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Why Every Young American Should See Ari’el Stachel’s ‘Other’
Ari’el Stachel in “Other.” Photo: provided.
Theatre has always been one of the most powerful spaces for self-reflection. It is intimate and raw, placing us in the dark together while a performer unfolds a story that demands our attention. Unlike film or television, there is no screen to hide behind, no pause button, no escape. We share the same room, the same air, and we can’t look away.
Ari’el Stachel’s new solo play — originally staged as Out of Character and now retitled Other — leans fully into that vulnerability. Stachel, who grew up with a Yemeni-Jewish father and a European Ashkenazi mother, has lived his life moving between worlds. His Jewish story is the entry point, but the performance quickly expands outward. He is able to pass as Jewish, Arab, Middle Eastern, and even Black, depending on context. At times, this mobility is liberating, opening doors to multiple communities. At others it is alienating, leaving him with the disorienting sense of belonging everywhere and nowhere at once. Other is about carrying multiple voices within a single body and still searching for one authentic voice.
The backdrop of 9/11 looms large in Stachel’s account. As a boy in California, he watched his father — darker-skinned, bearded, recognizably Middle Eastern — suddenly become a figure of suspicion. Overnight, his family’s presence was filtered through the fear and mistrust that saturated America after the attacks. For Stachel, it was a formative trauma. He recounts how he began distancing himself from his father’s appearance and heritage, denying or reshaping parts of his identity in order to escape the judgments of others. What might have been a simple story of a mixed-heritage Jewish boyhood became a painful initiation into the politics of race, religion, and suspicion in post-9/11 America.
The performance is brutally honest. Stachel doesn’t just tell stories; he embodies dozens of characters — parents, teachers, classmates, inner demons — giving voice to the forces that shaped him. Critics who saw the earlier Out of Character noted how he performed more than 40 roles over the course of the evening, slipping between them with humor and intensity. At the center of it all is his anxiety, personified on stage as a relentless voice; a tormentor who exposes his insecurities and self-doubt. Even the physicality of the performance matters: at times, Stachel literally sweats under the strain, his body underscoring the emotional labor of wrestling with self-hood in public.
What makes Other so compelling is how it resists flattening. Stachel could have chosen to present a neat identity that pleased everyone. He could have leaned into his Ashkenazi heritage in Jewish spaces, downplayed his father’s Arab and Yemeni roots in the broader culture, or passed as Black when it fit. Instead, he embraces contradiction. He admits to the pain of passing, to the shame of dissembling, to the exhaustion of being welcomed everywhere but rooted nowhere. His honesty is not tidy, but it is deeply human and it is precisely what gives the play its moral force.
For Jews, Other carries special resonance. Too often, American Jewish life is imagined narrowly, as if it were monochrome and monolithic. In reality, it encompasses Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi heritages, as well as countless blends created by Diaspora and intermarriage. Stachel’s story insists that Jewish identity is wide, textured, and complex. By putting a Yemeni-Ashkenazi household on stage, he gives voice to Jews of color and Jews of mixed heritage who have too often felt peripheral in communal narratives. Other says clearly: you belong.
But Other is not just a Jewish story. It is also an Arab story, a Middle Eastern story, a Black story, and an American story. It is about what it means to be welcomed conditionally, mistrusted reflexively, and asked to define yourself in ways that never quite fit. For Arabs and Middle Eastern Americans, it is rare representation that does not reduce or stereotype. For Black Americans, it echoes the struggle of reconciling self-knowledge with the perceptions imposed by others. And for every young American navigating multiple expectations — between family and school, tradition and modernity, online and offline — it is a reminder that identity is not a slogan but a journey.
The play also speaks to our cultural moment. Cancel culture and digital performance have created an environment where young people feel pressure to present a polished, singular self for approval. Nuance is suspect. Ambiguity is punished. Doubt is treated as weakness. Other resists that world. It demonstrates that wholeness comes not from clarity but from wrestling — not from erasing contradictions, but from inhabiting them.
That is why Other deserves more than applause from Jewish audiences. It deserves to be seen as a work that speaks to all Americans, and especially to the rising generation. It shows that identity is not fixed but fluid, that belonging is never simple, and that authenticity often comes through tension rather than resolution. These are lessons our fractured culture badly needs.
Great theatre does not just entertain; it enlarges our sympathies. It forces us to see ourselves in another’s story and to carry that recognition out of the theatre and back into the world. Stachel’s Other does exactly that. It challenges Jews to expand our sense of who belongs. It challenges Americans to reconsider the categories we use to define one another. And it challenges young people to resist the temptations of performance and to find their authentic voice in the midst of contradiction.
