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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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‘Call for Division’: Australian Muslim Council Sparks Outrage Over Push to Block Israeli President’s Visit
People stand near flowers laid as a tribute at Bondi Beach to honor the victims of a mass shooting that targeted a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Sunday, in Sydney, Australia, Dec. 16, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) has come under widespread scrutiny after seeking to block Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s visit to Australia to commemorate the victims of the Bondi Beach massacre, a move that Jewish leaders have denounced as a “call for division.”
In a press release, ANIC called on Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to revoke next month’s invitation for the Israeli leader to visit Sydney, where he intends to honor the victims of the deadly attack on a Hanukkah celebration that killed 15 people and injured at least 40 others.
ANIC accused Herzog of being “implicated in widespread war crimes and breaches of international law” amid Israel’s defensive war against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza, adding he should not be “welcomed or afforded legitimacy” in Australia.
“The president is directly implicated in grave war crimes and acts of genocide against the Palestinian people, including the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of Gaza, and the expansion of illegal settlements,” the Islamic body wrote in a post on X.
“While ANIC stands in solidarity with the Jewish community and mourns the victims of the horrific Bondi terrorist attack, accountability and justice must not be compromised,” the statement read.
ANIC Statement on NSW Protest Legislation and Invitation to the President of Israel
The Australian National Imams Council (ANIC) is extremely disappointed and expresses serious concern over the NSW Government’s new legislation introduced following the Bondi terrorist attack,… pic.twitter.com/ZW6MhVnIDc
— Australian National Imams Council (@ImamsCouncil) December 26, 2025
With Herzog having already accepted the invitation, Albanese is now facing growing pressure and criticism from politicians and Jewish leaders to oppose ANIC’s call to block the Israeli leader’s visit, planned for early next year in a show of solidarity with the Jewish community.
David Ossip, president of the New South Wales (NSW) Jewish Board of Deputies, condemned ANIC’s latest statement.
“It’s so disappointing to hear calls for division just as Australians want this to be a time for unity,” Ossip said in a statement.
“Australia has been attacked, and its citizens have been slaughtered on the beach. Many countries, quite rightly, want to show their solidarity with us at this time. Let them,” he continued.
In its statement, ANIC also denounced the NSW government’s new laws that expand police powers and curb protests in the wake of the Bondi Beach massacre, describing the demonstrations under scrutiny as “an act of solidarity for Palestinians.”
“There is no evidence to suggest that peaceful protest … has any connection to the Bondi terrorist attack,” the statement read.
“ANIC is concerned that the legislation conflates lawful, peaceful protest with terrorism and acts of violence … increases social division rather than strengthening cohesion, and threatens fundamental democratic freedoms and rights,” it continued.
As the local Jewish community continues to grapple with a shocking surge in violence and targeted attacks, the Australian government has been pursuing a series of firearm reforms, including a national gun buyback and limits on the number of firearms an individual can own.
Last week, NSW passed its own legislation further restricting firearm ownership, granting local police greater powers to limit protests for up to three months, and outlawing the public display of flags and symbols associated with designated terrorist organizations such as Hamas.
In the aftermath of the Bondi beach attack, Australia’s rabbis urged Albanese to establish a federal Royal Commission into antisemitism — a formal public inquiry empowered to investigate, make recommendations, and propose legislative measures to also address the issue.
“We have sat with grieving families. We have visited the injured. We have stood with children who no longer feel safe walking to school. We have watched members of our communities withdraw from public spaces, universities, and civic life out of fear,” the Rabbinical Association of Australia wrote in a letter.
“We are demanding nothing less than the banning of [anti-Israel] marches and demonstrations, and the criminalization of the phrases ‘death to the IDF,’ ‘globalize the intifada,’ and ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’ This is not an abstract concern. It is a lived reality,” the letter added, referencing three popular chants among anti-Israel activists that have been widely interpreted as a call for violence against both Jews and Israelis.
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Iran Protests Escalate as Pressure Mounts on Regime
Protesters march in downtown Tehran, Iran, Dec. 29, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Iran is again in motion. Four days of strikes and protests have unfolded across the country, from Tehran to Mashhad, from Isfahan to Kermanshah, from Shiraz to Arak, since Sunday.
In Fasa, in Fars province, protesters broke through the gates of the governor’s office on Wednesday and attacked a government building, an act that carries weight in a system built on the choreography of fear. Each day has brought new reports, new cities, new confrontations. Each day has also revived the familiar, painful question: Could this finally be the moment when the Islamic Republic loses its grip?
