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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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The post The legacy of Isaac Babel, Russia’s Jewish Hemingway, is dissected in new Chicago play appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Trump Labels Carlson a ‘Low-IQ Person’ After Criticism on Iran, Says ‘I Don’t Respond to His Calls’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
President Donald Trump on Tuesday lambasted far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson, one of his longtime supporters turned outspoken critic, as the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran continued to fragment online discourse among right-wing influencers.
“Tucker’s a low-IQ person that has absolutely no idea what’s going on,” Trump said in an interview with New York Post national security reporter Caitlin Doornbos when asked about Carlson’s condemnations of his Easter message promising massive destruction on Iran.
“He calls me all the time; I don’t respond to his calls. I don’t deal with him,” Trump said of Carlson. “I like dealing with smart people, not fools.”
On Monday, in his continued efforts to frame himself as a devout defender of Christian faith, Carlson released a more than two-hour long podcast on X and YouTube, announcing it by saying that “desecrating Easter was the first step toward nuclear war. Christians need to understand where Trump is taking us.”
Carlson took issue in part with Trump’s social media post the prior day, Easter Sunday, issuing a warning to the Iranian regime.
“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the F**kin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah,” Trump posted, referring to the Strait of Hormuz, a critical waterway for global shipping that Iran has effectively closed amid conflict with the US and Israel.
In addition to attacking the president, Carlson criticized multiple faith traditions and Christian Zionist religious figures including White House senior adviser Paula White and Franklin Graham, CEO of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) and of Samaritan’s Purse. Carlson also maligned the megachurch movement and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He has previously called Christian Zionism a heresy and said that he disliked its proponents “more than anybody,” remarks for which he later offered an apology.
Carlson’s 40-minute opening monologue framed his opposition to Trump in theological terms, asserting that Christians should have opposed the president’s effort to seize Venezuela’s oil, saying, “That’s not acceptable for Christians. In fact, that’s unacceptable for Americans or any civilized people because taking other people’s stuff by force cannot be allowed.” Carlson called Trump’s decision wrong “under the American legal code, but it’s also wrong under the Christian legal code.”
Carlson also argued that during Trump’s inauguration, he didn’t take the oath of office with his hand on the Bible.
“That should have been maybe a clue that we need to pause and think about,” the online media personality added, claiming it “became clear that maybe [Trump] didn’t put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively rejects what’s inside that book. And what’s inside that book are limits on human behavior.”
Carlson condemned Trump’s Truth Social posting on Sunday, calling his words “maybe the most real thing this president has ever done and also the most revealing on every level. It is vile on every level.”
On Sunday, former US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) also used religious rhetoric to reject Trump’s use of the phrase “Praise be to Allah,” which appeared to be in jest.
“Everyone in his administration that claims to be a Christian needs to fall on their knees and beg forgiveness from God and stop worshipping the President and intervene in Trump’s madness,” Greene wrote on X in a post that has since received over 9.6 million views. “I know all of you and him and he has gone insane, and all of you are complicit. I’m not defending Iran but let’s be honest about all of this.”
Greene then referenced the Strait of Hormuz, arguing it’s closed “because the US and Israel started the unprovoked war against Iran based on the same nuclear lies they’ve been telling for decades, that any moment Iran would develop a nuclear weapon. You know who has nuclear weapons? Israel. They are more than capable of defending themselves without the US having to fight their wars, kill innocent people and children, and pay for it.”
Returning to religion, Greene wrote “our President is not a Christian and his words and actions should not be supported by Christians. Christians in the administration should be pursuing peace.”
On Tuesday, Greene called for members of the cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution to remove Trump from power following his threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back.”
Far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has also advocated Trump’s removal, asking a guest on his Monday InfoWars podcast, “How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” On March 31, Jones said that Trump “does look sick … the brain’s not doing too hot. And so, we just cut bait on Trump, and we just mobilize against the Democrats.”
Other influential far-right media figures who previously spent years boosting Trump have also now called for his removal. On Tuesday in response to the same Trump threat, far-right podcaster Candace Owens wrote that “the 25th amendment needs to be invoked. He is a genocidal lunatic. Our Congress and military need to intervene. We are beyond madness.”
The 25th Amendment states that if key government leaders determine that the president is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” then the vice president “shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as acting president.”
