Jewish Currents

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.

Nov

7

2025

Simone Zimmerman (advisory board member): In 2018, my friend Noam Shuster Eliassi quit her job as a UN peacemaker to try her hand at comedy. I was there the first time she performed in front of a Palestinian audience in East Jerusalem. She had them from her opening line: “Don’t worry guys, I’m only going to be here for seven minutes, not 70 years!” The packed courtyard burst into laughter. It was a beautiful thing to witness.

Amber Fares’ film Coexistence, My Ass!, which follows Noam’s journey, began its US tour last week. While watching the film, I couldn’t help being struck by how Noam’s embodiment of solidarity and multiculturalism echoes that of Zohran Mamdani, whose election victory this week has captivated the world.

Coexistence, My Ass! documents Noam as she sets off to Harvard to write a comedy special about growing up in Neve-Shalom/Wahat A’Salam, “the only place in Israel where Jews and Palestinians live together by choice.” Noam jokes about her leftist parents, her mixed Ashkenazi/Mizrahi identity, and the Israeli peace camp. Adored by audiences of all backgrounds, she charms with her fluency in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and even a sprinkle of words in Farsi, her mother’s mother tongue.

When the pandemic shuts down life in the US, Noam is forced to return home to Israel/Palestine. Noam’s personal story becomes a vehicle for exploring the failure of the “coexistence” project in Israel—the impossibility of equality under apartheid, or of peace with occupation, and now genocide. Weaving together scenes from Noam’s comedy special and from her daily life, the film manages to capture, with humor and nuance, insights about the reality of Israeli society that feel devastating, urgent, and timely.

When I first saw the film last spring, I found myself sobbing, along with Noam—overcome by the rising violence and fascism in Israeli society and the bleak future it portends. Watching the film again at last week’s premiere in New York, I found a hopeful resonance that I didn’t expect.

This week, New York elected Zohran Mamdani—a progressive Muslim socialist immigrant whose campaign promoted a hopeful vision of an inclusive, affordable city. At a GOTV canvas in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza on Tuesday, Naomi Klein told a group of volunteers with JVP Action: “Fascists love uniformity, sameness, top down.” That’s why, she explained, they hate everything this campaign stood for: a multiracial, diverse city that celebrates its difference and its togetherness. Zohran’s campaign was subject to hideous Islamophobic slurs and racist fearmongering. The attacks aimed, among other things, to scare Jewish New Yorkers out of voting for him, to make them believe that they would not be safe or welcome in his coalition. The racists were dealt a resounding rebuke this week—and it is surely being heard around the world.

I have no illusions that this vision is anywhere close to a reality in Israel/Palestine. But if there is any chance of beating fascism, it will be because, as Zohran has done here, people like Noam will do there—remind people that if they choose hope over fear, solidarity over division, there is a better way to live. As Zohran’s mother, the filmmaker Mira Nair, told Vogue India this week, ”[Zohran] embodies the multiplicity of the worlds in him without apology, and actually with great celebration.” Noam is one of those people, too. We need more models of that in public life.

Coexistence, My Ass! is touring across the US in the coming weeks, and is playing at IFC in New York City through November 13th. On the film website, you can also invite the filmmakers to your community for a screening.

Raphael Magarik (contributing writer): I would not have believed the great American movie about prison abolition dates from 1947, but that is in fact when Jules Dassin’s Brute Force was released. In the film, an attempted jailbreak runs into an ambitious, sadistic chief of security and explodes into outright revolution. I find it almost unfathomable how radical the movie is, especially given that it was produced under the censorious Hays Code and in the top-down Hollywood studio system. Dassin, a leftist who was later blacklisted, portrays the prison as a factory gone horribly wrong; he emphasizes the convicts’ work amid hellish machines, as well as the clock on the guard tower, which imposes its ruthless labor discipline. In one of the movie’s most arresting moments, another inmate suggests to the rebel leader, played by Burt Lancaster, that they wait and plan their escape; Lancaster replies that time is always against them, repudiating any vision of gradual progress and offering instead a radical, revolutionary break.

Decades before the rise of mass incarceration (and a full 60 years before Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s classic Marxist study of the phenomenon, Golden Gulag), Dassin already understood prison as a repository for surplus population; thus, the warden complains that he struggles to employ the inmates because of complaints from outside manufacturers and unions, and rebellious prisoners are punished by having to dig a drainpipe that symbolizes their own status as capitalist waste-product. Recalling the endless arguments, just a few years ago, about the propriety of “fascism” as a term for American reaction, it is telling that Brute Force’s villain, the security chief, is a Wagner-listening Nazi torturer who is installed by an unnamed, shadowy elite figure who visits the prison and deposes the feckless warden. Fascism thus represents not an aberration, but the logic of a broader system. In this movie, it can and certainly does happen here.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): This year’s annual Other Israel film festival began last night, November 6th, and continues until November 13th. Its focus has always been on oppositional filmmaking in Israel. The films of the festival, and the festival as a whole, reflect a material contradiction, as the films are almost all funded by a state which in various ways they indict. That contradiction shapes the experience of attending and writing on the festival as well, requiring one to support art funded by the state in order to support artists that oppose the state. The tension was especially acute this year, as films and filmmakers opposed to Israeli policies and the standard Zionist version of history are in an especially difficult period, facing both physical and financial threats within Israel as well as a growing international movement to boycott all films that receive money from the Israeli government.

