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Tony nominee Mark Rosenblatt’s ‘Giant’ journey began with Menachem Begin
The seed for Giant was planted almost 35 years ago when a 14-year old Mark Rosenblatt and his friend were tasked with presenting the week’s news to a school assembly.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had just died and Rosenblatt assumed that they should mark the passing of a hero. His friend, a Muslim, equally assumed that everyone would understand that Begin was a terrorist. Fast forward from London’s St. Paul’s School in March 1992 to May 2026 in New York, and Rosenblatt is nominated for a Tony for best new play for his run of Giant on Broadway. The play, which he wrote about an episode in the life of children’s book author Roald Dahl when he criticized Israel and espoused a pernicious antisemitism, deals with differences in perspectives on the Jewish state, and the limits of reasonable opinions.
When I spoke to him on Zoom from London, Rosenblatt and I negotiated our own small differences before we discussed the larger geopolitical issues that the play raises. Soup (Rosenblatt) or tea? Leeds (me) or London? Masorti or Conservative (is there a difference)? But the very ease of triangulating our positions within U.K. Jewry and finding out the first tranche of mutual friends, is just proof of the minuscule size of the community. At barely more than quarter of a million, the Jews of Britain are a minority comprising only about 0.5% of the population and while we don’t all know each other, there’s only ever small pools of people the same rough age and prepared to publicly avow their Jewishness.
That’s why when Dahl (John Lithgow, nominated for a Tony for lead actor) complains that he never saw any Jews fighting for Britain with him in the war, it’s a smack-my-head moment for British Jews. Rosenblatt is giving voice to Dahl’s own quote to reporter Michael Coren, where he rehearses a well-trodden slander. British Jews disproportionately served in the war — actually doubly disproportionately in the RAF where Dahl did his military service — but because there are fewer Jews in the world than residents of Tokyo City (and fewer in England than the population of Bournemouth), it’s still statistically highly unlikely that Dahl would have served with one. And, if he did, Rosenblatt pointed out to me, why would that person have revealed his ethnicity to Dahl or others in a society so riddled with antisemitism?
Rosenblatt grew up, like many British Jews of our generation — he’s 48 years old, I’m 55 — with Israel as a potential holiday destination and a promise of ultimate safety: an odd amalgam of Mediterranean resort and escape from the return of the Nazis. The promise of safe refuge in a hostile world was especially meaningful for him growing up as a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor — many family members of his maternal grandmother were murdered by the Nazis.
“That narrative of sanctuary was strong,” he told me. Thinking about Israel as an alternative homeland from the home of his birth sounded unthinkable at the time, but stabbings in Manchester and London, fire-bombed synagogues, and destroyed Jewish ambulances have shaken British Jews since Giant began its run at the Music Box Theatre in March. And, of course, Israel was a topic upon which otherwise similar folks’ worldviews could diverge.
“It didn’t transform me overnight,” Rosenblatt said of his school assembly moment. “But I became aware very quickly that other people thought very, very differently.”
From small beginnings, giant things
The play, Rosenblatt’s first as playwright, didn’t begin with Israel, nor did it begin with Dahl. It began, Rosenblatt said, with the British Labour Party’s antisemitism crisis in the late 2010s — specifically, with the way that conversations about Israel within the party would turn into older, darker and more conspiratorial accusations about Jews.
“I found the medieval nature of some of those stereotypes shocking,” he said of the racist comments that were commonplace and tolerated under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. “The grouping together of millions of people as if we all have innate characteristics.”
But Rosenblatt wasn’t interested in writing a documentary play about the Labour Party. He was a director — indeed, in 1999 he had won the JMK Award for Young Directors, a prestigious early career award whose patrons include Dame Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to write at all, initially asking one of Britain’s preeminent directors Sir Nicholas Hytner for advice about who he might approach to write the play he was looking for. Rosenblatt wanted a proxy — something that could dramatize the distinction between legitimate political criticism and antisemitic tropes.
