‘The Zionists’ is a Brave New Play About U.S. Jews That Gets One Big Thing Wrong |
In America’s post-October 7 cultural landscape, telling the truth about Israel has become a radical act of defiance; a feat that turns every Zionist into what Hannah Arendt called a “conscious pariah,” delivering facts about the Jewish state to a culture saturated in antizionist falsehoods.
That is what makes The Zionists: A Family Storm — S. Asher Gelman’s play running at Miami New Drama on Miami Beach — so deliciously subversive.
Consider the cultural terrain on which the play is competing. Journalist Matti Friedman recently coined the term “Gazology” to describe the glut of anti-Israel fabrications and propaganda being passed off as high-minded literature, art, documentary, and serious film and journalism. The antizionist films The Voice of Hind Rajab and Palestine 36 are two prominent examples, as is the book The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, a fever-dream of anti-Jewish racism absurdly peddled as a work of nonfiction.
These antizionist works, among countless others, construct fictional narratives about Israel and present them with the visual grammar of historical fact, trusting that audiences won’t examine the seams too closely. Meanwhile, Jewish and Israeli artists whose works attempt an honest reckoning with October 7 and the Gaza war routinely find themselves passed over, their work treated as suspect by the same cultural gatekeepers who have made antizionist bigotry fashionable and career-enhancing.
And so The Zionists enters our upside-down world as something genuinely unexpected: a significant work of American theater in which Zionists are placed on stage and allowed to state unvarnished facts about Israel, the Palestinians, Hamas, and the Arab world without being boycotted, harassed, or ridiculed for it. In our post-October 7 culture, few things could be more audacious.
The Zionists, we learn, are pro-Israel members of a wealthy, multigenerational Jewish family — the Rosenbergs — who become stranded in a Caribbean resort bungalow as a rapidly-strengthening tropical storm rages outside. It is November 2024. One brother, David, has spent the year since October 7 raising money for the Friends of the IDF, publicly and prominently. The other, Aaron, has spent that same year channeling his inheritance into antizionist campus organizations — the very network responsible for the protests and harassment that made his sister-in-law’s professional life at Columbia University a nightmare. The family has been successfully avoiding a confrontation for over a year, until the storm removes that option.
What erupts is the most substantive creative engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7. The pro-Israel characters are not straw men propped up to be knocked down. They know their people’s history, and they use it. The Zionist case that emerges from this family’s arguments covers subjects that mainstream culture would prefer to suppress: the unbroken Jewish presence in the land across millennia, the Arab world’s rejection of the UN partition and its subsequent two decades of control over Gaza and the West Bank without ever moving toward Palestinian statehood, the multiple peace offers from Israel that went nowhere, the return of Sinai and decades of Egyptian-Israeli peace that followed. These are arguments made by people who value the truth, love their ancestral homeland, and are committed to fighting for it.
The most interesting character, to my mind, is Bex Rosenberg — a former IDF member who attended one funeral after another the week of October 7, and who has spent over a year watching the world construct explanations for why her people deserved to be slaughtered. Her dialogue reckons with the particular loneliness of Jewish grief at a time when the world had already decided the massacre could be blamed on its Jewish victims, before their bodies had even been counted.
The Israel of The Zionists is not the Israel rendered in American cultural and artistic life. That version of the Jewish state is a demonized, distorted creation with little connection to its real-life counterpart. In The Zionists, Israel is something people have loved and mourned and been saved by. It is the real Israel; not a grotesque antizionist construction.
The play at The Colony Theatre is the second production of Miami New Drama’s Y6K Project, a partnership with Wasserman Projects intended to amplify Jewish narratives at a time when anti-Jewish bigotry is actively reshaping American public life. The first Y6K production, Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, opens this June at MCC Theater off-Broadway, having originated at Miami New Drama.
MND’s artistic director, Michel Hausmann, has built a vital creative pipeline for serious Jewish work moving from South Florida into the center of American theater culture, even as most comparable institutions are headed in the opposite direction. As Jewish and Israeli creative voices are systematically sidelined, and antizionist works collect prizes and celebrity endorsements, Y6K is itself an act of cultural resistance worth recognizing.
Now, here is where it gets complicated.
Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida, an antizionist organization that supports the erasure of Israel as a Jewish state, recently protested The Zionists, handing out anti-Israel leaflets disguised as playbills to theatergoers. That should come as no surprise, given that JVP has spent years demonizing and attempting to silence Jewish pro-Israel expression. It organizes campaigns against Jewish faculty and students who decline to denounce Israel, glorifies the atrocities of October 7, spreads racist falsehoods and conspiracy theories about Israel and Zionism, and treats the public affirmation of Zionist identity as a punishable offense.
And yet, by the time a recent performance of The Zionists ended, some JVP members were expressing approval at what they had seen on stage, according to reports. They apparently found the play’s message congenial to their purposes.
Later, in an Instagram post, JVP stood by its antizionist talking points.
“We will continue to resist the normalization of Zionism and Zionist violence in our city,” the organization wrote, referencing non-existent “Zionist violence” on Miami Beach.