On Tuesday, conservative radio host Mark Levin labeled those calling for the 25th Amendment’s use as “the Woke Reich neo-fascists.”
Owens had reposted Carlson’s podcast condemning Trump.
On Sunday in response to Trump’s post, Owens wrote on X in a post seen by at least 3.8 million people that “this is a satanic administration. We all realize that satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress needs to move to have the Mad King Trump removed.” She added, “All of our lives may depend upon other countries realizing that Trump is deeply unwell and surrounded by religious fanatics who have convinced him that he is a messiah. We are in uncharted territory. Leaders worldwide need to act accordingly.”
On Tuesday, Owens accused Trump of involvement in the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Resharing an X posting by Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian asserting his willingness to die in defense of the Islamic regime, Owens wrote, “The Iranian President tweets that he is willing [to] sacrifice his own life for his people. Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice Charlie Kirk and is willing to sacrifice every American life and livelihood for Greater Israel. Who is the animal again?”
Joe Kent, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center and a conspiracy theorist ally of Owens, wrote on Tuesday in response to Trump’s threats of civilizational eradication that the president “believes he is threatening Iran with destruction, but it is America that now stands in danger. If he attempts to eradicate Iranian civilization, the United States will no longer be viewed as a stabilizing force in the world, but as an agent of chaos — effectively ending our status as the world’s greatest superpower.”
Kent reposted Carlson’s podcast too and came under fire from CNN’s Jake Tapper for also sharing Iranian propaganda falsely suggesting that the United States intentionally sought to kill its own downed pilot rather than rescue him.
Ann Coulter, the right-wing polemicist who authored 2016’s In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, has also turned against the president, writing on Tuesday that “Trump is going to set off the wildest rush for nuclear weapons the world has ever seen. Should go well.”
Coulter wrote in response to Trump’s Sunday message: “I really wish ‘legal experts’ hadn’t screamed bloody murder about every little thing Trump did, so they could speak with authority now that he’s actually committing war crimes.”
Antisemitic podcaster Nick Fuentes has also jumped on board the anti-Trump bandwagon.
“I’ve been saying this for the past couple of days: You have to understand that all Trump does is lie. It’s by design. This is the function of rhetoric from the White House,” Fuentes said on April 1 on his Rumble show. “But that’s the Trump doctrine, which is you flood the zone, you saturate the information space with disinformation or contradictory information, and the purpose of it is to throw your enemies and even your allies off balance.”
Fuentes added, “We are stuck. We made an attempt to destroy the Iranian regime and we failed. We took a shot and we missed. And what this has allowed Iran to do is seize the Strait of Hormuz and take a fifth of the world’s energy hostage. And we have no ability to take it back. Because the regime survived, it is now actually stronger. So, it’s not going anywhere. And what’s more, Iran prepared for exactly this scenario.”
Fuentes’ so-called “Groyper” movement promotes antisemitism, racism, rape, and support for Hamas. Proponents seek to infiltrate the Republican Party and subvert it from within, a tactic Fuentes has instructed. Conservative journalist Rod Dreher reported in The Free Press that his sources have told him that approximately 30-40 percent of Gen-Z Republican staffers sympathized with Groyperism.
While initial polling showed firm Republican support for Trump and Israel’s efforts to crush the Islamic regime in Iran, new research indicates diminished enthusiasm. A poll from YouGov and The Economist released on March 31 showed that while 62 percent of Republicans supported the conflict, that figure divided between pro-MAGA Republicans (79 percent) and non-MAGA Republicans (33 percent.) Self-proclaimed MAGA Republicans comprise roughly twice the number of non-MAGA Republicans.
Polling also shows that a majority of younger Republicans, a cohort more heavily influenced by Owens and Fuentes, now reject the war, with only 49 percent supporting Trump’s actions.
Tuesday wasn’t the first time that Trump blasted Carlson.
“Tucker has lost his way,” the president told ABC’s Jonathan Karl last month. “MAGA is saving our country. MAGA is making our country great again. MAGA is America first, and Tucker is none of those things. And Tucker is really not smart enough to understand that.”
Carlson told Status News editor Oliver Darcy that “there are times I get annoyed with Trump, right now definitely included. But I’ll always love him no matter what he says about me.”
