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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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Trump announces he has ‘largely negotiated’ Iran deal, Strait of Hormuz opening
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced in a post on Truth Social Saturday afternoon that a deal with Iran had been “largely negotiated,” despite saying earlier in the day that he was undecided on whether to agree to a proposal or resume strikes.
Trump described the deal as a “Memorandum of Understanding pertaining to PEACE” that was “subject to finalization” by the United States, Iran and other countries that participated in talks on Saturday. He noted that he’d “just had a very good call” with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Jordan and Bahrain.
Trump said in his Truth Social post that, separately, he had spoken with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a conversation that “went very well.” There was no immediate statement released by the Prime Minister’s Office following Trump’s post.
“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly,” Trump added.
In the post, Trump said the deal would include the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, though a widely reported quote from Iran’s Fars New Agency, which is close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said that Trump’s assertion was “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” and that the strait would remain under Iranian control.
Trump’s announcement comes over a month since he unilaterally extended a fragile U.S.-Iran ceasefire in April.
The announcement did not make mention of Iran’s nuclear program or highly enriched uranium, which Trump has previously stressed must be included in a deal.
Trump’s announcement came hours after he told Axios that he was a “solid 50/50” on whether he would be able to make a “good” deal with Iran, or else “blow them to kingdom come.”
Trump also told Axios that Netanyahu was “torn” over the potential deal but rejected the idea that the Israeli leader was “worried” that he might strike an unfavorable agreement.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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In Trump’s assault on democracy, echoes of Nazi Germany but new glimmers of hope that America will be different
In the final, tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, a succession of arch-conservative chancellors ruled by emergency decree rather than go through the Reichstag, the German parliament. Germany had become a democracy in name only, as reactionary power brokers steered the nation deeper into totalitarian waters, ultimately opening the door for Hitler.
As we approach our mid-term elections, America too is at a pivot point — with the burning question being whether Donald Trump’s grip on MAGA lawmakers can be broken so that Congress, feckless like the Reichstag of the late Weimar Republic, can resume its constitutional role as a check on the executive.
It’s a matter of life or death for American democracy as it nears its 250th birthday.
As Trump’s poll numbers tank while GOP lawmakers’ support for him endures, I find myself musing about the Weimar Republic and the self-immolation of its national legislature.
In the final months before they came to power on Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler and the Nazis were actually on the ropes. After they had become the largest party in the Reichstag in July elections a year earlier, two million Germans abandoned the Nazis in an election that November. Many Germans were less enamored of the Nazi leader, fatigued by a sense that the Nazis thrived on disorder. The spell seemed to be breaking. Does this ring a bell? Economics also played a role: Germany was finally emerging from the Great Depression.
But the German republic had already been brought to a breaking point by street fighting, political chaos, the Great Depression, and a coterie of arch-conservative power brokers who schemed and maneuvered to scrap Germany’s first democracy. They included Chancellor Franz von Papen.
Papen was unable to form a majority coalition after the July 1932 election because of huge gains by the Nazis and losses by other key parties, so he continued to govern by emergency decree with the consent of President Paul von Hindenburg, relying on the broad emergency powers of Article 48 of the constitution that had already hollowed out parliamentary rule.
More internal scheming resulted in Papen’s ouster after the November 1932 election. He was replaced by General Kurt von Schleicher, a master of intrigue. But Schleicher lasted only two months, as disagreements raged over whether to give Hitler a role in the government, and what that role should be. The reactionary schemers eventually reached a consensus: Let Hitler have the chancellorship but keep him in check by loading the cabinet with archconservatives like Papen. Once Hitler became chancellor on Jan. 30, 1933, it didn’t take him long to outmaneuver all of the other schemers, who became puppets of the Nazi leader instead of the puppet masters.
Germany’s political establishment — all but the Social Democrats and the banned Communists — ceremoniously handed the keys over to Hitler on March 23, 1933, when the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, dismantling parliamentary democracy and giving Hitler dictatorial powers.
Which brings us to the question: Whither American democracy?
