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The legacy of Isaac Babel, Russia’s Jewish Hemingway, is dissected in new Chicago play
CHICAGO (JTA) — All writers strive for a good story. How far they will go to find it depends on their ambition, their wherewithal and their sanity.
Isaac Babel, a Russian-Jewish writer who came from a relatively stable, privileged background in Odessa in the late 1800s, would go to war among Cossacks who murdered Jews, make friends with Soviet agents and then cuckold one of them. The reason why Babel constantly put himself in harm’s way may have been simple, according to another writer.
“I think he wanted something to write about,” said Rajiv Joseph, whose play at Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, “Describe the Night,” centers on Babel. “He was a young man who had wanted to be a writer but had nothing to write about.”
“Describe the Night” blends three stories from different eras that engage with questions of who controls the truth. The first portrays Babel, the Soviet secret police head Nikolai Yezhov and Yezhov’s wife, Yevgenia, with whom Babel begins an affair. The second follows a young Soviet agent rising through the ranks just before the Berlin Wall falls, and the third dives into a conspiracy behind a 2010 plane crash near Smolensk, Russia.
Babel himself may not rise to the ranks of Tolstoy or Dostoevsky in terms of immediate name recognition in the United States, but the journalist, author and playwright is remembered as one of Russia’s preeminent 20th-century writers. His modernist and bloody tales in “Red Cavalry,” a collection of short stories inspired by his time on the frontlines of the Polish-Soviet War of 1919, vaulted him to the status of a Russian Hemingway. The pithy American war correspondent once expressed his admiration, perhaps even jealousy, of Babel’s writing, saying “Babel’s style is even more concise than mine.”
Like Hemingway, Babel went to war in search of a good story. Combat itself was not the only threat to him: as a Jew, he bore witness to the Cossack cavalry’s antisemitic atrocities. Babel tamped down his Jewish identity while covering the war, though he would feel a sense of isolation in both societies or as his grandson would later describe him “a Jew among the Cossacks, and a Cossack among the Jews.” In his own diary, Babel wrote “Talking to the Jews, I feel kin to them, they think I’m Russian and my soul is laid bare.”
Joseph, who is not Jewish and authored the Pulitzer-nominated play “Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” had read “Red Cavalry” years ago but was inspired to write “Describe the Night” after discovering the poetic journal Babel had kept during the war. The title of the play comes directly from the diary, which repeats the word several times in Babel’s own prompts to describe things ranging from kitchens to marketplaces to women to horses. Sometimes Babel successfully answers his own prompts by forcing himself to write, and other times he doesn’t, Joseph said.
Lead actor James Vincent Meredith is also not Jewish and admitted he had concerns about “the choice of casting a black man in the role of a Jewish man living in the world of Russia, the Ukraine and Paris.” He partly found his way to the character by watching the 2015 documentary “Finding Babel,” which follows Babel’s grandson across Russia and Ukraine as he searches for his famous ancestor’s remains.
“I can read Babel’s work (I have), I can travel to Israel (I have, decades ago), I can take Hebrew as an elective in college (I did, not very well), I can read Chaim Potok (I have). But these are at their best, however well intentioned, tourist pursuits for one who is not Jewish,” he said. “I will never come close to knowing the true soul of a Jewish person. Thankfully, Rajiv has created this character that by his design, anyone can inhabit.”
Yasen Peyankov and James Vincent Meredith in a scene from the play about Isaac Babel. (Michael Brosilow)
He added that the play isn’t meant to be historically accurate. “The character of Isaac, as well as others in the play, is meant to be an entry point into a world where the scalpel crafting the ‘truth’ is rarely placed in the hands of those who are adversely affected by it. As a black male and father of a black male in the U.S., I’m certainly cognizant of that world.”
Joseph feels that he and other artists share the instinct Babel had to leave his comfort zone. He wanted to be a writer, but growing up in suburban Cleveland gave him little inspiration. After college, he joined the Peace Corps and spent three years in West Africa.
