Broadway's very Jewish year

By David Winitsky

Broadway gave out its Tony Awards in June, and as I kept whispering to my wife, it was “a big night for the Jews.” Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppard’s Holocaust drama, won best play. Parade, about the lynching of a Jewish man in the American South, won best musical revival. Miriam Silverman (The Sign in Sydney Brustein’s Window) and Brandon Uranowitz (Leopoldstadt) won for signature Jewish roles, and Alfred Uhry, who wrote the book for Parade, spoke while wearing a 2-inch diamond Magen David lapel pin.

It was a very prominent season for Jews on Broadway stages and beyond. The Sign in Sydney Brustein’s Window, Lorraine Hansberry’s second play — with a White, Jewish protagonist — arrived in a starstudded Broadway bow. Prayer for the French Republic at Manhattan Theatre Club — an examination of antisemitism in France — marked a massive turn in playwright Josh Harmon’s Jewish journey.

The Atlantic’s Yair Rosenberg raved over Edward Einhorn’s Shylock and the Shakespeareans, a reworking of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, and Second Stage presented Camp Seigfried, a different angle on German fascism. In California, the La Jolla Playhouse tried out Lempika, a musical about the notorious Jewish artist Tamara de Lempicka, who fled Europe for the United States in 1939.

You might see a thesis at work in producing these shows, most of which spotlight Nazis, antisemitism or the Holocaust: They urge audiences to remember and learn from the past to prevent future atrocities at a time when antisemitism is on the rise.

There’s lots to recommend this idea. A history forgotten is a history that will repeat. Representation matters. Giving Jews the moral victory (if not the narrative one) strengthens our resolve. Great artistry in the service of big ideas is a win for everyone.

And let’s not leave out the performances themselves. Uranowitz in particular was brilliant and gave a moving Tony speech honoring his ancestors who were murdered by the Nazis in Poland.

However, I can’t help but admit to some skepticism. I’m drawn by thinkers like Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews, who ask, “By revisiting the history of raging antisemitism, are we just giving violent extremists a to-do list for the future?”

But more important is that today’s Jewish life — even the parts necessarily focused on antisemitism — is radically different than it was 50 or 75 or 500 years ago. Even with the challenges and outright discrimination, the Jewish community today, here and abroad, is more diverse, more free, and more complex than at arguably any time in history.

So I’d like to humbly offer some alternatives for producers and artistic directors who want Jewish representation on their stages. As the artistic director of the Jewish Plays Project, a development house for 21st-century Jewish theatre based in New York and working around the country, I have the unique pleasure to be able to point to the plays written in just the last few years that can change the paradigm right now.

Think about Jewish joy. See Audrey Lang’s amazing character Librarian of the Jewish Soul in her play Birdie & Cait and the Book of Life or the Adon Olam sequence at the end of Mark Leiren Young’s Bar Mitzvah Boy

Think about Jewish ethics. Beth Kander’s Return

Continued on Page 16