Yet the fact that any of the antizionist bigots at JVP approved of The Zionists is something the work’s achievements cannot obscure.
Why were some anti-Israel propagandists happy with the play? Because the architecture of The Zionists is built on equivalence.
The two Jewish brothers at the heart of the play have arrived at positions that cannot coexist. The drama asks whether love is enough to keep them and the rest of their family together. But The Zionists is largely uninterested in the related question of whether one of their positions is actually just anti-Israel racism that targets Jews and “Zionists” as proxies for Israel. Because antizionism, pursued to its logical conclusion, does not end with two states or a more just arrangement of borders. It ends with the elimination of the sovereign Jewish presence in the Middle East — the destruction of the one place on earth where Jewish collective life is not contingent on majority tolerance. That is what the founding documents of Hamas promise in plain language, and what October 7 demonstrated antizionists meant literally.
A play that portrays this toxic ideology as Aaron’s sincerely held ethical commitment — granting it the same dramatic dignity as Bex’s grief, the same moral standing as David’s fury — is not being generous to Aaron. It is extending unearned respect to a movement whose ultimate success, if attained, would be measured in millions of dead Jews.
The play’s emotional intelligence is real. Its humanism is genuine. Sadly, the production also lends credibility to a hate movement that seeks the genocide of Israelis and the destruction of the Jewish state.
The specific fabrications Aaron carries into the debate receive no referee. For example, the apartheid libel — a fictional construct developed not to describe Israeli reality, but to place Israel in a category that forecloses further argument — is treated as a legitimate characterization that David simply disagrees with.
The genocide libel, applied to a military campaign conducted in response to a massacre by an enemy that deliberately operates from within civilian infrastructure and has stated its intention to go on killing Jews indefinitely, is portrayed as Aaron’s sincere conclusion rather than as what it actually is: a slander meant to demonize Jews and mark us for stigmatization and violence.
The claim that Zionism was premised on the fiction of a “land without people for a people without a land,” which Aaron deploys as historical background, has been so exhaustively dismantled that its continued use signals something beyond simple error. And the extended analogy Aaron’s husband, Zephyr, draws between Palestinian experience and the history of anti-Black racism in America is, in a word, offensive; a rhetorical bridge built to carry American progressive sympathy across to an antizionist movement that has never demonstrated any genuine concern for Black Americans, or for the Palestinians suffering under Hamas’ tyranny.
None of Aaron or Zephyr’s Hamas talking points are exposed as the propaganda they are. The storm rages on and the family argues. But The Zionists delivers a quiet verdict beneath the dialogue: here are two ways of being Jewish in a broken world, and the drama will not choose between them.
The antizionist JVP protesters who left the play satisfied understood this structure instinctively. They did not need to win the argument inside the theater. They needed only to be treated as participants in a legitimate argument, which the play provided. For a movement that extends no equivalent legitimacy to Zionist Jews — that has made a practice of marginalizing, harassing, and expelling anyone who publicly defends Israel’s right to exist — that reception was an unearned windfall.
The Rosenbergs’ matriarch, Ruth — a Jewish leader once considered for the U.S. ambassadorship to Israel — declares at one point that Israel has done things too terrible to name, and the play does not require her to name them. Meanwhile, the genocidal ideology of the organization Aaron has been financing remains largely in the background. These are structural omissions, and they shape what the audience is quietly guided toward concluding.
All of that said — and it needs saying clearly, because honest cultural criticism has to be honest even about work that is broadly on our side — The Zionists is a remarkable achievement, and the effort to get it to New York deserves every support we can offer.
Jewish audiences are hearing, in a celebrated theatrical space, a character testify from the marrow of their own experience that Israel was the only country on earth that would have accepted her family, that she draws breath today because that state exists. That message is one the broader culture has expended considerable effort to render unspeakable in artistic spaces. That it is being spoken, and that people are buying tickets to hear it, matters enormously.
Go see The Zionists, which heads to Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires this June. Take someone who hasn’t thought carefully about the conflict. Let Bex’s account of the year since October 7 – and the other conscious pariahs on stage in Miami Beach – serve as antidotes to the antizionist hate permeating our culture.
But go clear-eyed. A stage that allows us to speak has not necessarily heard us. A dramatic framework that treats antizionism as a legitimate Jewish ethical stance is not neutral ground, however sincerely it was designed to be.
The question of whether to keep a door open for Jews who have absorbed these hateful ideas in good faith, who have never genuinely encountered the Zionist case made by someone who is alive because of it, is a real one. Those people exist in every Jewish community, and the conversation has to remain possible for them. That is different from extending the same openness to the movement that manufactured and distributed those ideas — an anti-Jewish ideology that, pursued to its conclusion, ends with a second Holocaust.
Still, it is admirable that the Rosenbergs stay in the room and talk about painfully difficult issues in a post-October 7 world, wounded, loud, and loving each other as best they can. In 2026, that image of Jewish resolve might be exactly what we all need.