“That was a real life-changing event for me that opened my world and opened my mind,” Joseph said. “Not nearly as traumatic as traveling with the cavalry through Poland in 1920, but the same impulse to break out of your norms.”
Yet Joseph believes Babel’s desires went beyond pushing boundaries and into a deep, pathological need to associate with danger.
“The thing I find really interesting about Babel, both through his writing and through his personal life, is this inexorable draw towards danger and filth,” Joseph said, adding that Babel would hang out in taverns with Soviet soldiers, members of the secret police and executioners like Yezhov. “He was already treading on such thin ice. So he had a recklessness, you could call it a death wish if you want.”
Meredith was also stunned by the writer’s intense flirtations with danger.
“Why get that close to the flame? That to me is one of the things that really appealed to me about this guy,” Meredith said. “I tend to play it safe, as safe as an actor can play it, but I see this guy who had these kinds of desires, he had this quest to make this amazing art as far as his stories and I just I’m just so attracted to that.”
Joseph said he saw some parallels between Babel’s story and the exodus of some of his artistic peers in Russia, who have fled to Europe. In his time, Babel was seen as subversive by nature, existing as a Jewish man in early Soviet Russia. His relished writing about prostitutes and mobsters, transforming underworld characters into urban legends. His 1935 political play “Maria” was canceled during rehearsals and by 1939, Soviet police arrested him and confiscated his writing. Throughout the 1940s, his works disappeared from circulation. Though some believed Babel had spent time throughout that decade in a prison camp, the government had executed him in 1940.
“In the 1930s and ‘40s, I think if you are a Jewish creative writer, you’re automatically subversive,” Joseph said. He noted one pivotal scene where Nikolai Yezhov labels Babel as such because his writing portrays Russia as gloomy rather than inspiring.
“If you’re telling the truth, you are subversive,” Joseph added. “So I think that pretty much any creative writer worth his or her weight would be considered subversive at that moment.”
“Describe the Night” runs until April 9 at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago.
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Anti-Israel, Antisemitic Views of US Republicans Concentrated Among ‘New Entrants’ to Party, New Poll Finds
People gather for the UTEP chapter of Turning Point USA’s event featuring Border Czar Tom Homan on Dec. 4, 2025, at the UGLC on the UTEP campus in El Paso, Texas. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
A strong majority of Republicans in the US support Israel and reject antisemitism, but “new,” more liberal entrants to the party are more likely to hold an animus toward the Jewish state and tolerate antisemitic hatred, according to a major new survey.
The Manhattan Institute, a prominent US-based think tank, has released a new poll examining the evolving makeup of the Republican Party (GOP) and its current attitudes toward Israel and Jewish Americans.
The results show a GOP that still contains a strong, reliable core of pro-Israel voters, yet one that is increasingly fractured, with a growing minority expressing skepticism toward Israel or even openly hostile antisemitic views.
According to the poll, the majority of Republicans, defined as registered GOP voters or those who, regardless of party affiliation, voted for Donald Trump in 2024, remain consistently conservative on foreign policy and firmly supportive of Israel. The Manhattan Institute divided this group into two groups: “Core Republicans,” defined as “longstanding GOP voters who have consistently backed Republican presidential nominees since 2016 or earlier,” and “New Entrant Republicans,” defined as “recent first-time GOP presidential voters, including those who supported Democrats in 2016 or 2020 or were too young to vote in cycles before 2020.” The two blocs comprise about two-thirds and one-third of the GOP coalition, respectively.
Among the nearly 3,000 total respondents, 55 percent said that Israel is an “important and effective” US ally, while 23 percent said that Israel is “a country like any other” whose interests sometimes align with the US. An additional 12 percent agreed with a description of Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and a liability, indicating a heavy disdain for the Jewish state.
“New Entrant Republicans” perceive Israel in a far harsher light than the general GOP base, according to the data. Among this cohort, 24 percent see Israel as a “liability” while just 39 percent still consider Israel an important ally of the US.