That’s when he came across clippings about Dahl, the beloved childhood author who had, in a generally forgotten episode, made and then doubled down on inflammatory remarks about Jews in the aftermath of the 1982 Lebanon War, in the form of a book review and later comments to the press. Perhaps the most egregious quotation, after he suggested Jews as a “race” were responsible for loss of life in Beirut, was the remark that “even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [Jews] for no reason.”
The material clicked immediately. Here was a “perfect premise”: a globally-adored writer, in his own home, under pressure to account for what he’d said. The domestic setting allowed Rosenblatt to layer the political with the personal — Dahl’s family life, his grief, his acerbic personality, his ego — until the play, though deeply specific, became less about a single scandal than about the conditions that produce hate speech from people who should know better.
Rosenblatt wrote the play he was looking for. Hytner directed, earning an Olivier nomination and now a nod for a Tony.
Enter the American
One of Rosenblatt’s most consequential decisions about the play was also, in a sense, a mistake. In early drafts, he imagined Dahl’s American publisher, the legendary Robert Gottlieb visiting him alongside his British editor Tom Maschler. It turned out that this would have been anachronistic, since Gottlieb had left Farrar, Straus and Giroux years earlier. But the American presence remained an important intervention. The result is Jessie Stone, an invented Jewish American FSG sales director who arrives in Dahl’s English country house as both emissary and antagonist. She triangulates the discussion, disrupting, by her Americanness, Jewishness, lack of seniority and femininity (she is importantly, too, a mother) what might otherwise have been a locking of antlers between three eminent men. But she is also something more interesting: Rosenblatt’s attempt to imagine the confidence of American Jewishness.
“If you come from the U.K.,” he said, “you’re part of a tiny minority in a culture that doesn’t really know what you are.” Britain has, at most, a few hundred thousand Jews. New York has millions. The difference is not just demographic; it’s psychological.
“In America,” he said, “Jewish life is part of the mainstream fabric. You can speak with confidence about your identity and expect to be understood…. In England, you are thankful if anyone knows anything”
Jessie Stone, played In London and on Broadway by Aya Cash, a Tony nominee for featured actress, embodies that confidence. Where Maschler (Elliot Levey) “dances” — deflecting, accommodating, surviving — Stone confronts. Where he reads the room, she pulps it. The antagonism between Dahl and Stone is explicit and central, but the tension between Stone and Maschler goes beyond the personal and becomes cultural. British Jewish caution meets American Jewish assertion, and they despair of one other.
History rhymes
If Giant has not changed since its West End premiere, its audience certainly has. The play was greenlit on October 5, 2023. Two days later, Hamas attacked Israel. By the time the production opened at the Royal Court a year later, Israel had returned to Lebanon — echoing the very history the play dramatizes. (The past March, which saw an IDF ground invasion of Southern Lebanon, has only made its Broadway tenure more timely.)
“We were concerned the theatre might pull it,” Rosenblatt said of the Royal Court. “They didn’t. They said, ‘We want this play.’”
(The Court was just under new leadership, following a troubled recent history of dubious characterization of Jews.)
What followed was a kind of unintended experiment. Audiences arrived “incredibly genned up,” as Rosenblatt put it — immersed in a contemporary conflict that made the play’s historical argument feel immediate, even urgent. Lines from Dahl that might once have seemed shocking began to sound, in some cases, familiar.
“The more hostility there is towards Israel,” he said, “the more some of those tropes get repeated as if they’re acceptable truths.”
On Broadway, the play has undergone another subtle transformation. In London, the audience encountered Stone as an outsider — an American “alien landing” in a room full of English eccentricity. In New York, the sense of what is familiar totally flips.
“We’re on weird planet England,” Rosenblatt said of the opening scenes, “waiting for the arrival of one of our own.”
That shift of perspective matters because it changes where the audience’s sympathies lie, and what they notice. British viewers, raised with the nuances of class, recognize the delicate choreography of Maschler’s interactions with Dahl — the way he absorbs insult to maintain access and influence. They understand how he treats the insecure public schoolboy that lies behind the arrogant, bigoted celebrity. For Maschler it’s more important to lead this overgrown child to his better self than to mouth some form of banal pseudo-integrity. Better for Dahl to make and sell books successfully while explaining publicly that criticism should be separate from racism, than for Maschler to protect his own ego. American audiences, less attuned to those codes, sometimes read the same behavior as weakness.
