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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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Will Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza Actually Lead to the Next War in the Region?
FILE PHOTO: US President Donald Trump is interviewed by Reuters White House correspondent Steve Holland (not pictured) during an exclusive interview in the Oval Office in the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 14, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
Donald Trump wants to create peace in Gaza. He wants headlines that frame him as a historic dealmaker and a global statesman. But behind the carefully staged announcements and the language of “stability” and “prosperity,” Trump’s newly assembled Gaza peace structure reveals a misplaced trust in failed diplomatic elites, and fails to accurately account for Israel’s security realities.
The appointment of Sigrid Kaag to Trump’s Gaza Executive Board is emblematic of this problem.
Kaag is frequently portrayed as an experienced, neutral technocrat. Her defenders point to decades of United Nations service and her time as a Dutch minister as proof of professionalism. Yet in the Middle East, neutrality is not an abstract virtue; it has concrete consequences. And the institutional culture in which Kaag built her career has consistently betrayed Israel, while empowering those who undermine it.
This is not a personal attack. It is a political assessment.
For decades, the United Nations has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a deeply flawed lens. Israel is treated as a permanent suspect, the Palestinian leadership as a perpetual victim, and terrorism as an unfortunate but contextualized byproduct of “despair.”
This framework did not begin with Kaag, but she rose within it, succeeded within it, and continues to represent it.
That same UN ecosystem once elevated Yasser Arafat from terrorist mastermind to international statesman, without demanding that he dismantle the machinery of violence. The results were catastrophic: waves of suicide bombings, incitement, and a peace process that collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty.
The lesson should have been clear. Instead, the same thinking persists.
Figures like Kaag emphasize humanitarian access, reconstruction, and governance mechanisms while consistently avoiding the core issue: Gaza’s problems are not caused by a lack of international oversight, but by the systematic indoctrination of hatred and the glorification of violence. Without confronting that reality, no amount of technocratic management will bring peace.
Donald Trump’s political history shows a consistent pattern at times: grand gestures, dramatic announcements, and a hunger for recognition that can override strategic depth.
The Gaza peace plan features these elements, and that’s a bad omen for the future of peace in the region.
Rather than anchoring Gaza’s future in hard security guarantees for Israel, clear red lines against terror financing, and ideological deradicalization, Trump has surrounded himself with figures whose records suggest the opposite: a preference for “balance,” moral equivalence, and pressure on Israel to accommodate the unacceptable.
Unfortunately, it seems that Gaza is being used as a stage, not treated as a powder keg.
And Israel will pay the price if this experiment fails.
The composition of Trump’s Gaza councils should alarm anyone who understands the region. UN veterans, European moral arbiters, and political figures with long histories of criticizing Israel’s self-defense now sit at the table defining “peace.”
What is absent is just as telling as what is present.
There is no serious focus on dismantling terror ideology. No insistence on ending incitement. No recognition that Gaza’s suffering is directly linked to Hamas’ strategy of embedding itself within civilian infrastructure, and radicalizing the population against Israel.
Instead, Israel is once again expected to prove restraint, flexibility, and goodwill, while its enemies are treated as stakeholders rather than threats.
Trump’s defenders will argue that engagement is better than isolation, and that new structures are better than stalemate. But engagement without moral clarity is not diplomacy. It is delusion.
By empowering figures whose careers were shaped by institutions that consistently misinterpret Palestinian politics and excuse extremist behavior, Trump is not stabilizing Gaza. He is laying the groundwork for the next crisis.
Trump should prioritize hard truths over flattering headlines. He should reject failed diplomatic paradigms instead of recycling them. And he should stop mistaking international applause for strategic success.
Peace built on denial is not peace at all.
It is merely the pause before the next war.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Are We Living Through the Synagogue Burnings of the 2020s?
Smoldered remains of the Beth Israel Congregation’s library in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: Screenshot.
Six months ago, I stood on the grounds of Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. I observed a sign that read in bold, “Bombings In Jewish Community.”
I was curious about the history, so I leaned in and read further: “In 1967, Beth Israel broke ground for a new synagogue on Old Canton Road. The first service was held that March. Six months later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the new synagogue.”
I have visited synagogues across the United States, and spent years studying Jewish history through firsthand experiences visiting sanctuaries, cemeteries, memorials, and communities that thrived in places many already forget that Jews ever lived in.