In Jewish tradition, we often return to the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel. It is a story of struggle without resolution, of wounds that endure, but also of blessings that come only through the fight. Stachel’s play is a modern wrestling. It is a man confronting his many “others,” refusing easy answers, and choosing to tell the truth of his fractured self. That is why it is Jewish. That is why it is universal. And that is why every young American should see it.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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Israel’s Pager Attack Against Hezbollah Inspires New Spy Thriller With ‘Fauda’ Actors
An ambulance arrives at a hospital as thousands of people, mainly Hezbollah fighters, were wounded on Sept. 17, 2024 when the pagers they use to communicate exploded across Lebanon. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir
Israel’s operation last year that involved the explosion of pagers carried by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon has inspired a new film by Bleiberg Entertainment, which will launch sales for the project at the American Film Market (AFM) next month, Deadline reported.
The spy thriller “Frequency of Fear” will star “Fauda” cast members Doron Ben-David, Itzik Cohen and Marina Maximilian, as well as Israeli singer and actress Daniella Pick Tarantino (“The Perfect Gamble”), who is married to filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. The film is currently in post-production.
Israeli-American actor, director, and producer Danny Abeckaser is directing and producing with a script by Kosta Kondilopoulos. The two worked together previously on films including “Inside Man” and “The Engineer.”
The “Frequency of Fear” cast includes Ariel Yagen (“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”), actress and social media activist Emily Austin, Angel Bonanni (“Seven Days in Entebbe”), Herzel Tobey (“Damascus Cover”), Moran Attias (“Tyrant”), Aki Avni from Netflix’s “Beauty Queen of Jerusalem,” and Yarden Toussia Cohen from the Apple TV+ series “Tehran,” according to Deadline.
The AFM, held this year from Nov. 11-16 at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles, is an annual event where members of the international film and television industry can meet and collaborate.
The covert Israeli operation took place in September 2024 and targeted members of the Iranian-backed Islamist terror group Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon. The blasts took place over the course of two days, wounding thousands and killing more than 40 people. Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani was among those injured and reportedly lost an eye. The explosions took place across Hezbollah’s main stronghold in Beirut and in southern Lebanon. It was carried out following months of almost daily Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel and almost a year after the Hamas-led deadly terrorist attack in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023
Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad sabotaged thousands of explosive-laden communication devices, such as pagers and hand-held radios, before they were distributed to Hezbollah operatives. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed Israel’s involvement in November 2024, telling his cabinet he had approved the operation.
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Documentary Festival in Amsterdam Bans Gov’t-Funded Israeli Film Institutions in Support of Israel Boycott
Illustrative: Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
One of the world’s largest documentary festivals has prohibited Israeli film institutions receiving government funding from participating in its event this year, in support of a Dutch and Belgian cultural boycott of Israel.
Every year, the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) invites more than 300 independent films, 45 projects, and more than 3,000 professionals to the festival.
“These films and individual film professionals can come from any country, even if freedom of expression is under pressure in those countries or if human rights violations are committed in the name of governments,” an IDFA spokesperson explained to The Algemeiner on Tuesday. “Filmmakers and films with demonstrable ties to governments that contribute to serious human rights violations (for example, if a film or project has been financed by such government) will not be selected. Official government delegations or affiliated institutions from these countries are not eligible for official accreditation to IDFA.”
The festival will be held this year from Nov. 13-23.
The IDFA similarly explained its policy for next month’s event on its website under its “principles and guidelines.” The festival stated that it “does not claim to settle or resolve political debates, but rather to enrich them from an artistic perspective, thereby stimulating public debate and fostering understanding and individual growth.” Organizers also noted that the festival “cannot and does not want” to have a neutral position but instead hopes to be “a committed institution with a socially critical perspective.”
Despite participating in a boycott against Israel, IDFA further claimed that it aims to serve as a “safe space” for independent filmmakers, artists, and audiences, “where everyone feels welcome and respected and can express themselves freely even when perspectives differ.”
“At IDFA there is a plurality of voices, that established names and opinions can be critically questioned, that protests can be heard, and friction can exist to discuss social issues and contribute to change,” according to the festival’s website. “We must protect this open space, especially when things get complicated.”
