Nov

14

2025

Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): In 1946, halfway through a Broadway play, a character called David, a young Holocaust survivor, broke the fourth wall and directly confronted the audience with a shocking accusation: “Where were you – Jews? . . . When the six million were being burned and buried alive in the lime pits, where were you? . . . You Jews of America! . . . Nowhere! Because you were ashamed to cry out as Jews.” The play—which ends with this hero joining a group of Haganah, Irgun, and Sternist soldiers marching to Palestine as they sing “Hatikvah”—was Ben Hecht’s A Flag Is Born. The actor playing David was Marlon Brando (a year away from his breakout performance in A Streetcar Named Desire).

David’s angry cynicism is contrasted in the play by two old pious survivors drawn from the world of Sholem Aleichem and played by veterans of the Yiddish stage, Celia Adler and Paul Muni (who had changed his name from Muni Weisenfreund when he crossed over to the English-language stage); Muni’s character was named Tevya. The elders die by play’s end, but David heads boldly into a new Jewish future, waving a makeshift flag: Tevya’s tattered tallis, to which David has affixed a Mogen Dovid. The soldiers tell him that as they “fight for Palestine,” they speak “a new Jewish language, the language of guns. We fling no more prayers or tears at the world. We fling bullets.”

The show ran for four months before embarking on a national tour. Hecht was already well known at that point for his Hollywood screenplays, among them The Front Page, His Girl Friday, and Scarface (as well as for some novels and countless works of journalism) but, as the theater scholar Garrett Eisler recounts in Ben Hecht’s Theatre of Jewish Protest, Hecht’s horror at news from Europe in the early 1940s prompted his calls to action in the columns he wrote for the left-leaning journal PM. Those articles caught the eye of Peter Bergson, the far-right Zionist organizer, who reached out to the writer. Hecht soon joined Bergson’s Committee for a Jewish Army. The Popular Front liberal and the Jabotinsky acolyte forged a heady partnership, seeking to win American hearts and minds—along with their dollars—for the cause.

Eisler calls A Flag is Born Broadway’s “first Zionist play” as well as the first Holocaust drama to address the trauma of World War II from the perspective of Jewish survivors. In it, Palestinian Arabs are barely mentioned—there’s just a line in which Tevya claims them as allies against their common British enemy—as the play’s point-blank message focuses entirely on the Jewish right to a homeland. In part, it does so, Eisler argues, as one of the first works to claim “the unfolding story of the Holocaust as a Jewish story, framing it as a ‘discrete’ and exceptional event,” in a period before the world had distinguished the violence as a “war against the Jews.”

A Flag Is Born was just one of four propagandistic works produced by Bergson and written by Hecht in the 1940s, and Eisler deftly places them within theatrical history in thematic and stylistic terms. The first and best known, We Will Never Die (1943), was subtitled “A Memorial Dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe.” Featuring music by Kurt Weill, the mass spectacle played at Madison Square Garden to sold-out audiences of 20,000 before touring to similar venues in Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The pageant sought to raise American consciousness and to save the Jews of Europe while also, Eisler writes, “to change American perceptions of Jews as defenseless victims – a stereotype [the artists] believed only encouraged neglect of indifference toward their cause.” The tour reached Los Angeles shortly after the crushing of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Hecht quickly added a new scene depicting “an action-driven war narrative,” writes Eisler, honoring how Jews fought back.

The other two Bergson-Hecht collaborations were A Jewish Fairy Tale (1944), a one-act comedy responding to the assassination of a British imperial officer by Jewish militants, and The Terrorist (1947), written for a Zionist benefit evening (and commissioned by then-Irgun commander Menachem Begin). The least known and most astonishing of the works, it is essentially a prison drama based on the real-life story of Dov Gruner, an Irgun fighter hanged by the British for his part in an attack on a British police station and celebrated by the most militant wings of the Zionist movement—and by the play—as a martyr.

In an appendix to his book, Eisler includes the scripts to all four works—some published for the first time—affording readers the chance to encounter for themselves these strange but influential specimens of political theater that played a major role in rousing America’s Zionist sentiments and shaping them for decades to come.

Helen Betya Rubinstein (contributing writer): The title story in Bennett Sims’s collection Other Minds is about a reader frustrated with the other readers whose traces he encounters in the form of e-book highlights. These “other minds” seem always to underline the same old maxims about love: “Love was …,” “Being in love meant…” The sense of isolation this induces for our reader—who prefers to underline “precise descriptions”—conjures a dinner party where, as he savors ice cream, his companions lick spoonfuls of ash.

I picked up Other Minds last winter and have turned to it repeatedly in a year when, for the first time, I caught myself handling a book the way I handle the internet, “scrolling” its pages in search of ideas I wanted to catch. In an era of both literary excess (more new books than ever) and literary scarcity (fewer resources and fewer risks), when far more reading happens online than in print, I found myself asking: What distinguishes a book? What really deserves to be printed and to be savored word by word?

The stories in Other Minds ensnare us in the haunted darkness of their protagonists’ private terrors. A series of calls from an unknown caller become a fixation that unravels a relationship. The ostensibly straightforward task of killing a backyard chicken turns into a harrowing battle for self-mastery. A philosophy adjunct’s fellowship application devolves into a convoluted (and hilarious) game of psychological chess. Each of these stories persuades us of its logics with fiercely focused attention and a Nicholson Baker-esque insistence on, yes, precise description. (As for that reader, if he reads so that “his own mind could be reflected and enlarged by the language of other minds,” does that mean their language will become his?)