So coming across a sign of a synagogue being attacked in the 1960s felt horrifying, but not unfamiliar. American Jewish history knows well what living under the shadows of hate feels like — especially in those years when Jews were accused by extremists of “masterminding a plot to ruin America.”
That led to the synagogue bombings of the late 1950s, where justice never arrived in many of the cases.
After reading that sign, I walked the garden of the Beth Israel Congregation, which has a Holocaust memorial formed from seven glass structures, each representing a part of the Holocaust. One of them depicts the Ghetto, another one Kristallnacht. One that caught my eye, was for the victims who wore striped clothes. Another one depicts the book burnings. I found myself thinking of my own family history, as all of my great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
And yet, I stood there grateful. Grateful to be an American Jew living freely, enjoying the unalienable rights this country promises its citizens. Grateful for raising my children in a land that, with all its flaws, has been a safe haven for Jewish life.
Still like many American Jews, I asked myself: Could another synagogue be attacked? Could our books burn again? Could this history return in a new form? And most of all, could the unthinkable become thinkable again?
Earlier this month, that question was answered — painfully.
Federal authorities say a 19-year-old admitted that he set fire to Beth Israel because of the building’s “Jewish ties.” The fire consumed portions of the building, some Torah scrolls, and memories of a defiant and historic Jewish community.
Synagogue attacks are often treated as isolated incidents. A tragedy for a few. An investigation for authorities. A bit of solidarity from some, and the news cycle moves on.
They are no longer reported as “The 1950s Synagogue Bombings,” which is how they were in the past, and even has its own dedicated Wikipedia page.
But looking back, over the past few years, multiple synagogues and Jewish centers in the United States have been targeted by fire.
Some have been prosecuted as arson, while most carried hate crime charges. In Texas, a man was charged and sentenced after admitting guilt to a hate crime and arson connected to an attempt to burn down Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. In Arizona, the Justice Department announced a hate crime charge tied to the Khal Chasidim synagogue fire in Casa Grande. In Florida, prosecutors charged a man tied to the fire at the Chabad Jewish center in Punta Gorda, stating that the man had “hatred towards Jewish people.”
But the latest attack in Jackson, Mississippi is symbolic. It’s not another one — it is a second act by fire on the same platform, nearly 60 years apart.
We live in a faster world now — social media, constant noise, outrage, and excitement. We often skim through things that should make us stop.
We treat extremists’ behavior as news, and hateful rhetoric as theater or comedy. We rarely pause. But standing at the Beth Israel Congregation months ago, reading what happened in 1967, worrying about what could happen again and then watching my worry become a reality — has forced me to pause and ask are we living through “The 2020s Synagogue Burnings?”
American Jewry changed dramatically over the last 60 years. Jews have done very well in this country, with most still holding onto their Judaism. And yet it pains me to say that hatred did not disappear. It changed its vocabulary, its slogans, its platforms, its activists, and its camps. But the basic “Jews are the problem” is maintained. Our houses of worship are burning throughout the land.
Jew hatred travels. It mutates. Sometimes it wears the nationalism hat, other times the “social justice” hat, and other times it wears the libertarian hat. Sometimes it’s just a joke. But the line is not hard to draw when we’re willing to draw it consistently.
When leaders in our country dismiss Nazi rhetoric as “Kids being kids” and brand them as “stupid jokes” or when Jewish leaders and politicians choose to politicize antisemitism and make it a partisan tool, it sends a confusing and ultimately a harmful message.
We should be clear.
Hate towards any group of people is wrong. Hate towards Jews for being Jewish is wrong. Nazi “jokes” are not childish or stupid, they’re corrosive. Praising terror groups is evil. Harassing a visible Jew in the streets with any political chants just because you recognize a Jew and want to intimidate him — is evil.
We the Jewish community have work to do, too. We cannot let our public voice become only “look at what they did to us.” We cannot let bigots frame the story of American Jewish life as one of living in the shadows.
While speaking of and confronting bigotry, which is real and dangerous, we should also insist on our truth and shine light — that Jewish life here has contributed quietly and profoundly to the country’s civic and moral fabric, and that our contributions, just like the contributions of many others in the country, have shaped our country for the better.
And while we do not have to justify our existence and right to belong, it is still a mistake that we allow our identity in the American public to be reduced to one of victimhood.
I am a Jewish father, and a patriot of this country. And I keep returning to the most difficult question: will my children and grandchildren read this 60 years from now and conclude the same — that nothing has changed? Or will we as a collective finally do better?
The writer is an Orthodox Jewish New York businessman.