The dilemma was especially obvious in the opening film of the festival, Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea, which is a throwback to the greatest Iranian films—particularly the early films of Jafar Panahi, like The White Balloon and The Mirror—as well as the gentle humanism of Italian neorealism, in this case De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The Sea is a touching story of a young Palestinian boy who dreams of seeing the sea, but who can’t because he lacks a permit to cross from the occupied West Bank into Israel. The same holds for his father, who is unable to obtain legal work in Israel. Neither is deterred, and while the father is doing construction work the boy sneaks into Israel on his own and attempts to make his way to the beach in Tel Aviv. Things inevitably go south for both, and Carmeli-Pollak demonstrates that you can make a film that denounces injustice without banging the viewer over the head. And yet, when the film won the Ophir—Israel’s Oscar—for best film, the government announced it would cut off funding for the prize ceremony.

Coincidentally, another film on the region is also being released this week. In a just world, Fatme Hassona would be regarded as the Anne Frank of the genocide in Gaza. She is the heart and soul of Sepideh Farsi’s unbearably moving Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Like Anne Frank’s diary, Farsi’s film is centered around the day to day existence of one person, 24-year-old Fatme, a talented photographer, faithful Muslim, and proud Palestinian and Gazan. The film consists of nothing but the conversations between the two women over WhatsApp or Facetime. Fatme, indefatigable, smiles all the while as she recounts the daily miseries of a life under bombardment, of attacks by tanks and artillery and troops and planes and Apache helicopters. She talks of her dead, shows off her family, and tells of never having left Gaza in her life, and of her desire to see Rome. She speaks of her joy on October 7th, which showed that Gaza still had the ability to fight back, and of her mixed feelings about the Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, who Israel assassinated in October 2024. To read about at least 65,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza is too abstract; to spend nearly two hours in Fatme’s presence and to learn that she was killed along with her entire family when their building was bombed moves genocide from the realm of a legal question to the reality of an irreplaceable life. Like Anne Frank, Fatme’s story stands for countless real people with real dreams and hopes who were slaughtered by a murderous state.

Oct

31

2025

Siddhartha Mahanta (contributing editor): This month, New York University’s Skirball Theater staged a production of Krapp’s Last Tape, one of the celebrated short works of absurdist master Samuel Beckett. In the play, Krapp, a rumpled sort of fellow, sits at a desk with a tape recorder in a spare room illuminated by a single hanging light. Over the course of his adult life, he has obsessively maintained a spoken diary, recorded on countless spools of tape and logged in a massive, dusty ledger.

On this particular “late evening in the future,” he listens to his 39-year-old self, who, it happens, has just re-listened to his 20-something-year-old self, full of fire and possibility. We hear of the death of his mother, of a dog and his rubber ball, of a romantic encounter with a woman on a pier. Present-day Krapp then makes a fresh recording—the titular “last tape,” in which he berates both Krapps the Younger, laments his literary failures, and once again recalls the encounter on the pier. Expectations for a full, brilliant future—how silly.

Many of the greats, including Michael Gambon and John Hurt, have played Krapp. This production, directed by Vicky Featherstone, features Stephen Rea, a proud son of Belfast known as much for his groundbreaking film and theatrical work as for his patriotism. Rea apparently recorded the younger Krapp’s dialogue years ago in hopes of one day playing the role. Watching it live, I was struck by the spare dramatics and the deliberateness of the comedic business, and marveled at Rea’s physical gifts as he shambles around a barren stage.

It’s a play very much about meditating (or obsessing) on the past, on fleeting moments, old patterns and recognitions, the curses we inflict on ourselves, and our unresolved pains and losses. Taking on Krapp requires the gravitas and clear vision of one who has lived, seen, erred, and kept going. Watching Rea as he rewinds, pauses, and fast forwards the tapes, always on the precipice of epiphany, is both aching and funny, a manifestation of how we both relive and re-edit our memories to avoid a true reckoning with who we are and who we have been.

Sean Pergola (operations coordinator): The first thing I heard at the end of Jewish Plot was the man next to me apologizing to his guest—“I’m sorry, that wasn’t what I was expecting at all”—which playwright Torrey Townsend would probably take as a compliment. My fellow theatergoer may have been surprised to see a work of meta-theater centered around a fictional play, a fact which the show’s marketing seems to purposely conceal, or he may have been caught off-guard by its in-your-face disgust with Zionism. But even though I knew to expect both of these going into it, I was still thoroughly shocked myself.

The play, which runs at Theatre 154 in New York City through November 7th, opens with actor Madeline Weinstein’s announcement that the cast will be performing the fictitious I.W. Bruntmole’s Jewish Plot, a supposed long-lost Victorian melodrama depicting antisemitic prejudices in 19th century London. What’s more interesting than the play-within-a-play itself––a story of a lover rejected by his beloved after she learns he’s Jewish, performed with flat but entertaining slapstick affect––is Weinstein’s frenetic presentation of it. She tells us that most of the cast and the director have quit at the last minute, and talks around the obviously related fact that Townsend, her friend, has gone more than a little insane over his many years of working on this show.