My favorite of the book’s 12 stories opens with the descent of a single snowflake: “For as long as I focused on it,” says the mind we are lucky enough to briefly inhabit, “it came to seem creaturely and vibrant, because it was stirring inside of—being stirred to life by—the ray of my paid attention.” Indeed, the narrator’s observations—of the single flake, or of the windowpanes that produce the “momentary sensation that I was on a conference call with several snowfalls”—expand into a discussion of mourning and another on the wind as syntax: “The wind was arranging its grains the way a sentence arranges its words … as if there were something the wind wanted to say and kept erasing.” That snowflake, and the way it’s summoned “from out of the depths of its crystalline insentience,” encapsulates the action of Sims’s book—a reminder that tender, devoted attention can yield both mystery and magic.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): In 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz initiated a promising project. She asked her artist friends to describe all they’d done the previous day, and she recorded the results. The project was never completed and the tapes were lost. In 2019, however, a transcript of the tape of the photographer Peter Hujar’s account of his previous day was found in his archives, housed at the Morgan Library. Ira Sachs’ new film, Peter Hujar’s Day, is nothing but a recreation of that recording, drawn word for word from the transcript.

It is a tour de force of acting by the British actor Ben Whishaw, who plays Hujar and who carries the bulk of the dialogue of the film. Rebecca Hall as Rosenkrantz does a lovely job of hosting, listening, and occasionally commenting on or questioning Hujar’s account. But make no mistake about it, this is Whishaw’s film.

Making a film of one man recounting the details of an ordinary day is something of a gamble. The conversation film has its roots in Louis Malle’s My Dinner With Andre, which addressed big issues, whereas Peter Hujar’s Day is an account of a normal day in the life of a photographer. Yes, he photographs Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times. Yes, he is catty in his telling of how and where Ginsberg lives. Ginsberg, too, can be cutting, as Hujar tells us that Ginsberg advised him he could get an excellent photo of William S. Burroughs if he gave him a blow job. There are rare moments that would go in a biography of Hujar. But more typically, we hear about Hujar feeling he was cheated by a magazine that printed his photos of the theater director Robert Wilson without paying him; about a visit to a Chinese restaurant and the amount of the check ($7.43); of a silly telephone call with Susan Sontag; of his three naps; of the liverwurst sandwich he ate.

Hujar is concerned that he did nothing over the course of the day in question, though he realizes he’s actually done a lot that amounts to little. But as Rosenkrantz tells him, hearing him recount it all, it’s like a novel. And it is. Examined closely, we realize, every day is full of dramas, comic moments, and tragedies; we just don’t see them as such. It takes Hujar hours to tell of the hours he’d spent the day before doing so little.

The film reminded me of Borges’ greatest story, “Funes the Memorious.” Funes has so precise a memory that it takes him 24 hours to remember a day. Like Funes, if Hujar were to remember the day he recounted the previous day, he would be forced to say that the day after the day he recounted was a simple retelling of the day in question. Life then becomes a kind of matryoshka doll, each day nestled within another, though all the dolls are the same size.

Sachs’ direction is pointedly offhand. Clothes worn by the actors inexplicably change from shot to shot. There are flashes when film rolls end, a brief shot of the booms, weak lighting, and many purposely underexposed shots. Peter Hujar’s Day is a relatively short film, at 75 minutes. But in its focus on the daily nothing it turns into quite something. Incidentally, many of the photos discussed can be found online at The Peter Hujar Archive.

This week’s parshah, Chayei Sarah, begins with the death of the first biblical matriarch. At the end of last week’s reading, Sarah’s husband Abraham nearly slaughtered their son Isaac, heeding a divine command that was rescinded only at the last minute. Several commentaries see the narrative proximity between the binding of Isaac and Sarah’s death as suggesting that the former actually cost Sarah her life. As the medieval interpreter Rashi writes, “Through the announcement of the Binding [of Isaac], and the fact that her son had been made ready for sacrifice and had almost been killed, Sarah’s soul fled from her.” One classical midrash imagines this even more vividly, explaining that when Isaac described his ordeal to his mother, “she cried out six cries, corresponding to six shofar blasts. They say that she did not complete them before she died.”

In a 1939 homily on our parshah, delivered in the Warsaw Ghetto just two months after his son was killed in the German invasion of Poland, the Hasidic rebbe Kalonymus Kalman Shapira invoked Sarah’s anguish and death to articulate a theological response to his own pain and that of his community. Shapira first cites the Talmudic sage Reish Lakish, who believed in the benefits of suffering: “Just as salt sweetens the taste of meat, so too does suffering cleanse a person’s transgressions.” But Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rimanov, a late 18th- and early 19th-century Polish Hasidic leader, was uncomfortable with this claim, and Shapira cites him more approvingly: “Just as meat is ruined when salted too heavily,” Rabbi Menachem Mendel explained in a revision of Reish Lakish’s analogy, “so too can a person be damaged by excess suffering. For suffering to be positive, it needs to be tempered with mercy.” Building on this view, Shapira teaches that Sarah died to teach God a lesson. “She died,” he writes, “in order to show God” that it is wrong for anyone “to be expected to suffer excessively”—that is, she voluntarily succumbed to this fate to demonstrate its injustice. Her death, in this interpretation, was a protest against God and a demand for a more ethical future. For this Shapira extols her; because her actions were done for the benefit of others, he sees them as entirely virtuous.

Of course, as Shapira himself was all too aware, Sarah’s protest did not succeed; we live in a world in which violence and extreme suffering are commonplace. In light of this grim reality, perhaps we can understand his invocation of the matriarch as a call to continue making her demand, in less self-destructive but no less committed ways—to refuse to defend or rationalize unnecessary suffering, no matter the context. If the near-sacrifice of one child, at God’s command, justified such an all-encompassing protest against the divinely ordered world, then all the more so are we obligated to stand up against human authorities that wreak death and destruction against children on a far vaster scale.

Daniel Kraft is a writer, translator, and educator living in Richmond, Virginia.