Rosenblatt doesn’t dispute the reading; he contextualizes it. “I see it as survival,” he said. Maschler is not failing to stand up for himself; he is choosing when and how to do so. It’s a distinction that may be more legible in a culture where minority status has historically required a certain kind of strategic accommodation.
For all its topical resonance, Giant is not a play about the news cycle. It is, instead, a play about what happens when private prejudice collides with public responsibility — and about how communities argue, internally, about where that line lies.
Rosenblatt resists the idea that he is delivering a message to any particular audience, including the American Jewish readers of the Forward. The play, he suggests, does its work not by instructing but by staging contradiction.
“There are no neat messages,” he said. “Other than that antisemitism is a terrible thing. Beyond that, it’s about complexity and nuance — and inviting people to think.”
That invitation feels at once both modest and radical. In an era of algorithmic certainty and ideological sorting, Giant insists on something messier: that people can be wrong in ways that are revealing, that arguments can be both necessary and insufficient, and that identity — British or American, Jewish or otherwise — is less a fixed position than a set of pressures, constantly negotiated.
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Palestinian-American to challenge John Fetterman for Senate seat in 2028
(JTA) — Ahmed Moor, a Palestinian-American writer who has worked with anti-Zionists, is the first Democrat to challenge Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman in the 2028 primary.
Fetterman, who has faced sharp criticism from within the Democratic Party for his staunch support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, has yet to announce whether he plans to run in 2028. A defeat or retirement would remove one of the Democratic caucus’s most pro-Israel voices.
Moor, 42, enters the playing field with radically different positions on Israel, and on foreign policy in general, from those Fetterman has promoted. Claiming that the United States “funds wars based on corruption and lies and has turned its back on its own people,” Moor pledged on his campaign website to ensure “this never happens again.”
Moor, born in Gaza, moved as a child to Philadelphia, where he earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard. He switched from finance to journalism, reporting in Beirut and Egypt for The Guardian and other outlets, and co-editing the book “After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine.” He also spent many years in Jordan, where he launched a peer-to-peer lending organization, before moving back to Philadelphia in 2021.
“A few years ago my birthplace was turned to rubble in a genocide funded by our tax dollars,” Moor stated, saying that this has occurred “with the support of politicians on both sides of the aisle who can’t find money for transit or removing asbestos from our schools.”
Moor, who has served on the Philadelphia Democratic City Committee, has never held public office. He says he is determined to address corruption, affordability, foreign policy and constitutional authority, according to The Philadelphia Inquirer, which first reported his candidacy.
Moor told the Inquirer that he was “not really running against Fetterman” but instead “running for the rule of law.” He acknowledged that he would face an “uphill battle” against Fetterman, who took office in January 2023.
Fetterman has irked some fellow Democrats by siding with Republicans on numerous issues, especially on Israel. He has also drawn praise from the pro-Israel community and Israel’s leadership. With Democrats securing a Senate majority of at least 54 seats, including two independents who caucus with the party, Democratic leadership will be less dependent on Fetterman’s vote when the new Congress convenes in January.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Northwestern launches civil rights investigation into club that banned pro-Israel group from its food festival
Northwestern University’s Office of Civil Rights is investigating a club that said it canceled its annual “Cultural Food Fest” after students objected to its initial inclusion of a pro-Israel student group.
Spoon University Northwestern, a student-run food magazine, wrote in an email to students that it was calling off its Nov. 6 food festival because of concerns about the participation of Wildcats for Israel, a club housed within Hillel that describes itself as focused on Israeli culture and society.
“There’s been a lot of disappointment expressed in and around Hillel today,” Michael Simon, executive director of Northwestern Hillel, told the Forward on Friday. “What should be an opportunity for connecting across differences and having really positive engagement got turned into a sort of political catfight.”
Students involved with Wildcats for Israel were initially “really excited” to participate in the fest, Simon said.
