arose.
She said the medical exchange partnerships strengthened communities by bringing together professionals and residents of different faiths and backgrounds. “I’m perplexed by this proposal because it doesn’t seem to strengthen those communities,” she said. “What it seems to do is cause division.”
She also asked, “How can a transparent review that is non-partisan, already come with a decision before the review has begun? You need to be honest about what you’re doing here.”
Supporters argued that maintaining the relationship would conflict with Hackney’s stated commitment to human rights.
Green councilor Manal Massalha, who described herself as the granddaughter of Nakba survivors, spoke at length about conditions in Gaza and the West Bank before declaring, “Never again is never again for everyone.”
“Respect for international law and human rights born from the ashes of the Holocaust, together with the ICJ’s findings on Israel’s unlawful occupation requires us to reject dehumanization, military occupation, oppression, impunity, and racism,” she said.
Massalha rejected accusations that the proposal targeted Israelis or Jews. “De-twinning is not about opposing a people, a religion, or a culture. It’s about ensuring that our institutional relationships reflect those values.”
One of the proposal’s most vehement supporters was Green councilor Florence Schechter, who was raised in, but no longer practices Orthodox Judaism.
“It is my Jewish values that inform me. Hackney should no longer be twinned with Haifa,” she said, adding that fellow Green councilor Cathy Troupp, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, shared her position.
Drawing on Jewish teachings, she argued, “When Gentiles open their newspapers or log into social media and they see the horrors that are being committed in Palestine, children maimed and murdered, prisoners mocked by soldiers, what will people think of all Jews?”
“It isn’t fair and it isn’t right that the actions of Israel should reflect on all Jewish people,” she added. “If the Jewish people of Britain want to fight rising antisemitism, the first thing they must do is condemn the genocide in Palestine.”
Closing the debate, Mathys stressed that the vote marked “a first step,” saying the cross-party working group would hear from interested parties before bringing recommendations back to the council in January 2027.
Following the decision, Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg posted on X, “Tonight, the Hackney Green Party showed its ignorance and bigotry.” He added, “This vote represents the prioritization of spite over sense.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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