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Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews
President Donald Trump has backed himself into a corner on Iran. His increasingly apocalyptic threats — including a Tuesday morning social media post that warned “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not accede to his terms — make that much clear. Trump is looking for any way out of this war that will let him not just avoid blame, but claim superiority.
One uncomfortable possibility for how he might do so: follow the lead of far-right pundits, and pivot to blame the Jews.
We know how Trump handles failure. The 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn? shows a 20-something Trump learning his strategies at the knee of the late, disgraced titular attorney, who instructed him never to admit error or accept responsibility for his failures. “Donald Trump is Roy Cohn,” Matt Tyrnauer, the documentary’s director, told NPR.
The techniques break down to this: deflect, attack, deny.
Trump has tried a combination of them as the war has defied a quick conclusion. He has denied reality, declaring victory two weeks ago. He has lashed out at the media for supposedly undermining the war effort through clear-eyed reporting, going so far as to have the FCC threaten to revoke broadcast licenses for war coverage he finds objectionable. He promised in an Easter Sunday message to bomb civilian infrastructure if Iran doesn’t “open the f— Strait” of Hormuz to maritime traffic.
But what if ramping up attacks won’t work? What if it becomes impossible to deny reality, as gas prices soar higher, American casualties pile up, and taxpayers see themselves shelling out more billions for a war they don’t understand?
Trump could look into a camera and tell the American people that he miscalculated. That the buck stops with him, and that as commander in chief he and he alone made the decision to go to war, and the war’s successes and failures are on him.
Or he could turn back to the first of those Cohn strategies, and deflect. And the easiest culprit to deflect blame to is, clearly, Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has long pushed for a military strike on Iran. And a subset of erstwhile Trump supporters, including commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens — both of whom have long records of spreading antisemitism — have been laying the groundwork for Trump to take advantage of that widely known fact for a last, desperate bit of narrative spin. They and their ilk have claimed that Israel and its American Jewish supporters, including, bizarrely, Chabad, pushed Trump into the unpopular war. Trump could easily slide into the nefarious narrative they have prepared for him, and cast himself as the innocent manipulated by a foreign government and its American agents.
The consequences of the president of the United States placing the blame for what could be an unpopular, failed, costly and deadly war on Israel and, by extension, Jewish Americans, are unforeseeable, and existentially frightening. They are also consequences that, given Trump’s track record, we need to consider.
Because here’s what we know about Trump: He has never accepted blame for anything during his presidency.
Confronted in 2020 with the suggestion that his administration had failed to effectively address the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Trump said, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all,” then blamed former President Barack Obama. When his ill-conceived tariffs sent the stock market into a nosedive, forcing the administration to reverse course and pause the tariff to avoid a market collapse, Trump and his spokespeople said that was the plan all along. “I know what the hell I’m doing,” he said. While 48% of Americans blame Trump for the spike in gas prices since the start of the Iran war, he has deflected, posting that the increase is “a very small price to pay… only fools would think differently!”
If Trump wants to get out of the war without following through on his threats to commit mass war crimes — which, despite his evident glee in playing bully, he may — he will need to cast blame in a way that makes him look like the reasonable party.
To those Jewish Trump supporters who think there is no way Trump would throw Israel, and by extension Jews, under the bus, consider this — he’s already tried.
After Israel’s March attack on an Iranian natural gas facility, which outraged Gulf allies and sent gas prices soaring, Trump claimed the U.S. “knew nothing” about the Israeli plans. But Israeli and American officials later confirmed that was a lie, and that Trump himself “green-lit” the operation.
Trump hung Israel out to dry once, and it’s far from inconceivable that he could try again.
Never mind that blaming Israel would make no sense. Successive administrations, including the first Trump administration, chose not to pursue wars with Iran because, well, the U.S. can freely choose when and when not to go to war — and Trump is the decider. Netanyahu has not been the world leader threatening civilizational destruction on Truth Social. And American Jews, crucially, oppose the current war. According to a GBAO Strategies poll commissioned by J Street, 60% of American Jews opposed U.S. military intervention in Iran.
But think of how easy it would be for Trump to, say, announce that the U.S. has accomplished its goals, then suggest Israel has been holding out for more wins, and that he’s told Netanyahu the U.S. is done fighting on Israel’s behalf?
