“Birthright” and “Giant” Tackle Jewish Identity
The Oakland-based playwright Jonathan Spector wrote “Birthright”—his warm, haimish, ultimately frustrating new drama—on a dare. Weeks after October 7, 2023, Spector was “cajoled” by a peer to dig into the generational fracture among American Jews, a split that deepened precipitously after the catastrophes in Israel and Gaza. At first, Spector said no. Who could blame him? The risks included glibness and finger-wagging, not to mention the danger suggested by the metal detectors outside the production now at M.C.C.
So it’s strange to report that the play Spector constructed from such volatile material is an oddly uplifting project—a witty, tender portrait of left-leaning Jews that, by its final moments, feels hobbled by a pulse of wish fulfillment, a desire for closure at any cost. We meet six millennial hopefuls in 2006, shortly after they’ve returned from Birthright, a free ten-day trip to Israel that is designed to create, in attendees, a bond with the Jewish state—and, not coincidentally, attractions to fellow-Jews. (Like the hookup-heavy youth group N.F.T.Y. and the summer-camp circuit, Birthright aims to vaccinate Jews against that diluter of the tribe, intermarriage.) The trip seems to have worked: Izzy, a vulnerable, dry-humored lesbian, played with a hummingbird intensity by the wonderful Molly Bernard, marvels that the experience is hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t been through it, like sharing a dream. (“They’ll listen for a while, but then at a certain point . . .”) Her peers will be her “mish-fucking-pokah,” her chosen family.
The gang has gathered, at the behest of Izzy’s bossy, flirty childhood friend Chaya (Zoë Winters), for an intervention. The Yale good girl Alona (Molly Ranson), fresh off a tryst with an I.D.F. soldier, is toying with making aliyah—moving to Israel. The other five intend to talk her out of it. Why step off the gleaming escalator of Diaspora success? It’s a zippy, sexy debate that expands as we follow the new friends (and Chaya’s chatty mom, played by a terrific Liz Larsen) for eighteen years, and as their lives kink into unexpected shapes. At three hours and twenty minutes, the play’s length may sound daunting, but, under the fleet direction of Teddy Bergman, “Birthright” races by, bright and light and often very funny, its crisp exchanges like gleaming stones skipping across an ocean of pain. In addition to the three women, we meet the proto-blogger Noah (Eli Gelb), who’s crushing on Chaya; the boozy indie rocker Emerson (Nate Mann); and the free spirit Lev (Hale Appleman, all legs and grins), who ditched the Birthright tour midway through, and is so disarmingly openhearted that even when he ghosts a lover he is quickly forgiven.
Each act takes place at the suburban home of Chaya’s family: the first, “Two Jews, Three Opinions,” weeks after the trip, and the second, “A Palace in Time,” in October, 2016, around a hot tub, where the gang assembles to celebrate (and debate) Alona’s wedding to an Israeli. The final act, “Right of Return,” marks a sadder occasion, in 2024. Between the acts, a screen displays an ingeniously calibrated cascade of digital interactions: initially, Yahoo and “.edu” e-mails; then a Facebook group, BirthLeft; and gradually—as the political landscape tilts ominously—a WhatsApp group. These feeds sparkle with good news, from shiny jobs working for Barack Obama or for the PAC J Street to marriages and babies. Then, not long after October 7th, someone abruptly exits the chat.
The moment made me gulp. I’ve seen similar splits occur in my own circles, and it was exciting and disturbing to imagine these conflicts made visceral onstage. Spector is clearly concerned with the pernicious consequences of technology, its ability to numb emotions and steer people into ideological cul-de-sacs. During the third act, in a cunning effect, when anyone picks up a phone, the screen’s contents are displayed on a wall as the lights fade, muting the friends onstage. These techniques echo a brilliant scene in Spector’s best-known play, “Eureka Day,” a satire of wokespeak at a Berkeley private school, in which a Facebook Live chat turns feral during an argument over vaccines. In its richest moments, “Birthright,” like “Eureka Day,” nails the struggles of flawed do-gooders to find meaning, along with the pain of seeing friends age. It’s especially touching when dramatizing the dimming of Lev’s youthful glow into wary alienation, summed up in a passing remark: “You would have been a good rabbi if you hadn’t fallen for the wrong chick.” Critics have rightly tagged “Birthright” as a Jewish “Big Chill,” but it also has the puppyish verve of “Friends,” had Ross, Rachel, and Monica been allowed to talk like real Long Island Jews. There’s a sensual specificity to the staging, from the Proustian sight of a teal-butted 2001 iMac to the sounds of news junkies snarking about Thomas Friedman or trading in-jokes about the shrimp at an Israeli wedding.