Notably, old guard and newer members of the Republican Party have split perspectives on Qatar, with 41 percent of new entrants viewing the Middle Eastern country favorably compared to 23 percent of “core” Republicans.
The survey also delivers a stark warning about a troubling minority within the GOP and across the broader electorate that holds openly antisemitic views. According to the results, 17 percent of current Republicans can be categorized as “anti-Jewish,” defined as those who “self-identify as both racist and antisemitic and express Holocaust denial or describe Israel as a colonial state” or “do not self-identify that way but nevertheless hold both of those extreme positions.”
The Manhattan Institute found that newer entrants are more likely to be anti-Jewish.
“Anti-Jewish Republicans are typically younger, disproportionately male, more likely to be college-educated, and significantly more likely to be New Entrant Republicans,” the survey states. “They are also more racially diverse. Consistent church attendance is one of the strongest predictors of rejecting these attitudes; infrequent church attendance is, all else equal, one of the strongest predictors of falling into this segment.”
This group is also in general more politically liberal, according to the survey: “Given that many of these voters are younger and former Democrats, more progressive policy tendencies are unsurprising.”
Notably, the Manhattan Institute found slightly higher levels of anti-Jewish sentiment (20 percent) among Democrats.
Among newer Republicans, 38 percent believe that Jews are more loyal to a foreign country than the US, compared to 24 percent of more traditional Republicans.
The “new entrant bloc is more likely to express tolerance for racist or antisemitic speech, more likely to support political violence, more conspiratorial, and — on core policy questions — considerably more liberal than the party’s traditional base,” the Manhattan Institute writes. “These voters are drawn to Trump but are not reliably attached to the Republican Party.”
A key factor in the data is age, with the survey showing a major generational divide in which older GOP voters are much more supportive of Israel and less likely to express antisemitic views than their younger cohorts.
According to the data, 25 percent of GOP voters under 50 openly express antisemitic views as opposed to just 4 percent over the age of 50.
Startlingly, a substantial amount, 37 percent, of GOP voters indicate belief in Holocaust denialism. These figures are more pronounced among young men under 50, with a majority, 54 percent, agreeing that the Holocaust “was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.” Among men over 50, 41 percent agree with the sentiment. There are also substantial divisions among racial lines. Whopping amounts of black and Latino GOP voters, 66 percent and 77 percent, respectively, believe in Holocaust denialism. Thirty percent of white GOP voters deny or minimize the Holocaust, according to the Manhattan Institute.
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Neo-Nazis Deploy AI Apps as New Creative Weapons Against Jews, Watchdog Groups Reveal
Screenshots taken on Oct. 23, 2025, of three Sora videos created by user “Pablo Deskobar.”
Large language model (LLM) programs marketed as “artificial intelligence” have become common tools in the kits of online extremists advocating a genocide of the Jewish people, according to new research from longtime watchdogs of antisemitic hate groups and terrorist movements.
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released its report, “The Safety Divide: Open-Source AI Models Fall Short on Guardrails for Antisemitic, Dangerous Content,” which presented the results of testing 17 LLM models — including Google’s Gemma-3, Microsoft’s Phi-4, and Meta’s Llama 3 — which are available for anyone to download and customize to their preferences.
“The ability to easily manipulate open-source AI models to generate antisemitic content exposes a critical vulnerability in the AI ecosystem,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL. “The lack of robust safety guardrails makes AI models susceptible to exploitation by bad actors, and we need industry leaders and policymakers to work together to ensure these tools cannot be misused to spread antisemitism and hate.”
In addition to the “open source” models, the group’s researchers analyzed OpenAI’s “closed source” GPT-4o and GPT-5 as a comparison and reported a surprising finding.
