Photo credit: Joan Marcus
Written by PJ Grisard
February 27, 2024
At two important junctures in Act I; alliesIn Itamar Moses’ new play about Israel, student groups, and social justice on an American college campus, the characters quote the Talmud and disagree completely about its importance.
Rachel Klein, a junior who advocates for the Jewish tradition of interrogation, likens these ancient commentaries to something wild but beautifully democratic, “toilet stalls for an entire culture.”
Reuven Fischer, a confrontational Jewish studies doctoral student who wears a kippah, disagrees. The Talmud is not an open dialogue, but a dialogue between great rabbinic sages. Beyond that, unlike planned lectures by Jewish historians critical of Israel, Talmudic conversations areinternal one of them Jew”
In drama, debates over what constitutes acceptable speech and who is allowed to hear it are essentially theatrical.
Directed by Tony Award winner Lila Neugebauer. allies It’s about Asaf Sternheim (Josh Radnor), an adjunct professor at an elite university, and his raw, ironically funny performance, which outdoes his performance, was somehow expected. how i met your mother tenure). Like Moses, Assaf is a playwright who was raised in Berkeley by Israeli immigrant parents, and when asked to sign a comprehensive manifesto for institutional change by a black student whose cousin had been killed by police, Assaf became a playwright. He is a proud progressive who has been forced to look at discomfort. .
Assaf agrees with “98 percent” of a text accidentally written by his ex-girlfriend, local activist and lawyer Nakia (Cherryse Booth), but two sentences accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide are written by Assaf. I have been forced to suspend my opinion for a while. (The play, released by the Public Theater last June, is set in September and early October 2023, before the current war and South Africa’s decision to take Israel to The Hague.)
Shortly after, Rachel pitches Asaf on the Talmud in a bathroom stall and asks him to sponsor a new student organization similar to the Jewish Voice for Peace. The group hopes to welcome scholars whose views on the founding of Israel differ from the narrative Assaf was raised with. Further deepening Assaf’s dilemma is his Korean-American wife Gwen (Joy Osmanski), who is spearheading the expansion of an unnamed university in a disadvantaged neighborhood, and whose attitude is making her feel uneasy about her job. The question is how does it affect the Set in a spare setting like Frasier’s foreclosed mansion, the play, in two acts, seizes the third rail of the campus conversation that has been building since October 7th.
case of joshua harmon Prayer for the French Republic We can see the domestic dialectic regarding Israel and anti-Semitism, but it is very isolated among members of Jewish families. allies The film is about Jewish men’s relationships with other minority groups and their fears of being left behind, or worse, villainized, in their activities.
Assaf wants to do right by his student, the Baron (Elijah Jones), and agrees that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is wrong, but why is the only manifesto on racism and racism that I don’t understand why the Jewish state is the only one to be blamed. Economic justice in the United States. Nakia argues that Israel has achieved its place within a matrix of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy, but fails to understand how anti-Semitism is implicated in the same networks. do. Jews, she reasons, do not need protection as urgently as other peoples. Assaf says this same myth of Jewish power kills Jews.
Moses had been writing notes for the play for years — writing in bold in the program notes that the play was not inspired by “any particular event or incident.” Yes – he knows about October 7th. The ensuing university controversy will likely shape how we perceive this work. I can’t decide for myself whether the current context makes this piece more timely or actually more irrelevant.
Moses’ achievements won Tony Award in 2018 band visit, what he brings to the table is a golden ear for all sides’ points, and he primarily chooses to lay out their best arguments against his increasingly conflicted protagonists. He uses Reuven’s (Ben Rosenfield, whose one scene elicits a barnstormer’s exit applause) rhetoric that anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, and Rachel’s (Madeline Weinstein, who gradually becomes more emotionally complex) )’s never-again spirit is perfectly expressed. characterization and social justice buzzwords). By the second act, I was waiting for one Palestinian voice to break the silence.
Michael Khalid Karasheh, who plays Farid, a student activist from Gaza, delivers a harrowing monologue about Assaf’s selective alliance and the world’s disregard for peaceful Palestinian activists. Defensive Assaf may quibble with the semantics of words like “apartheid” or seek “analogical perfection.” Mr. Farid, like Mr. Baron, does not have that luxury, having experienced what he felt was the “threat of violence incarnate.”
The play ends just before the new reality for Israeli-Palestinian discourse, offering no glimpse of what is to come. Mr. Assaf’s fear of signing the manifesto is purely personal, but today the presence of his name, or for that matter the names of his students, on such a document carries professional weight. This could lead to serious consequences and the disclosure of personal information via mobile bulletin boards located just outside the quad. At the same time, the betrayal Assaf feels from his fellow progressives is compounded by statements from student and national organizations that ignore the killings and kidnappings of Israelis or blame Hamas attacks solely on Israel for the bloodshed. It is likely to become more serious in the next few days.
allies is a brave work because of its uncertainty, but some may criticize it for the same quality. At my performance, an Israeli man walked out during the intermission, calling the play “bullshit,” and someone booed me when I mentioned BDS. But even as the play allows us to find fault with Assaf’s narcissism, we see the reluctance of pro-Palestinian audiences to center the Jewish perspective at this moment of intense suffering in Gaza. easily visible.
Moses presents what Assaf describes as a “complex, five-pronged argument,” expertly staged by Neugebauer, but given the subject matter and The Public’s subscription base, such an external argument is , there is no escaping the practical reality that the following constituencies are being reached: , who looked more like Assaf than any other black or brown actor at my matinee screening. (Although not ironically, in this production Conversation at 92NY, the venue canceled the event and ultimately the entire reading series after an invited author signed a letter accusing Israel of “indiscriminate violence.” )
In other words, as Reuven warns Assaf against supporting scholars critical of Israel, “the meaning of a performance depends above all on who is in the audience.” .
Itamar Moses allies is currently playing at The Public until March 24th. For more information and tickets, visit The Public’s website.