And yet a bratty skepticism welled up in me as the play unfolded. Clashes flared only to be tamped out; repercussions were softened, often comedically, as an outsider crashed the debate. Lines were uncrossed. Plays, like people, have value systems. I share the ones central to “Birthright”: talking across divides, keeping the conversation going. I, too, am frustrated by the online reflex to sneer. But those ideals block the play from being fully honest—by letting ugliness stick around. “Birthright” culminates in a fiery showdown in Act III, when the left-wing Izzy and the liberal Chaya wield phones like knives, competitively Googling “Theodor Herzl colonialism” and “1930s partition plan Israel” as Noah struggles to talk them down. The moment has a trace of Aaron Sorkin; I usually mean this as an insult, but in Spector’s case it’s not all bad. Everyone—including Alona, the only one who’s lived in Israel—gets to make their case in full, just as the anti-vaxxers did in “Eureka Day.” But is it enough to hear people out? To retreat to “It’s complicated”?
I kept sensing the elisions. We hear about MAGA Zionists—Fox News-watching fathers, Tel Aviv neighbors—but they’re all offstage. By design, this is a play about a narrow slice of Ashkenazic Jews, college-educated members of Conservative shuls. (This isn’t a political category; it’s the middle of the continuum of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, or, as the joke goes, “lazy, hazy, and crazy.”) It’s a play about two-state Zionists resistant to the term “genocide” and anti-Zionists pushing them to use it, a demographic just left of the women from the hilarious “JAP Battle” rap track, from the TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” who spar over their anti-racist bona fides, then add, politely, “Though of course I support Israel.” Yet “Birthright,” despite having been written, daringly, into the current crisis, feels one step behind.
Or perhaps the problem is that it’s too short! This may be the first time I’ve thought a play might work better as a television series, with space for its characters to grow. As it happens, there is a series like that: “Long Story Short,” an emotionally chewy animated Netflix series by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of “BoJack Horseman.” A portrait of the Schwoopers, a liberal Jewish family in the Bay Area, “Long Story Short,” like “Birthright,” jumps across decades, allowing for a prismatic portrayal of Jewish identity, in all its pride and ambivalence. Nobody mentions Israel, which is, I guess, a cop-out—but also a magic trick that lets the show explore Judaism as distinct from Zionism. The standout episode—the conversion history of Kendra, a Black striver married to the Schwoopers’ daughter, Shira—sticks its landing, enabling the viewer to see faith as a refuge, not a cage.
Then, there’s “Giant,” the other big new play to address Jewish identity. It has a different sort of peculiar timing: the script was completed the week before October 7th, a tragedy that imbues it with an unwieldy resonance. Swashbuckling and polemical, “Giant” is set in 1983, on the afternoon that Roald Dahl gave a radio interview making plain the links between his anti-Israel punditry and his private antisemitism. An old-fashioned ideas play, it has its contrivances. But its ability to tolerate discomfort is its strength, particularly through its most original figure—Dahl’s friend and publisher Tom Maschler, deftly portrayed by Elliot Levey. A secular Jew and a Holocaust survivor, Tom is a cool customer: a louche, assimilated Brit whose astringent view of his ethnicity, and irritation at being forced to opine on Israel at all, ultimately leaves him more vulnerable, not less—hamstrung by his intimacy with a brilliant bigot. The contradictions of their closeness aren’t papered over; the unease is allowed to linger, inflamed and ineradicable.
“Birthright” works under different rules: it can’t subtract Israel, like “Long Story Short,” or take refuge in the past, like “Giant.” But, as heartfelt and skillfully performed as “Birthright” is, in its eagerness to become a healing ritual for the audience it dodges what Dahl, in an acid exchange in “Giant,” deems “the vexing bit.” In Act I, Lev is thrilled by a Talmudic concept: that letting contradictory interpretations coexist is a distinctly Jewish way of encountering Hashem, or God. That’s a beautiful idea, but in drama it can feel like throwing up one’s hands. And for some people, as a Yiddish milkman once put it, there is no other hand. ♦