“As suggested by previous research and data, OpenAI’s closed-source GPT-4o beat every open-source model (save gpt-oss-20b) in nearly every benchmark, compared to the next highest, the open-source Phi-4 with a score of .84,” the ADL researchers wrote. “GPT-5, in contrast, despite being a newer model than GPT-4o, had a lower guardrail score (.75 compared to .94), fewer refusals (69% compared to 82%), more harmful content (26% compared to 0%) and a higher evasion rate (6% compared to 1%).”
The analysts considered varying explanations for their findings including the possibility “that GPT-5 is designed for ‘safe completions’ (partial or high-level answers), leading to significantly fewer refusals than GPT-4o (e.g., 0% vs. 40% in one prompt). This also resulted in a change of tone. In Prompt 3, for example, GPT-4o started with a preamble about the sensitive nature of the topic, while GPT-5 usually omitted the warning, choosing instead to address and illustrate problematic tropes within the answer itself.”
The complexity of analyzing the LLM models and ambiguity of the results led the ADL to adopt a cautious tone and assess that “we cannot claim a strict linear boost in overall capability.”
“The decentralized nature of open-source AI presents both opportunities and risks,” said Daniel Kelley, director of the ADL’s Center for Technology and Society. “While these models increasingly drive innovation and provide cost-effective solutions, we must ensure they cannot be weaponized to spread antisemitism, hate, and misinformation that puts Jewish communities and others at risk.”
In its list of recommendations in response to the research findings, the ADL urged governments to “establish strict controls on open-source deployment in government settings, mandate safety audits and require collaboration with civil society experts, [and] require clear disclaimers for AI-generated content on sensitive topics.”
The ADL report came out a few days after the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) published a new analysis of how online neo-Nazi advocates have started to use AI models. The group described the discovery of custom AIs with names like “Fuhrer AI” and “Deep AI Adolf Hitler Chat” programmed to speak in the style of the Nazi leader and to promote his genocidal ideology.
“We are also witnessing the rise of a new digital infrastructure for hate. And it’s not just fringe actors,” Steven Stalinsky, executive director of MEMRI, and Simon Purdue, director of MEMRI’s Violent Extremism Threat Monitor project, wrote in their analysis. “State-aligned networks from Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea amplify this content using bots and fake accounts, sewing division, disinformation, and fear — all powered by AI. This is psychological warfare. And we are unprepared.”
Stalinsky and Purdue warned that “the threat isn’t hypothetical. We’ve been studying how extremists began experimenting with generative AI as early as 2022. Since then, the volume, coordination, and sophistication have grown dramatically.”
Analyzing the many dimensions of the threat posed by AI has recently drawn significant research attention from both the ADL and MEMRI, with the two groups findings’ complementing one another.
Last month, The Algemeiner reported on MEMRI’s in-depth analysis, “Artificial Intelligence and the New Era of Terrorism: An Assessment of How Jihadis Are Using AI to Expand Their Propaganda, Recruitment, and Operations and the Implications for National Security.” In October, the ADL released its report, “”Innovative AI Video Generators Produce Antisemitic, Hateful, and Violent Outputs.”
Meanwhile, Israel has begun moving quickly to integrate AI into its war plans.
Last week, the Israel Defense Forces announced its “Bina” initiative, named after the Hebrew word for “intelligence.” This restructuring and consolidating of Israeli military efforts in artificial intelligence-fueled warfare specifically aims to counter aggression from Iran, China, and Russia.
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Can Jewish tradition help you stay sane when all your bosses are ‘idiots’?
Dear Bintel,
My work colleagues and I need your help. Does Jewish tradition have anything to say about how not to lose your mind when all your bosses are idiots?
Signed,
Losing It
Dear Losing It,
Proverbs 29:2 sums up the impact of bad leadership on morale better than I can: “When a wicked man rules, the people groan.” Believe me, I can hear you and your colleagues groaning in response to every ridiculous email and edict from your inept employers.