But amid student backlash, Spoon reversed course and disinvited Wildcats for Israel, Simon said. In a statement posted to Instagram, Spoon cited “the ongoing genocide in Gaza” to explain the group’s removal.
Yet even that exclusion was not enough for some student organizations. Northwestern’s Asian Pacific American Coalition; Alianza, the Latinx student alliance; and the Middle Eastern North African Student Association, issued a joint statement saying that they were withdrawing from the fest because of the original inclusion of Wildcats for Israel.
“A ‘culture’ born from the active land theft and genocide of Palestinians should not be recognized,” the student groups wrote on Instagram.
Spoon then cancelled the event altogether.
Now, Spoon’s status as an officially registered student organization has been frozen while the investigation into allegations of discrimination is being conducted, a Northwestern spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
The investigation comes as Northwestern faces additional obligations to address and report allegations of antisemitism as part of its $75 million settlement with the Trump administration in November 2025. As part of the agreement, the university pledged that its Office of Civil Rights would publish annual reports with data about complaints of antisemitism, including investigative and disciplinary actions taken.
Spoon did not respond to the Forward’s request for comment.
In its email to students, Spoon said Wildcats for Israel was removed because of its status as “a political action group, not a cultural organization.”
Simon pushed back on that characterization of the club. “They’re not engaged in political advocacy or political work, certainly not in their current iteration,” Simon said. “They’re really focused on doing cultural and educational programming, connecting with Israel and with the Israeli people.”
The idea that Wildcats for Israel is considered political, while other student organizations opposing Israel are not, “appears to be a real double standard,” Simon said.
Still, Simon said the cancellation did not prevent Wildcats for Israel from having its own cultural food event — inviting students to the Hillel building on Friday to talk about what had happened over slushies in two flavors popular in Israel, limonana and iced cafe.
“They’re really turning to a place of being in community and supporting one another,” Simon said.
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Israel’s love affair with Trump may be over – with no other suitor in sight
Israelis were among the few groups outside America who genuinely liked Donald Trump, and they had persuaded themselves that the feeling was mutual. Now, as the American president pledges to terminate military assistance and blames Israel’s unpopularity for the Republicans’ electoral humiliation, they are confronting the possibility that their greatest supposed friend may become one of their gravest strategic liabilities.
In a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of 24 countries, 69% of Israelis expressed confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs. Israelis saw a champion where much of the democratic world saw a menace.
Israelis, who tend to be more direct and plainspoken than other Western societies, were less inclined to be scandalized by Trump’s personal shortcomings. But mainly it was policy that made him so popular: Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and cultivated a conspicuously warm relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his increasing toxicity around the world. Trump opposed Hamas and ultimately joined Israel in attacking the Iranian regime.
Still, warning signs were there – in the displays of U.S. dominance over decisions in the 2025 and 2026 Iran confrontations and in the Election Day announcement last week that Trump plans to terminate roughly $4 billion in annual military assistance to Israel this year.
The announcement threatened a cornerstone of Israeli security planning established under Barack Obama, whose administration negotiated a 10-year, $38 billion assistance agreement extending through 2028.
The precise legal and financial consequences remain uncertain, not least because Congress controls appropriations. But the political significance is unmistakable: The president whom Israelis regarded as their most dependable protector was proposing to dismantle an arrangement that even administrations regarded as unfriendly to Netanyahu had sustained.
Moreover, the aid is far more than a gift. Its greatest value is not financial but geopolitical: the unmistakable message to Israel’s enemies that Washington stands behind it.
As the dismal election results became clear, Vice President JD Vance highlighted a supposed demand among disaffected Republican voters to “change our relationship to Israel,” placing the alliance itself among the issues requiring political reassessment.
In Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview, Trump went further, identifying what he called a “great dislike” for Israel as one factor in the Republican electoral defeat.