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Palestinian Authority Admits Its True Goal: Israel ‘Is Doomed to Perish’
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
The Palestinian Authority (PA) consistently indoctrinates Palestinians to believe that Israel’s demise is inevitable and is an inherent form of justice.
This message is delivered by senior PA leaders and is reinforced repeatedly across official PA media, including news programs, children’s education, political commentary, poetry, and international forums broadcast to the Palestinian public.
This doctrine has been articulated again recently by Abbas Zaki, a senior Fatah leader and member of the Central Committee, the PA’s ruling party:
Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki: “In the end, the winner is the one who remains on the land … and those who will remain are the ones with the idea, the idea that says there is no escaping the fact that this land will be liberated, and that the land of peace cannot be based on revenge.
Israel is doomed to perish.” [emphasis added]
[Arabi 21, London-based Arab news website, Jan. 9, 2026]
Zaki’s statement presents Israel as a temporary presence and Palestinians as the enduring owners of Israel’s land, so that justice will ensure Israel’s disappearance. This is a foundational belief promoted systematically by the PA.
PA/Fatah education teaches children to see Israel as temporary:
“Palestine fell under the Zionist occupation [in 1948], which continues today … The occupation will cease to exist just as what was before it ceased to exist …”
“All of the invaders were defeated, and Palestine returned to be free and Arab.”
“[Israel] the evil occupation state … this artificial state … It is artificial because it is foreign …”
“The liberation of Palestine will only be achieved through armed struggle.”
“The Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history.”
“Palestine will be liberated and purified from the occupation’s defilement.
“Palestine is destined for full liberation … from the yoke of Zionist colonialism”
“Algeria’s experience [of the French leaving] assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end.”
[Fatah’s Waed Magazine for children ages 6-15]
On official PA television, Israel’s demise is conveyed as fact.
PA TV narrators repeatedly describe Jewish presence as a transient colonial episode destined to end, with this specific script reiterated every two years on average:
Official PA TV narrator: “The illegal immigration of the Jews to Palestine: The beginning of the illegal immigration to Palestine was in 1837 … The Jewish immigration to the land of Palestine continued as part of a colonialist Zionist plan led by the world powers at the time …
But history has never let the colonialist remain, and the occupiers have always left in the end. One day they [the Jews] too will return to where they came from.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV]
The same doctrine is embedded in PA cultural programming. On official PA TV, Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi recited a poem listing past rulers of the land — Greeks, Romans, Persians, Crusaders, and British — before concluding that Jewish rule will meet the same fate:
Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi:
Do not believe that the land will not return
How much has this land been occupied!
How much defilement!
How many soldiers have trodden upon it!
So where are the soldiers?
Where is the rule of the Greeks over us?
Where is the rule of the Tatars?
Where is the rule of the Romans?
Where is the rule of the Persians?
Where is the rule of the Crusaders?
Where is the rule of the English?
Where are the soldiers?
One day you will grow up and ask:
Where is the rule of the Jews?[Official PA TV, Dec. 7, 2025]
By placing Jewish sovereignty alongside former rulers who disappeared, the poem teaches that Israel’s rule is merely another temporary phase awaiting its end.
Official PA TV amplifies this message by hosting guests who present themselves as analysts, while repeating the same conclusion:
Tunisian journalist Khaled Krouna: “This entity [i.e., Israel] was planted in the region to be a policeman for the interests of the world’s powerful forces … Now the services it [Israel] can provide, after its failure has become apparent, after its army only scares cowards … the cost of maintaining it is much greater than the benefits its existence can bring to the superpowers.
In time, they themselves will disown it and leave it to its fate, and its fate is to fall into the hands of the Palestinians. Its fate is to disappear.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Nov. 19, 2025]
The same theme is projected internationally and broadcast back to Palestinian audiences. Speaking at the United Nations and shown on PA TV, Arab League spokesman Mohamed Nasr declared:
Arab League Spokesman at the UN Mohamed Nasr:“The occupation [i.e., Israel] – no matter how much its violence intensifies – will cease to exist, while the Palestinian state will become a reality.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Dec. 1, 2025]
Across senior leadership statements, education, historical narration, poetry, political analysis, and international advocacy, the Palestinian Authority delivers a unified talking point to its people: Israel is temporary, Palestinians are permanent, and time itself will erase Israel’s existence — a doctrine that Western governments continue to ignore while proposing to restore the PA as a governing force in Gaza.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.