(New York Jewish Week) – “My feelings about Israel are valid,” says Asaf Sternheim, an adjunct writing professor at an unnamed university who is the protagonist of a much-talked-about new play opening in New York this week. .
Assaf, played by Jewish actor Josh Radnor of How I Met Your Mother, speaks to his wife and details his feelings about Israel.I actually don’t like many things do”
Such ambivalence is at the heart of Radner’s character in “The Ally,” a timely drama that opens Tuesday at the Public Theater. Throughout the approximately two-and-a-half hour play, the audience watches Assaf become increasingly drawn into the conflict after signing a letter harshly criticizing Israel. The show’s themes seem ripped from the headlines: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, campus activism, racism, and anti-Semitism, to name a few.
Public Theater Artistic Director Oscar Eustis wrote in a note published in Playbill that the play “will evoke strong and contradictory opinions in the audience,” and that the goal of a production like “Ally” is For the audience to “step back a little, empathize with the feelings of others, and break with the habits of thought and belief that keep us at odds in the world outside the theater.”
The play, written by Itamar Moses (who won a Tony Award for another Israel-based show, “The Band’s Visit”) and directed by Lila Neugebauer, centers on Assaf. Asaf is a playwright in his 40s who, like Moses, grew up in Berkeley. He is the son of Israeli parents in California. A professor finds himself caught up in a campus conflict when a former student, Baron, asks him to sign a manifesto to protest the murder of his black cousin by local police. Assaf signs the manifesto. There are probably thousands of them,” he tells himself – even though he calls Israel an apartheid state.
Assaf became known as a signer on campus, and two students asked Assaf to become a faculty sponsor for a new group seeking to embrace critics of Israel. According to a press release, Assaf is caught in an “increasingly complex web of conflicting agendas that challenge his loyalties as a progressive, husband, artist, academic, American, atheist, and Jew.” That’s what it means. .
Despite being written far in advance, in the fall of 2023, “The Ally” takes place in New York City, a city disrupted to its core by the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel and the ensuing deadly war between Israel and Hamas. arrive at. Anti-Semitic incidents in the city have increased since the war began nearly five months ago, while pro-Palestinian street demonstrations have occurred almost daily. From Columbia University to New York University to the City University of New York, the city’s campuses are particularly hot spots for activity. During heated debates over the war, students were assaulted, disciplined, and banned from group activities.
It remains to be seen how theater-going New Yorkers will react to a play with such an incendiary and timely theme. As the drama unfolds, the audience meets a variety of characters, from African-American lawyer-turned-community organizer Nakia (who is also Assaf’s ex-girlfriend) to Reuven, a pro-Israel graduate student who wears a black kippah. meet. . They address and debate a myriad of issues, including what the phrase “never again” means and what exactly constitutes genocide. Many of the conversations reflect discussions currently taking place on campuses, synagogues, and cafeteria tables across the city and beyond.
Playwright Moses told the New York Times that one of the “toughest questions” he asks in the play is “whether the fight against anti-Semitism belongs on an equal arm of the social justice movement.” Ta.
In the end, the play does not provide clear answers. The audience is asked to sit with the discomfort of the characters’ conflicting views.
“I’m not interested in saying anyone is completely right or completely wrong, or that someone is a hero or a villain,” Moses told the Times. “I don’t think that’s true. I want them all to be fascinating and flawed.”
“The Ally” opens Tuesday at the Public Theater (425 Lafayette St.) and runs through March 17. Click here for tickets and information.
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