Trump certainly has a point. A 2026 Pew survey found that 60% of Americans viewed Israel unfavorably, up from 42% in 2022, including 57% of Republicans under 50. Gallup found that, for the first time in its 25-year tracking, Americans were no longer more sympathetic to Israelis than Palestinians: 36% favored Israelis, compared with 41% for Palestinians. The longstanding bipartisan consensus is unraveling. Among younger Americans, the situation is even worse.
Whether the reason is a global propaganda campaign against Zionism, social media manipulation, Netanyahu and his noxious far-right allies, or Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank are almost beside the point – the collapse in Western and U.S. opinion is undeniable.
Trump also asserted that “those countries that we’ve protected” from Iran – meaning Israel – “wouldn’t exist” without the U.S. and “are going to pay us back any and all costs that we’ve had for the war,” which was another major surprise and mystery that caught Israelis off-guard.
Whether this implies a demand that Israel reimburse the United States, and for precisely what, remains unclear. What is clear is that Trump has begun discussing a relationship Israelis considered existential in the language of electoral liabilities and financial transactions.
Writing in Maariv on Monday, veteran Washington correspondent Shlomo Shamir reported that senior Washington commentators described Netanyahu as having become effectively persona non grata in Trump’s inner circle – and that Trump’s seeming affinity for Netanyahu was “more a media relationship than a genuine friendship.”
The change in atmosphere in Israel has been extraordinary.
On Monday, Israeli television seemed preoccupied with little beyond the coalition negotiations following Israel’s election and the growing fear that the country might lose its most important international relationship.
Appearing on Channel 13, I argued that another Netanyahu government would have faced economic sanctions from Europe and even serious discussion of an American weapons embargo. This provoked very little disagreement.
“Netanyahu put all his chips on Trump, and it’s falling apart,” observed anchor Daniel Zilberstein. “It wasn’t only him, but the entire system,” replied Omri Rolls, an expert in monitoring and countering anti-Israel propaganda. “We put all our attention on the United States. Europe, we’ve completely given up on. All over the world, important elements are simply not on Israel’s agenda.”
The alarm was loud and clear this week across the Israeli political and diplomatic establishment.
Tovah Herzl, a former Israeli diplomat who served in Washington as liaison to Congress, captured the predicament in the title of her article in Maariv: “Netanyahu Bet on Trump — and Israel Could Lose Far More Than Money.”
“Israelis are unaware of the depth of the hole into which the country has fallen,” wrote Yedidia Stern, a leading expert on Israel-U.S. relations, in Ynet. “The hourglass has been turned over: we have two years to regain the legitimacy that has been lost” before a Democrat potentially wins the White House.
Ashley Perry, a former senior Israeli government adviser, wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel must urgently start arguing its case – “consistently demonstrating what Americans gain” in intelligence cooperation, joint defense development, investment, trade and Israeli contributions to scientific and technological progress.
Beyond all that, there is a general understanding that Israel will need some real policy changes – for example, cracking down on Jewish extremists in the West Bank. And it will need to court the U.S. Democrats and the Europeans once more – as it did decades ago.
There is a grim lesson at play, and it has more to do with morality than ethics.
Israelis are people badly traumatized by the conflicts that implacable enemies have forced on them. Over the decades, however, they took some pride nonetheless in what they believed was a moral high ground. It’s safe to say this has eroded, at least somewhat.
In a reflection of that erosion, one of Trump’s greatest attractions to Israelis – sadly enough – was his indifference to Palestinian human rights, an issue that had long complicated Israel’s relations with more conventional Western leaders. Trump was clearly untroubled by the West Bank occupation, the expansion of settlements or the absence of a credible political horizon for millions of Palestinians. In February 2025, he even proposed removing Gaza’s Palestinian population in its entirety and placing the territory under American control, a scheme whose breathtaking implications seemed scarcely to concern him.
Many Israelis overlooked the dark aspects of such absurdities, seeing only evidence of exceptional friendship. They overlooked the possibility that a president so utterly uninterested in Palestinian rights might also prove indifferent to Israeli interests whenever they ceased to coincide with his own.
They celebrated his willingness to discard diplomatic conventions – or even basic human decency – when it worked in their favor. They are discovering now that sometimes cliches are true: What goes around comes around.
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