The protests did not begin as a single ideological uprising. They emerged from economic pressure and daily suffocation. Bazaar merchants, money changers, workers, and ordinary residents reacted to a currency in freefall, to inflation that devours salaries, to a state that extracts obedience while offering little in return. Students have since joined. Chants have hardened. Anger has spread geographically and socially.
These details matter. In Iran, unrest confined to campuses can be isolated. Unrest that reaches bazaars, provincial towns, and state offices strains a different set of nerves.
Even figures within the system acknowledge this fragility. Fatemeh Maghsoudi, a spokesperson for the Economic Committee of the Iranian Parliament, said last week that the collapse of the rial owed less to any concrete economic development than to an atmosphere of fear driven by the prospect of conflict, remarking that when US President Donald Trump so much as tells Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “let’s go and have a coffee,” the exchange rate suddenly collapses. And when Netanyahu makes any statement, Maghsoudi added, prices in the market immediately rise, despite the fact that nothing substantive had changed in Iran’s economy.
Yet the regime, too, is moving. According to the Iran specialist Kasra Aarabi, sources inside the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) indicate that the state has raised its internal threat posture to a “yellow” level, defined as an abnormal situation within a four-tier (white, yellow, orange, and red) national security system. That architecture, built methodically since 2007, reaches into every province, city, district, and neighborhood.
Under higher threat levels, layers of security are activated: checkpoints, patrols, phone searches, internet restrictions, Basij deployments down to the street and apartment block. When a “red” level is declared, infantry units fold into domestic suppression, and the IRGC’s operational security headquarters assume sweeping authority over provincial life. This apparatus exists for one purpose. It has been used before. It has not yet fractured.
History teaches restraint in moments like this. The 1979 revolution did not triumph because crowds filled streets for a few dramatic days. It succeeded because strikes paralyzed oil production, administrative systems failed, and elite loyalty dissolved under sustained pressure. Today’s thresholds have not yet been crossed. There is no confirmed nationwide shutdown of core industries. There is no evidence of defection within the IRGC or the regular military. There is no alternative authority capable of coordinating power. These absences do not negate the tremendous courage of those protesting. They define the uncertainty of what comes next.
The international environment sharpens that uncertainty. Speaking in Florida alongside Netanyahu this week, Trump warned that Iran may be attempting to rebuild its nuclear program after US strikes in June damaged three nuclear facilities. His language was characteristically blunt. Any renewed nuclear buildup would invite rapid eradication. Missile production, too, was placed under explicit threat. The message was typically blunt. Negotiations remain open. Deadlines, Trump reminded his audience, have consequences.
The last time Trump issued a deadline to Iran, he gave Tehran 60 days to reach an agreement over its nuclear program. When that deadline expired, Israeli strikes followed the very next day, with clear US permission.
Strikingly, this convergence of internal unrest and external pressure has received only limited attention in much of the international media, treated as background noise rather than as a meaningful shift. The result is a failure to register how significant it could be for economic protest, regional spread, and explicit great-power deadlines to coincide in Iran like this.
For Tehran, this external pressure intersects dangerously with internal unrest. The regime faces a population increasingly willing to test red lines and a strategic environment in which miscalculation could invite devastating force. It is within this context that documented evidence from IRGC-linked academic institutions should be noted with great concern: the development of incapacitating chemical agents, including medetomidine and fentanyl derivatives, appear to have been adapted for crowd control munitions. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests of 2022, demonstrators described effects inconsistent with standard CS gas. The implication is grim: The state has invested not only in batons and bullets, but in yet more insidious, chemical tools of repression.
And still, hope persists. It persists among Iranians chanting on rooftops and in streets. It persists among families who have buried the dead and returned anyway. It persists across the Iranian diaspora, for whom memory and longing blur into expectation. Each cycle of protest carries the belief that this time the accumulation of anger, courage, and exhaustion might finally converge. Each cycle also carries the memory of how brutally that belief has been punished before.
Prediction is a temptation best resisted. Revolutions are legible only in retrospect. While they unfold, they present as disorder, hesitation, advance, and retreat. What can be said is narrower and more honest. The protests of these four days show breadth, persistence, and a willingness to confront symbols of authority. The regime’s response shows preparedness, experience, and an arsenal refined over decades. Between these forces lies a struggle whose outcome remains unwritten.
The future of Iran will be decided neither by foreign speeches nor by analytical frameworks alone. It will be decided by whether pressure can move from streets into the systems that allow the state to function, by whether fear can be transferred from society back to those who govern it, by whether the machinery of repression can be strained beyond its capacity. Those conditions may yet emerge. They may also recede.
For now, Iran stands in that familiar, aching space between possibility and reprisal. The chants rise. The checkpoints loom. The world watches, hoping, doubting, fearing. The question remains suspended, unanswered and unavoidable: How many times can a people rise before rising becomes irreversible?