Under Trump, our Congress has been reduced to a shell of its former self, an American analog of the toothless Reichstag. As Trump has launched assault after assault on the pillars of American democracy — on the judiciary, on higher education, on free speech, our election system, the rule of law, and even on unflattering but true chapters in American history — Republicans have kept quiet, fearing Trump’s wrath and retribution.
But now there are glimmers of hope. Trump’s broken promises, self-aggrandizement, megalomania, corruption, utter indifference to everyday Americans’ economic suffering, and relentless catering to the country’s wealthiest are finally catching up with him. New polls put his approval rating at a dismal 37%. In a New York Times/Siena poll, just 28% of voters approved of how Trump is handling the cost of living, while only 31% approved of his war with Iran. Even Fox News had him at 39% approval. That same poll showed GOP support for Trump weakening considerably on his handling of the economy.
Economic pain is driving the collapse. The soaring costs of the war in Iran, Trump’s vanity projects, and his proposed $1.8 billion slush fund for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, coupled with his push for lifetime immunity for himself and his family to commit tax fraud, have incensed voters who are already struggling to afford groceries, gas, housing and health care.
As Americans make impossible choices, the 47th president touts the glitzy White House ballroom he wants to build and his plans for an arch that would dwarf the Arc de Triomphe, all while prosecuting a war that has closed the Strait of Hormuz and driven up prices worldwide. The widening gap between Trump’s self-indulgence and the country’s hardship is finally producing something late Weimar never managed: a meaningful break in the habit of submission to an aspiring strongman.
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This Jewish artist hadn’t painted in more than 5 decades. Then came Oct. 7.
Sid Klein has finally found his subject. More than half a century after he scrambled to pick a topic for his senior art project at Brooklyn College—and settled on exploring the porcelain curves of a toilet bowl in a 20-painting series—he’s discovered a purpose.
Klein, 78, took a five-decade hiatus from art between college graduation and retirement. He picked his brushes back up just a few months before the events of Oct. 7.
Upon hearing of the Hamas attacks, Klein processed the news with acrylics. Soon, he began looking back to the Holocaust. He felt compelled to render contemporary and historical victims of hatred on paper and ultimately take on the mantle of combatting antisemitism, not with words or weapons but with images.
“For the first time in my life, I’m so motivated in my art,” Klein told me over Zoom from his home in South Florida. “All of a sudden I went from, ‘I don’t know what I want to paint,’ to, ‘I’ve got to make a record of this so people can look at these paintings and see what does antisemitism naturally lead to.’”
Born and raised in Brooklyn, Klein noticed at a young age that he could depict objects in three dimensions. “I started drawing with Crayola crayons with paper that my mom would pick up [at] the local five and dime,” he said.
But his mother died when he was seven, leaving his father to raise three children on his own. Though they weren’t particularly religious, Klein said, he attended yeshiva. The extra-long school day helped his working single father make sure he was safe. Klein continued dabbling in art through elementary and high school.
The Holocaust was not part of his education, as far as he remembers, not at the yeshiva and not later in college, where he flitted from pre-law to economics to philosophy before settling on fine art. “I’d never been exposed to it,” he said. “I’d never seen the photographs. I consciously avoided the photographs.”
“I was living in this bubble so I could pretend that antisemitism did not exist,” he said.
He remained in that bubble through business school and a long career in marketing. During that time, “painting didn’t even cross my mind,” Klein said. “For 55 years, I focused on the business and totally ignored the art.”
It wasn’t until his career drew to a close that he thought he might try again. “I wanted to give it a try and see what was left,” he said. But he wanted to keep painting only if he had a worthy subject, which he found in the wake of the Hamas attacks.
“That murder affected me in a profound way,” said Klein, who has two sons and five grandchildren living in Israel. “I started painting in my mind what these 1,200 people would have looked like. And that was my return to art.”
The segue from the horrors of Oct. 7 to those of the Holocaust felt natural to Klein. “For me, all of those are one of the same. They’re all Jew hatred at different times in history,” he said. “The amount of evil in our world is just—I don’t know how to measure it.” There are endless tragedies, he said, “but I’m focusing on our people.”