The first 20 minutes are just an aperitif to the show’s real meat, which begins when Townsend supposedly delivers a freshly-penned second act to the cast, sight unseen. What begins as a simple continuation of the melodrama quickly turns into Townsend’s personal rant against his agent, Joshua Harman, the theater world at large, and, most especially, against himself. “[Are you] too good at using your Jewishness to actually be successful?” an actor reads from his script.

Once we learn that Townsend’s grandfather was a Zionist propagandist, the play-within-the-play descends into an orgy of cruelty. The Jewish character is falsely accused of murder and blood libel, and is paraded through the town square; Weinstein reads off Townsend’s instructions for the audience themselves to hurl human excrement at the actor, then to strip naked and have a very literal orgy. The scene grows only more horrific as the show grinds on, transporting us into the pits of hell, interspersed with descriptions of the violence in Gaza and deranged quotes taken directly from Theodore Herzl and Townsend’s grandfather.

If the play is meant to capture what it means to be an American Jew right now––as its marketing suggests––it is a failure. Townsend’s screed is too rambly, and too specific to himself, to have any cohesive depiction of a general “Jewish experience.” Where it succeeds, and remarkably so, is in the very depiction of this failure. As Townsend’s anxiety over how to make sense and use of his Judaism spirals out of control, the melodrama’s Jewish protagonist begins to split in two. In the play itself, he is very firmly a Jew and suffers specifically from antisemitism, but as his existence becomes a general symbol of a scapegoat applied to contemporary times, his character begins to slip from a Jew into a metaphor for an immigrant or even a Palestinian. He becomes “Jewish” in scare-quotes, Jewish only in the sense that “everybody is somebody’s Jew,” as Townsend quotes Primo Levi.

At the root of Jewish Plot is this fundamental anxiety of non-identity, the inability to map the historical experiences of Jewish persecution onto a present where a Jewish ethno-state actively seeks to inflict this same persecution onto others, purportedly in the name of Jews as a whole. Beyond the very real, genocidal violence playing out in this drama is a metaphorical suicide, Jews murdering “Jews.” Townsend perhaps veers more toward shock value than thematic depth in his conclusion, but he’s one of the few artists I’ve seen depict this societal psychosis with appropriate gravity.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Pascal Bonitzer has been a presence on the French cinematic scene for nearly 60 years—as a critic at the Cahiers du Cinéma, as the screenwriter of countless films, and as a director. Though he has occasionally made a film that I liked, for the most part his name in the credits has signaled that I should run the other way. For every worthwhile film, like The Young Karl Marx, for which he wrote the screenplay, there have been many others I couldn’t abide. And never, until now, have I ever been emotionally touched by a film that bears his name.

Auction, his latest, is a pleasant surprise. Bonitzer has always been an exemplar of the worst form of intellectualisme, of a pretentious, self-absorbed cinema that eschews any human feeling, but here he presents a story of enormous directness and simplicity. It is a film in which the characters are recognizable human beings—flawed, changeable, and unpredictable.

Based on a true story, Auction recounts the recovery of a painting by Egon Schiele that went missing during World War II, stolen by the Germans from its Jewish owner. It is now in the possession of a simple factory worker in Alsace who, when he learns of its history, refuses to profit from it. He wants it to be returned to the heirs of its original owner. We are taken into the world of art auctions, of the wheeling and dealing of auction houses, lawyers, and collectors. Both honorable and dishonorable conduct are on display. Because this is a Bonitzer film, I spent its running time waiting for an unexpected and unlikely turn of events. Instead I got a film of remarkable warmth in which the most unexpected of all outcomes arrives for everyone involved: a happy ending.

The casting and acting are extraordinary. As strong as Alex Lutz is in the role of the auctioneer, who presents himself as a man who loves to be hated, he is overshadowed by the female leads. Lea Drucker and Nina Hamzawi are excellent as lawyers, but the film is stolen by Louise Chevillote as Aurore, a troubled woman, an emotionally unstable mythomaniac who nonetheless manages to see things more clearly than anyone else. Auction is intellectually and emotionally intelligent. It allows the characters to breathe and even redeem themselves.

One more rec: Film Forum in New York is currently screening a series of films in honor of the great film historian Kevin Brownlow, author of one of the essential books of film history, The Parade’s Gone By. It was originally scheduled for 2020, but Covid screwed things up. It will be running until November 6th, when it will screen two fascinating films by Brownlow himself. Winstanley (1975) is his telling of the story of Gerrard Winstanley, the leader and theoretician of the 17th century radical Levelers. The other is the cinematically and morally challenging It Happened Here (1965), which imagines an England that was invaded during World War II, was defeated, and became a collaborationist-run National Socialist state opposed by a not especially savory resistance movement. One character in the Resistance explains that “sometimes to fight fascism you have to use fascist methods.” A curious idea, and one that merits reflection.