And yet the play, now running at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, after a premiere earlier this year at Miami New Drama, manages to turn the post-October 7 debates that have torn many Jewish families apart into something like catharsis.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is ultimately what the world needs right now,\u201d the playwright, S. Asher Gelman, told me Monday. \u201cIt needs us to lean into discomfort and to work through our discomfort with each other.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Zionists (subtitled A Family Storm) follows the affluent Rosenberg family as ideological fault lines open up during a vacation in the Caribbean.<\/p>\n
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S. Asher Gelman says he wrote ”The Zionists” in response to the crude and uninformed social media messages he received after Oct. 7. (credit: Barrington Stage Company)<\/p>\n
Mom\u2019s a philanthropist and Jewish communal leader. One daughter is married to an Israeli. The family\u2019s youngest son has embraced anti-Zionism<\/a> and contributed to groups supporting the pro-Palestinian encampments. Other relatives hold varying relationships to Israel, Judaism, and Jewish communal life. Nobody leaves unscathed. (Did I mention it\u2019s set during hurricane season?)<\/p>\n Artists are moving from avoiding to embracing Israel-related topics<\/p>\n Since October 7, artists and cultural institutions have frequently found themselves pressured to choose sides or avoid the subject altogether. A play called The Zionists risks alienating audiences before the curtain even rises, a possibility that suggests why there have been so few attempts by writers of fiction to tackle the ugly discourse. Two short stories published in The New Yorker since October 7 – “My Camp” by Joshua Cohen (Oct. 13, 2024) and “From, To” by David Bezmogis (April 14, 2025), each about families deeply split over Israel – are the conspicuous exceptions.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perhaps that\u2019s shifting. In New York, Jonathan Spector\u2019s play Birthright, running off-Broadway through July 26, explores some of the same territory as The Zionists.<\/p>\n The play by Gelman, 42, who wrote the Off-Broadway hit Afterglow, emerged from his own sense of alienation in the weeks after Hamas\u2019s October 7 attack on Israel.<\/p>\n He recalls learning about the attack through social media posts from people he considered friends.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were busy contextualizing and explaining October 7,\u201d he said, \u201cand what caused [Israelis] to be raped and murdered and kidnapped.\u201d<\/p>\n What sounded like justifications for terrorism left him disillusioned with online discourse. Social media<\/a>, he said, flattens complexity into slogans and rewards performance over conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cNuance goes to die there,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n A play, he felt, could accommodate multiple truths, conflicting narratives, and uncomfortable questions. Instead of reducing arguments to memes or hashtags, it could place them in the mouths of fully realized human beings.<\/p>\n Gelman knew some theatergoers would arrive expecting propaganda and others expecting condemnation. He wasn\u2019t interested in either.<\/p>\n \u201cArt is not supposed to be comfortable,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s to sit in the deep discomfort of the characters onstage and experience that catharsis.\u201d<\/p>\n The play also examines a distinct slice of American Jewish life: wealthy, liberal characters who are materially and physically privileged yet still feel an unshakeable sense of vulnerability. For some that translates into a hypersensitivity to antisemitism<\/a>; for others a universalizing, even self-erasing, empathy with the Other.\u00a0<\/p>\n Gelman took inspiration from his own family life<\/p>\n Gelman\u2019s examination of this donor class, and the tensions over Israel that have put a strain on its members, draws heavily on his own biography. His parents are the longtime Jewish philanthropists Susie and Michael Gelman, each of whom has been president of the Jewish Federation of Greater Washington, and who have in recent years backed liberal pro-Israel groups, including the Israel Policy Forum. A sister, Rachel Gelman, has helped fund left-wing Jewish and pro-Palestinian groups, before and after October 7.<\/p>\n \u201cThey set an incredible example for me and my sisters, about how to be really active in your community, whether your local community or your national community or your participation in the global community,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Israel was an essential part of his upbringing. Starting at age 19, Gelman spent years living in Tel Aviv as a dancer and choreographer and eventually founder of an English-language theater organization. He moved back to New York<\/a> in 2016 to pursue his stage career.<\/p>\n He is careful not to present The Zionists as a definitive statement about Israel or Zionism. No play, he said, could possibly contain every argument.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was never meant to be the end of the conversation,\u201d he said. \u201cIt was meant to be the beginning of one.\u201d<\/p>\n That meant creating characters whose arguments feel credible even when he disagrees with them. Gelman said he worked deliberately to give anti-Zionist characters some of the play\u2019s strongest arguments.<\/p>\n \u201cThe people who feel themselves seen in those characters have appreciated that we didn\u2019t write them to be dumb or uninformed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n ‘The Zionists’ has received emotional reactions<\/p>\n That openness has produced some volatile reactions. During the Miami run, one audience member became so upset during an anti-Zionist monologue that he began shouting at the actor, forcing the performance to stop temporarily. The cast resumed after addressing him directly, and several audience members later assumed the interruption had been scripted.<\/p>\n The play arrives at a moment when many families – Jewish and otherwise – have been strained by political polarization, which is a polite way of saying \u201ctorn apart.\u201d Audience members frequently tell him that the issue dividing their own families isn\u2019t Israel at all, but politics, abortion, transgender rights, or something else entirely. Nevertheless, they see the Rosenbergs\u2019 story as their own.<\/p>\n \u201cBy being quite specific about telling this very specific story about these very specific people,\u201d he said, \u201cit allows us to tell a more universal story.\u201d<\/p>\n