Jonathan Sacerdoti, a writer and broadcaster, is now a contributor to The Algemeiner.
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Julius Berman, Orthodox rabbi whose influence spanned secular and observant Jewish institutions, dies at 90
Rabbi Julius Berman, who led the Orthodox Union and a myriad of other prominent Jewish communal organizations across the Orthodox and secular Jewish world, has died at 90.
Born in Lithuania in 1935 to Rabbi Henoch and Sarah Berman, Berman immigrated with his family to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940 where he was among the first graduating class of the Yeshiva of Hartford.
Berman received his bachelor’s degree from Yeshiva University in 1956 and his rabbinic ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University in 1959. In 1960, he graduated first in his class from New York University School of Law.
Berman joined the New York City law firm Kaye Scholer in 1959, where he was a pioneer for observant Jews in the city’s legal world.
But while Berman went on to be an accomplished partner at Kaye Scholer, it was his extensive leadership at some of the largest Jewish communal organizations in the United States that defined his broader legacy.
“Though I am not equipped to psychoanalyze myself, it is very possible that my decision to go into a legal career rather than the Rabbinate had a role to play in my decision to immerse myself into Jewish communal matters,” said Berman in a 2006 interview with the Yeshiva University Commentator. “In any case, I have been heavily involved in communal work my entire adult life.”
Over the span of his career, Berman served in leadership positions at the Orthodox Union, Yeshiva University, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and over a dozen other Jewish communal organizations.
Early in his career, Berman became the president of the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs, or COLPA, a legal group that represents the Orthodox Jewish community.
Dennis Rapps, who was hired as COLPA’s executive director in 1970, described Berman as a personal mentor and a “sought-after participant” in Jewish communal life.
“He was a member and active participant in many of the leading Jewish organizations,” Rapps said. “I think the respect that people had for him cut across a broad swath of the Jewish community, he got along with everybody, and people respected him for his intellect and for his selflessness, and he was a real nice guy.”
Following his work with COLPA, Berman went on to serve as the president of the Orthodox Union from 1978 to 1984, later serving as the longtime chairman of the organization’s Kashrut Commission and OU press. In an obituary for Berman, the Orthodox Union described Berman as “one of the most significant lay leaders of twentieth-century Orthodoxy.”
“He was a gracious, generous person,” Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union Kosher Division, told JTA. “Whenever we had a kashrus meeting, or any other kind of meeting, everybody ultimately would defer to Julie Berman.”
Berman was also a longtime devotee of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the spiritual leader of Modern Orthodoxy in the 20th century and longtime lecturer at Yeshiva University who ordained close to 2,000 rabbis.
“He was a devoted disciple of Rabbi Soloveitchik, and Soloveitchik had a very, very high regard for him,” said Genack. “If he had issues, if he wanted to consult someone, amongst them was always Julie Berman.”
In 1982, Berman also was elected as the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. He also served as chairman of the board at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary.
“God was good to him in terms of his talent, and he used it,” said Rapps. “He was really, basically one of a kind, extremely bright, I think fearless and very dedicated to doing what he thought had to be done. He was a remarkable guy.”
Berman also served as the longtime chairman of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or Claims Conference, where he was widely credited for expanding restitution for survivors worldwide. His time at the Claims Conference was later shadowed by controversy in 2009 after a $57 million fraud scheme orchestrated by an employee sparked criticism of the organization’s governance.
“Rabbi Julius Berman was a towering moral leader whose life’s work helped shape the global landscape of Holocaust survivor care, restitution, and Jewish communal life,” said Greg Schneider, the executive vice president of the Claims Conference in a statement. “A brilliant legal mind and widely respected Torah scholar, he was typically the smartest person in the room, while his sharp intellect was always matched by profound compassion. Julie led with unwavering integrity, grounding his leadership in the dignity of survivors, an abiding love for the Jewish people and a profound sense of responsibility to future generations. We are deeply grateful for his guidance, and he will be deeply missed by all who had the privilege to know him.”
Berman also formerly served as the president of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency from 1989 until its merger with its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
“I loved and always valued my discussions with Julie Berman, first as a reporter talking (often on background) to a source and later as a CEO seeking sage advice from a former board president,” said Ami Eden, the CEO and executive editor of 70 Faces Media, in a statement. “He was passionate about his beliefs and causes, super sharp and never shy about telling you if and why he disagreed.”
Berman is survived by his wife Dorothy Berman, and his children and their spouses, Zev and Judy Berman, Myra and Simcha Aminsky and Eli and Miriam Berman. His funeral will be held Thursday at Young Israel of Jamaica Estates in Hollis, New York.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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