The Bible is also full of stories about individuals saddled with work they neither want nor enjoy. Jeremiah is a reluctant prophet ordered to deliver messages nobody wants to hear. Jonah also pointed out the futility of his assignment, saying, essentially, “Why should I tell everyone they’re evil when they won’t listen?” Meanwhile, Moses tries to talk God out of giving him the task of leading the Jews out of Egypt.
And what does the Talmud have to say about all this? The sages portray pushback not as insubordination, but as part of the fundamental relationship between Jews and God: We have a responsibility to demand justice and challenge authority.
But how do you do it without getting fired? Speaking truth to power is an art. Nathan the prophet did it with panache: He got King David to see the error of his ways by relating a parable. When David noticed that the man in Nathan’s tale had transgressed, Nathan said to David, “You are the man!”
Now, I’m not saying your work life will improve if you tell your terrible bosses a story in which the villains are thinly veiled versions of themselves. Nor am I suggesting that you must endure 20 years of servitude, like Jacob did, in order to get some sheep and the woman of your dreams, or that you should argue about every single thing you’re asked to do, as did Moses.
But here’s an oft-quoted Talmudic saying that expresses one of Judaism’s guiding principles, and I think it’s relevant to your work-life quandary: “It is not up to you to complete the task, but neither are you free to avoid it.”
In other words, you aren’t responsible for fixing everything that’s wrong with your job. But you are required to make an effort.
What might that look like? How about cheerfully encouraging adherence to best practices by offering evidence-based recommendations? Or matter-of-factly questioning a pointless policy — without pointing fingers — by simply showing that it’s hurting the bottom line or creating delays?
Now I wouldn’t want you to get on the bosses’ bad side or put yourself in the firing line in the course of offering criticism veiled as new ideas. To help your cause, enlist trusted colleagues to backread that email before you send it, or ask others to jointly request a meeting to propose a new approach to something you’re aching to improve.
What if your suggestions and complaints go unheeded? The Talmud tells of a rabbi who predicts that those on the receiving end of his protests “will not accept the rebuke from me.”
Do it anyway, is the response: “Even though they will not accept it, the Master should rebuke them.”
Consider, too, this beautiful precept from the great philosopher Maimonides: “Each of us should see ourselves as if our next act could change the fate of the world.” Meaning that every small choice you make as you carry out your duties — rendering a compliment to an overwhelmed work friend, making a correction without judgment, sharing a shortcut with the team or listening to a colleague’s frustration — matters.
I truly believe that part of how we maintain our sanity in the face of incompetence or evil is by standing up for our own values, even when it seems pointless. If you subscribe to the notion that every righteous act we perform, no matter how small, contributes to repairing our broken world, and if you can truly believe in the power of individual good deeds, it will go a long way toward restoring your peace of mind.
Peace of mind can also come from the time-honored Jewish tradition of kibbitzing. If you don’t already have an online group on WhatsApp or Discord where you and your coworkers can kvetch as well as support each other away from the bosses’ gaze, start one. If your work is in-person, in the office, rather than remote, invite a couple of colleagues out for a beer or coffee or a meetup in the park.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t also serve up this oft-quoted Talmudic nugget: “A person should love work and not hate it.” The ancient rabbis believed work not only supports one’s material needs, but also provides dignity and self-worth — or so it should. If it’s impossible for you to love your work given your current situation; if you can’t bear the thought of sticking it out the way Jacob did; and if you don’t feel motivated enough to push back one small act at a time, as Maimonides advised, well then, you could always go all out and confront those idiotic bosses head on.
Of course, if you do that, they might hand you your walking papers. Then again, maybe being forced to look for a new job isn’t the worst thing that could happen given your disdain for your situation. Maybe you’re thinking of quitting anyway — and maybe that’s not a bad idea. As a more contemporary Jewish sage, Bob Dylan, once said, “All you can do is do what you must.”
Signed,
Bintel
What do you think? Send your comments to bintel@forward.com or send in a question of your own.
This is Beth Harpaz’s final column for Bintel Brief. She managed and wrote for the column from 2022 to 2025.
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