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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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The Yiddishist Yeshiva is open for registration
ס׳האָט זיך לעצטנס געשאַפֿן אַ נײַער סאָרט לייענקרײַז דורך פֿייסבוק, וווּ מע לערנט תּורה אויף ייִדיש צוזאַמען.
אינעם לייענקרײַז, וואָס הייסט „די ייִדישיסטישע ישיבֿה“, לייענט מען חומש מיט רש״י — סײַ אויפֿן אָריגינעלן לשון־קודש סײַ אויף ייִדיש־טײַטש. „די גרופּע איז אָפֿן פֿאַר אַלע מינים מענטשן,“ האָט דערקלערט דער לינגוויסט און ייִדיש־אַקטיוויסט לייזער בורקאָ, וועלכער האָט אָרגאַניזירט די גרופּע. „פֿרויען און מענער, ייִדן און נישט־ייִדן, געי און ׳גלײַך׳. נײַע תּלמידים דאַרפֿן פֿאַרשטיין ייִדיש גוט, אָבער זיי דאַרפֿן נישט האָבן קיין תּורהדיקן הינטערגרונט.“
די גרופּע טרעפֿט זיך יעדן דינסטיק דורך פֿייסבוק. נאָך מער פּרטים אָדער כּדי זיך צו פֿאַרשרײַבן, שטעלט זיך אין קאָנטאַקט מיט בורקאָ, אויפֿן אַדרעס leyzertag@gmail.com אָדער דורך פֿייסבוק.
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A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall
(JTA) — When David Freedman discovered a long-forgotten photo album in his parents’ Montreal basement last year, he found nearly 100 pages of century-old photographs from his grandfather’s year in British Mandate Palestine, capturing Jerusalem street scenes, market stalls and holy sites.
The photographs were not only century-old and in near-perfect condition, but included figures who would later become central to Jewish medical and political history, among them Israel’s future first president Chaim Weizmann, Jerusalem ophthalmologist Abraham Ticho, malaria researcher Israel Kligler, future British prime minister Winston Churchill and Herbert Samuel, Britain’s first high commissioner for Palestine.
David Freedman said he knew he had “struck gold” when he found the album, which had been untouched for decades. “I realized in disbelief I was looking at extraordinary images of Jerusalem,” he said.
Though Freedman said the album showed his grandfather’s “passion for skillful, impromptu photography,” it was images of a site that epitomizes endurance that are having the broadest impact.
Freedman’s pictures of the Western Wall has inspired a public appeal by the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum, which is asking people to look through old albums and attics for photographs, postcards and other visual material that could help expand the historical record of Judaism’s holiest site.
The request comes ahead of a major exhibition opening in 2027 marking 60 years since the 1967 Six-Day War brought the wall, known in Hebrew as the Kotel, under Jewish control for the first time in nearly two millennia.
Although the Western Wall is now one of the most photographed sites in the world, museum curators say the visual record of earlier decades remains surprisingly fragmented, with many of the most intimate images likely still tucked away in private collections and family albums.
“The Western Wall, the Kotel, in its simplest form, is a structure of ancient stones. Yet its true meaning has never resided in the stones alone — it has been shaped and elevated by the countless individuals who have stood before it over the centuries,” Eilat Lieber, the museum’s director and chief curator, said in a statement.
Next year’s exhibition, titled “Eyes on the Wall” and curated by Shimon Lev and Yael Brandt, will be the first large-scale exhibition dedicated entirely to the Western Wall, the museum said, and will trace its transformation over nearly 2,000 years. It will be one of the major exhibitions staged by the Tower of David Museum since it reopened in 2023 after a $50 million renovation of its ancient citadel complex.
The wall, the exposed section of an ancient retaining wall around the Temple Mount, the site of the biblical Jewish temples, has long been Judaism’s most sacred places of prayer and pilgrimage. From 1948 until the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Old City and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Jews were barred from going there.
Among its most iconic images was David Rubinger’s photograph of three Israeli paratroopers standing at the wall shortly after its capture, looking upward in a mixture of awe and disbelief. The picture was taken 59 years ago this week.
Abraham Orkin Freedman, a Canadian physician and Zionist activist, took his photographs before the site was so contested. He arrived in Palestine in July 1920, just as Britain was replacing military rule with a civil administration, and stayed until 1922, serving during that period as managing director of Hadassah Hospital. His grandson David, also a doctor, said the album’s timing gives it much of its historical value, with photographs that capture people in the streets, as well as the terrain and buildings of Jerusalem during the nascent years of the British Mandate.
Among the images Freedman uncovered, the one that struck him most was a photograph of women praying side by side with men at the oldest part of the Western Wall, a scene far removed from the gender-separated prayer sections at the site today. The question of mixed-gender prayer at the Wall remains politically charged, with a recent High Court order to advance the egalitarian section followed by Knesset moves to strengthen Chief Rabbinate control over prayer at the site.
After recognizing the album’s significance, Freedman met with his family who decided collectively to give it to the Tower of David Jerusalem Museum for safekeeping, research and public access. Freedman said the family was proud the album had found “a new home, not many meters from where my grandfather once stood.”
Lev said he hoped the appeal would bring more discoveries like Freedman’s into public view, expanding the visual record of the Western Wall beyond official archives.
“There is something profoundly moving in the moment when an intimate private photograph transcends its original purpose and becomes an important historical testimony,” Lev said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post A century-old Jerusalem photo album sparks search for forgotten images of the Western Wall appeared first on The Forward.
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5th man charged in March arson of London’s Hatzola ambulances
(JTA) — Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced Tuesday that an 18-year-old man has been charged in connection with the March arson attack that destroyed four ambulances owned by Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service.
Subhan Ahmed, a British national, was charged on Monday with “assisting an offender” in connection with the arson.
The ambulances were set ablaze in the early morning of March 23 in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood in London. The incident spurred increased patrols in Jewish communities.
The charge is the latest development in an investigation being led by the Metropolitan Police’s counter-terrorism unit.
Four others have already been charged in connection with the attack.
Three British nationals — 20-year-old Hamza Iqbal, 19-year-old Rehan Khan and 18-year-old Judex Atshatshi — along with a 17-year-old dual British and Pakistani national were all charged in April with “committing arson, destroying or damaging property, and being reckless as to whether life would be endangered.”
The four have remained in custody ahead of a trial planned for January. Ahmed, meanwhile, was released ahead of a June 16 court date.
The ambulance arsons came at the early edge of a wave of incidents that have put London Jews on edge and induced the city’s police force to step up their presence in Jewish communities. The incidents have included multiple incendiary devices placed near synagogues as well as the stabbing in April of two Jewish men in Golders Green. The Metropolitan Police reported last week that antisemitic hate crimes in the capital rose 72% in May.
Following the announcement of Ahmed’s charge, the Community Security Trust, a Jewish organization, thanked the police and the Crown Prosecution Service “for their ongoing work investigating this attack and other arson incidents targeting the Jewish community.”
It added in a statement, “These are very serious allegations, and it is right that those responsible are being held accountable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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