If Trump were to go there, it wouldn’t be the first time Jews found themselves blamed for an unpopular war. The first Russian-language editions of the antisemitic forgeries The Protocols of the Elders of Zion sought to scapegoat the Jews for the country’s 1905 defeat in the Russo-Japanese war. Following World War I, German antisemites promulgated the “stab-in-the-back” myth that Jews and Communists conspired to undermine the war effort.
American Jews and their institutions, already targeted as a result of the Gaza war and increasingly unhinged right-wing antisemitism, could be put in even greater danger by the president’s lifelong inability to take responsibility for the consequences of his decisions. To quote Trump, only fools would think differently.
The post Trump is backed into a corner on Iran. Get ready for him to start blaming Jews appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Calls on Children, Civilians to Form Human Shields Around Power Plants Amid Trump Threats
Iranian citizens, including children, form a human chain around a power plant in Tehran on April 7, 2026, as officials urge civilians to protect key infrastructure amid rising tensions with the US and Israel. Photo: Screenshot
Iranian authorities have urged children, teenagers, and civilians to gather around power plants and other sensitive sites to serve as human shields, in an apparent effort to raise the cost of potential US and Israeli strikes on Iran’s infrastructure.
The call came as US President Donald Trump’s deadline of Tuesday night for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and accept a ceasefire proposal rapidly approached.
Trump previously warned that if Iran refused to reopen the strait — a critical global shipping chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to international waters, through which about one-fifth of the world’s oil flows — US strikes would destroy the country’s key infrastructure, including bridges and energy facilities including power plants.
“We have a plan according to which every bridge in Iran will be destroyed and every power plant will be bombed by midnight. It will happen within 4 hours if we want,” Trump said during a press conference on Monday.
Trump appeared to escalate his threats on Tuesday.
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social website.
“However,” he added, “now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”
In response, Iranian officials issued stark warnings that, should the strikes on Iranian soil go ahead, Tehran would retaliate by targeting infrastructure and other civilian sites in Gulf states hosting US forces, risking a broader escalation across the region.
Even as negotiations remain formally underway, Iranian officials signaled little change in their stance, insisting that Washington’s demands and tone “have not changed” amid ongoing conflict.
“There are no negotiations with the US, which wants Iran to collapse under pressure. We will show flexibility after we see flexibility from the US,” an Iranian official told Reuters.
“Iran will not open [the Strait of Hormuz] in exchange for empty promises,” he continued.
With tensions now approaching a breaking point, Iranian government and military officials have publicly urged civilians to gather near key infrastructure sites to act as a deterrent against potential airstrikes.
During a televised speech on Monday, Alireza Rahimi, Iran’s deputy minister of youth affairs, urged citizens to join the “Iranian youth’s human chain for a bright tomorrow” by gathering around power plants to serve as human shields.
“I call on all youth, athletes, artists, university students, and professors to gather tomorrow, Tuesday, at 2 pm, and form a circle around our power plants, which are national assets and the nation’s capital,” Rahimi said.
“Come regardless of political views, because these facilities belong to the Iranian youth and their future. Let the world see that targeting civilian infrastructure is a war crime,” he continued.
Old habits die hard.
In the Iran-Iraq War, this regime deployed children with plastic keys to heaven against Iraqi machine gun fire and to clear minefields. This is a regime which also deployed Iranian and Afghan children alongside the Basij to fight in the Syrian Civil War. https://t.co/vfR3iqZnG5
— Behnam Ben Taleblu بهنام بن طالب لو (@therealBehnamBT) April 7, 2026
In a separate televised message, Hossein Yekta, a commander in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), addressed parents directly and urged them to send their children to sensitive locations and checkpoints.
“Send the children to the checkpoints so they can become men,” he said.
The regime’s use of human shields appears to extend beyond minors, with reports indicating that political prisoners and dual nationals are also being positioned near sensitive sites as part of broader deterrence efforts.
Last month, the IRGC officially lowered the minimum age for war‑related roles to 12 as part of a campaign recruiting children to serve as “Homeland‑Defending Combatants for Iran,” assigning them to patrols, checkpoints, and logistics duties.
For years, Iran has drafted children under 18 into the Basij militia, with Human Rights Watch documenting boys as young as 14 years old killed in combat, revealing a brutal pattern of exploiting children on the battlefield.