Klein paints in a corner of the family room he’s designated as his studio. He regularly pores over hundreds of black-and-white photos taken in ghettos and camps, looking for his next subjects to call out to him.
In one photograph, he recalled, he saw lines upon lines of women and children, standing near cattle cars, waiting, exhausted. He distilled the scene to one row of imminent victims in “Innocents.” They’re “going to be taken to a gas chamber and they’re going to be dead in 20 minutes or a half hour, and they don’t know that,” he said. On the right, a boy tugs at his mother’s coat. The woman on the far left balances the small child in her arms alongside her pregnant belly. In the middle, another grasps a toddler’s hand. Their eyes implore the viewer to grapple with their fate.
Several of Klein’s Holocaust works were displayed earlier this year at the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica in Poland, on the grounds of the concentration camp system of the same name, where an estimated 120,000 people were imprisoned and 40,000 died.
“As employees of a Memorial Site, we have constant access to disturbing historical photos and documents; these are undeniably important, but viewing the victims through the eyes of an artist is an entirely different, more intimate experience,” Bartosz Surman, who works for the museum’s education department, told me. Surman estimated that approximately 4,000 people saw Klein’s work there between January 27 and March 31. “For a Memorial Site located in a village of fewer than a thousand people, we consider it a significant success and a testament to the power of Mr. Klein’s work,” he said.
Four thousand miles away, “My Zaidy” hangs on the wall at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum in downtown Manhattan as part of the exhibition “Proverbs, Adages, and Maxims.”
The man in the painting wears a star under his heart. The bright yellow patch and pearlescent and gold shimmer of his face contrast with the matte blue of his coat and hat. But turning the corner of the exhibition, it’s the eyes that catch you. “I left them blank, so you can put in his eyes, any eyes you want,” Klein said—his zaidy’s or yours or a stranger’s.
The eyes may be missing but the gaze is powerful, as though this old man, as he approaches his cruel end, is staring and saying, “Look at me. Do you see what’s happening? Why are you just standing there?”
“A lot of bubbes and zaides were exterminated,” Klein said, including his paternal grandfather. But the zaidy in the painting isn’t Klein’s, exactly, he said. He can’t recall ever seeing a photo of him. Instead, he painted another elderly man in a photo that struck him: This is what a zaidy selected for the gas chamber looks like. This is what Klein’s zaidy could have looked like.
“I decided I was going to do a painting, and fill that hole in my heart,” Klein said.
“There’s something very haunting about the hollowed, empty eyes,” museum director Jeanie Rosensaft told me over the phone. “We were very touched, because although [Klein] has not had a long resume of art production, we felt that the image that he provided was very compelling.”.
Klein is one of 58 artists in the exhibition, and his work will be included in a tour the museum is organizing following its New York run, which ends June 24. “We hope that he continues on this path,” Rosensaft said. “It’s really essential that art bear witness to the past and provide a bridge to the future.”
Seeing the pain
Klein’s next painting, he told me, was inspired by a photo of two small children, empty bowls in hand, begging for food.
“If I had more working space, I would make my paintings bigger,” said Klein, who says he hopes to one day create life-size portraits. “Right now you’ve got to get pretty close to see what the hell is going on,” he said. “I want size to be part of your experience seeing the pain.”
Spending his days sifting through Holocaust photos and painting its victims takes a toll. “When I paint, I become emotionally involved. But when it’s done, I listen to my music for a couple of hours, and that gives me the emotional strength to continue,” says Klein, who puts on Vivaldi, Mozart, or Brahms, for example. “After I do a painting, I need this music to settle my nerves.”
“Sometimes I say, ‘Klein, try something else!’” he said. But he can’t imagine abandoning his subject or newfound mission for any others. Which means he’ll need more of that music in the years to come, as might those viewing his paintings.
“A lot of my work is grotesque,” Klein said, and that’s intentional. “I want to shake you up.”
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