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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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Benjamin Disraeli once saved Britain’s monarchy — the current one may be beyond repair
Not a bad send-off for a commoner whose family’s religion still prevented them from holding political office or attending Oxford or Cambridge up until the second half of the century.
This was the reason why the young Disraeli was baptized in the Church of England. His father, a prominent literary scribbler, thought this would ease his son’s way in society. Little did he know how far and fast this would happen.
Starting in his early twenties, Disraeli began to write wildly romantic (and self-promoting) novels, several of which star a brilliant and, predictably, mysterious hero named Sidonia, who prides himself, as did his (possibly mistakenly) creator, on his Sephardic ancestry. Disraeli uses Sidonia to turn the era’s racial prejudices inside out, having him wax on the brilliance of his race’s civilization while the ancestors of the British aristocracy were still mucking about as “Baltic pirates” and “tattooed savages.”
Similarly, when the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell made an antisemitic slur against the twenty-something Disraeli, the latter — in a fashion worthy of Sidonia — declared “Yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” He then challenged O’Connell to a duel, which was happily quashed by the police.
With the same alchemical genius that transmuted the alleged dross of Jewishness into the gold of racial superiority, Disraeli launched his political career, making his way to become leader, rather remarkably, of the Tory conservatives rather than the liberal Whigs. He persuaded his party’s mostly well-born and dull-witted members to embrace both political reform — the Torys pushed through the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which dramatically extended voting rights — and progressive social and economic reforms during his second term as prime minister.
But Disraeli’s most remarkable achievement was not a matter of political or social reform but of monarchical reinvention. It was, quite literally, spectacular and starred the woman now known as the “widow of Windsor.” Following the premature death of her beloved Prince Albert, the stricken Victoria withdrew from public life and turned inward. Grieving and always garbed in black, she ignored her ceremonial duties, often seeking refuge in distant Scotland at her Balmoral estate.
In an echo of the British Crown’s current crisis, republican voices in Parliament began to question the immense sums spent on the monarchy while those on the street began to ridicule the queen. On a sign pinned to the gate at Buckingham Palace, one wag had written: “These premises to be let or sold, the late occupant having retired from business.” For the British public, it felt increasingly as if they were paying a lifelong subscription to a show that had permanently closed.
As a result, when Disraeli reached “the top of the greasy pole” upon becoming prime minister in 1868, his overriding concern was to cultivate his ties with the sovereign. As he confided to the poet Mathew Arnold, “everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”
The newly arrived prime minister was as good as his word. As he wrote in his first message to the queen, “Mr. Disraeli with his humble duty to Your Majesty. He ventures to express his sense of Your Majesty’s most gracious kindness to him and of the high honour which Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him. He can offer only devotion.”
Swept off her feet by such declarations of devotion, Victoria described her new prime minister as “her kind, good, considerate friend.” She allowed her friend unprecedented privileges, such as front row seats for him and his wife for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and even more shockingly, the permission to sit during their frequent private audiences, though he insisted on standing.
Disraeli continued to lay it on thick over the course of their relationship. “If your Majesty is ill,” he wrote in the third person during a political crisis, “he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty.”
“He lives for Her,” he continued, “works only for Her, and without Her all is lost.”
Okay, even “thick” fails to describe Disraeli’s flattery. But here is the vital point: his conversations and correspondence with Victoria, while over-the-top, were also sincere. He was impressed by her character and her capacity to represent the nation. The future of Great Britain, he believed, depended on a vibrant and visible monarchy, one in which Victoria would of course play the starring role.
Deeply moved by Disraeli’s attention, the queen was drawn out of her shell of mourning. “After the long gloom of her bereavement,” Lytton Strachey wrote in his biography of Victoria, “she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.” Gradually, this expansion was not just private and emotional, but also political and ceremonial.
In fact, Disraeli did not distinguish between the two. The imperial and spectacle were one and the same. In 1876, this conviction led him, with the Queen’s delighted complicity, to push a bill through Parliament that bestowed upon Victoria the title of Empress of India. Rather than pause her ceremonial ambitions in the years following Disraeli’s death, Victoria doubled down on her mentor’s playbook. She orchestrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and then years later, her Diamond Jubilee.
With these earlier spectacles in mind, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter continued the tradition, with stunning success, not just with the first two jubilees, but adding, shortly before her death, the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. And yet, that triumph was soon followed by Elizabeth’s death and the diminishment if not death of the monarchy, in part thanks to Andrew’s abhorrent antics.
“A man’s fate,” Disraeli once remarked, “is his own temper.” But now, the fate of the very monarchy Disraeli helped build hangs in the balance — a turn of events that perhaps even he could not solve.
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Israeli bobsled squad is disqualified from Olympics after trying to swap in Druze teammate
(JTA) — The Israeli bobsled team’s historic journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics ended in anything but storybook fashion on Sunday, as Israel’s own Olympic committee withdrew it from competition after learning that the team had lied about a member’s health.
The withdrawal meant that Israel did not compete in the four-man race on Sunday, the final day of competition in Milan and Cortina.
After finishing the first two heats of the four-man bobsled race as the slowest team, Israel planned to swap out Uri Zisman for team alternate Ward Farwasy, who would have become Israel’s first-ever Druze Olympian had he taken the ice.
But bobsled substitutions are only permitted in the event of an athlete’s injury or illness, so Zisman had agreed to lie and tell officials he was sick. He had reportedly obtained a medical certification for the false story.