IDFA organizers declined accreditation to Israel’s DocAviv Festival, the Israeli public broadcaster Kan, and the Israeli Co-Production Market because they receive partial funding from the Israeli state budget, according to Variety. Filmmaker and producer Michal Weits, who became Docaviv’s artistic director last year, released a statement criticizing global cultural boycotts of Israel. He called on colleagues in the international documentary filmmaking community not to “conflate the Israeli government with the state and its people.”
“This is the moment to strengthen liberal institutions and voices of dissent within Israel, and to ensure that they do not disappear,” he said. “The budgets allocated to cinema in Israel do not belong to the government; they belong to the public. They belong to the citizens, to the taxpayers. These resources enable us to amplify critical voices, to shed light on injustices, and to provide the broad platform we dedicate to filmmakers from across the world, offering audiences the opportunity to encounter urgent and meaningful cinema.”
The IDFA is among hundreds of Dutch and Belgian cultural organizations, artists, and cultural workers that recently signed a pledge to boycott Israel and Israeli entities that are complicit in alleged “grave human rights violations against the Palestinian people.” The signatories support boycotts of Israel in every field, including sports and music, like the Eurovision Song Contest.
“A cultural boycott alone cannot end the genocide, apartheid, or illegal occupation,” they said. “We thus echo longstanding Palestinian calls on the sports sector, academia, the economic sectors, and all spheres of politics to sever ties with complicit institutions.”
The group added that it is composed of “members of the Dutch and Belgian cultural sector, [who] wish to no longer remain bystanders to the ongoing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and what has been widely recognized by all authoritative institutions as a genocide of the Palestinian people.” Individual independent filmmakers and film professionals are not affected by the boycott.
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Harvard conservative magazine is shut down after publishing article laced with Nazi rhetoric
A conservative magazine at Harvard University was suspended by its board of directors Sunday amid scrutiny over an article published in September that closely resembled the rhetoric of Adolf Hitler.
In its September print issue, the Harvard Salient published an article by student David F.X. Army that read “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans,” echoing the words Hitler used in a January 1939 speech to the Reichstag in which he forecasted that another world war would lead to the annihilation of Jews.
The Harvard Salient piece also argued that “Islam et al. has absolutely no place in Western Europe,” and called for a return to values “rooted in blood, soil, language, and love of one’s own.” (The phrase “blood and soil” also echoes a Nazi idea that the inherent features of a people are its land and race.)
In a statement to the school’s newspaper, the Salient’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers, claimed that Army “did not intentionally quote Adolf Hitler, nor did any member of our editorial staff recognize the resemblance prior to publication.”
Rodgers continued, “The article was a meditation on how nations and cultures preserve coherence in an age of rootless cosmopolitanism and global homogenization. To confuse a defense of belonging for a manifesto on exclusion is a fault of the reader, not the writer.”
The print edition of the article was placed in undergraduate dormitories last month. Harvard installed Salient distribution boxes in dorms in February after the publication, which is independent from the university, complained that students could not easily access its work.
The uproar comes as politicians and other public figures on the right have faced allegations that their rhetoric echoes that of the Nazis. It also comes as Harvard and other universities face pressure from the Trump administration to show that they are not clamping down on conservative voices.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had illegally frozen more than $2.6 billion in federal funding to the school as a “smokescreen” for advancing its political agenda. The Trump administration had frozen the funds over allegations that Harvard was persecuting conservative ideology on its campus as well as fostering a climate of antisemitism.
The school’s mainstream student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, published three opinion pieces criticizing the rhetoric used in the Salient piece, to which Rodgers published his own article last week lamenting that “ordinary conservative thought is one headline away from criminality.”
“Together, the coverage forms a coherent script. The conservative scholar becomes the reactionary theorist. The traditionalist student becomes the bigot,” wrote Rogers. “‘Fascism’ is no longer a historical reference but a weaponized cliché, a way to place opponents outside the moral guardrails of the University.”
On Sunday, the Salient’s board of directors brought the debate over the Salient to a close and announced that it would suspend its operations pending a review.
“The Harvard Salient has recently published articles containing reprehensible, abusive, and demeaning material—material that is, in addition, wholly inimical to the conservative principles for which the magazine stands,” read the statement from the board, whose ex officio members include the prominent Jewish literature scholar Ruth Wisse.
“The Board has also received deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization. It is our fiduciary responsibility to investigate these matters fully and take appropriate action to address them,” the statement continued. “We are therefore pausing operations of the magazine, effective immediately, pending our review.”
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