In a statement, Israel’s Olympic committee said it had learned of the team’s plan to substitute in Farwasy “in an improper manner that does not meet the standards expected of Olympic athletes and is not in line with Olympic values,” and chose to withdraw the team from the race.
“The Olympic Committee of Israel views any deviation from the Olympic values as unacceptable and cannot accept inappropriate behavior,” the statement said. “It should be emphasized that, up to this point, the participation of the bobsleigh delegation has taken place in the spirit of sport and without any violations by the athletes.”
David Greaves, the president of the Israeli Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, told the Times of Israel that he was “deeply disappointed in the actions of the team.”
AJ Edelman, the team’s captain and main driver of its existence, took responsibility for the scheme.
“I apologize profusely for the disappointment,” Edelman posted on X. “But I will always remain proud that the team looked at their Druze brother, who had earned his place on the team, and unanimously said ‘we want this for you.’ I signed off on it and I take responsibility.”
Later, fending off criticism that he had compromised the very Olympic program he had sought to build up, Edelman appeared to blame Zisman’s mother for calling foul on the switch and said he did not regret it.
“I make no apologies for the decision. At all. The switch is not only common in our sport, we did it believing it was good for the country and to honor our teammate. We thought we were putting country first,” he wrote. “The end effect was not intended but I am proud of the team’s consensus in that moment. It was only an issue because the mother of the athlete replaced was upset it was her child, not another athlete. The decision itself was not in question and I remain okay with it.”
The disqualification ignited criticism of the team from both pro-Israel sports fans and those who had protested Israel’s inclusion in the Olympics in the first place. Edelman and Menachem Chen’s last-place finish in the two-man bobsled event last week was overshadowed by a Swiss broadcaster’s criticism of Israel and Edelman during the race. The broadcaster later removed the clip from its website.
On Saturday, Italy’s public broadcaster apologized for a commentator’s off-camera remark calling to “avoid” the Israeli team. The network’s director issued an apology for what he said was an “unacceptable expression that in no way represents the values of public service broadcasting or of RAI Sport.”
The controversies came after the bobsled team’s apartment was broken into while it trained in the Czech Republic. Israel was competing in Olympic bobsled for the first time, in what Edelman and some fans dubbed “Shul Runnings,” a reference to the Jamaican bobsled team’s similarly improbable run in 1988.
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Leaked DNC autopsy found Biden’s Israel backing cost Harris votes for president
Senior Democrats who reviewed the party’s 2024 presidential election autopsy concluded that the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war was a “net negative” for Democrats and cost Vice President Kamala Harris critical support among younger and progressive voters, according to a new report published Sunday. The Democratic National Committee has so far withheld the findings from public release.
Activists affiliated with the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a progressive research group, told Axios that in post-election discussions with DNC representatives, party officials acknowledged that the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza was a factor in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump.
The war loomed large in the campaign before Biden withdrew from the race. Anxious Democrats reportedly pressured former President Biden to “take a tougher stance on Israel” as one way to recover from his catastrophic debate performance in June 2024. Some advisers floated the idea of conditioning or halting certain arms transfers to shift the campaign’s direction and appeal to disaffected progressives and voters in Michigan — a swing state with a substantial Arab American community — who had cast “uncommitted” protest ballots in the primary.
Harris, who was more forceful in her call for an immediate ceasefire to address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, lost Michigan and Pennsylvania by almost 2 points.
“We should have done more as an administration,” Harris said in November. “We should have spoken publicly about our criticism” of how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government “were executing this war.”
The DNC claimed it has shared the internal findings with party leaders and candidates. Progressive activists are pushing for them to be made public ahead of the midterm elections.
Kamala Harris’ conclusions
In her book about the election, titled 107 Days, Harris addressed what she described as the political fallout from Biden’s statements and her own stance on the war, writing that it hurt Democrats with key constituencies.
“The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was,” Harris wrote, adding that she wished that those who protested her understood that “sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.”
In her own defense, Harris wrote that she “wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian.”
In her rushed vetting of running mates, Harris pushed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to apologize for criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protests, which he refused to do, according to his recent memoir.
Harris wrote that she discussed with Shapiro how his selection might affect the campaign, including the risk of protests tied to Gaza at the Democratic National Convention and “what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build.” She wrote that Shapiro responded by saying he had clarified that earlier views he held were misguided and that he was firmly committed to a two-state solution. Harris ultimately selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, but protests over Gaza still roiled the Democratic convention. Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside the venue after the DNC declined to allow a Palestinian American to address the main stage.
The path forward
Palestinian rights have increasingly become a litmus test for Democrats.
Recent national polls show Democratic voters have as a group become more sympathetic to Palestinians. The IMEU Policy Project conducted a poll after the Democratic primary for New York City Mayor last year, which showed that Zohran Mamdani’s sharp criticism of Israel attracted new voters and energized parts of the Democratic electorate that contributed to his victory. The post-primary survey showed that 78% agreed with his belief that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and 79% support restricting weapons to Israel.
Last August, the Democratic National Committee withdrew a resolution reaffirming the party’s support for Israel and a two-state solution to avoid a clash with younger and progressive activists who were pressing sharper opposition to Israel.
In July, a record 27 Senate Democrats, a majority of the caucus, supported a pair of resolutions calling for the blocking of weapons transfers to Israel.
Even national Jewish Democrats, like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel — both considered possible presidential candidates in 2028 — have publicly challenged Israeli policy. Shapiro has repeatedly been critical of Netanyahu and, last year, criticized the Israeli government’s rejection of international reports on hunger in Gaza, calling it “abhorrent” and “wrong.”
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