In ‘The Ally,’ Josh Radnor is one Jew with five opinions
Set just before Oct. 7, the play grapples with Israel, Gaza and a social justice movement that may have outgrown Jews
Ben Rosenfield and Josh Radnor in Itamar Moses’ The Ally. Photo by Joan Marcus
By PJ Grisar February 27, 2024
At two key junctures in the first act of The Ally, Itamar Moses’ new play about Israel, student groups and social justice on an American college campus, characters invoke the Talmud, and disagree entirely about its significance.
Rachel Klein, a junior arguing for the Jewish tradition of questioning, compares these ancient commentaries to something beautifully, if crassly, democratic: “a culture-wide bathroom stall.”
Reuven Fisher, a confrontational, kippah-wearing doctoral student in Jewish studies, objects. The Talmud is not an open dialogue, but one between the great rabbinic sages. Beyond that, he thunders, unlike a planned lecture by an Israel-critical Jewish historian, the Talmud’s conversation is an “internal one amongst Jews.”
In the drama, the debate over what constitutes acceptable speech, and who’s allowed to hear it, is a fundamentally theatrical one.
Directed by Tony winner Lila Neugebauer, The Ally concerns an adjunct professor at an elite university, Asaf Sternheim (Josh Radnor, in a raw and wryly funny performance outpacing, but somehow anticipated by, his How I Met Your Mother tenure). Asaf, like Moses, is a playwright — raised in Berkeley by Israeli immigrant parents — and a proud progressive forced to take stock of his discomfort when a Black student whose cousin was killed by police asks him to sign on to a sweeping manifesto for systemic change.
Asaf agrees with “ninety-eight percent” of the text, coincidentally penned by his ex-girlfriend, local activist and lawyer Nakia (Cherise Boothe), but is given pause by two sentences accusing Israel of apartheid and genocide. (The play, which The Public Theater announced 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.)
Soon after, Rachel makes her bathroom stall Talmud pitch to Asaf, asking him to sponsor a new student group a la Jewish Voice for Peace, which hopes to host a scholar whose views on Israel’s founding depart from the narrative Asaf grew up on. Adding to Asaf’s dilemma is his wife, Gwen (Joy Osmanski), a Korean American who is spearheading the unnamed college’s expansion in an underprivileged area, and how any stance he takes may affect her work. In two acts, on a spare stage that looks like Frasier’s foreclosed condo, the play grabs the third rail of a campus conversation that’s only gained voltage since Oct. 7.
If Joshua Harmon’s A Prayer for the French Republic makes us privy to an internal dialectic on Israel and antisemitism, so insular that it’s between members of one Jewish family, The Ally is about a Jewish man’s relationship with other minority groups, and his uneasiness at being an afterthought — or worse, a villain — in their activism.
Asaf wants to do right by his student, Baron (Elijah Jones), and agrees that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is wrong, but he doesn’t understand why the only Jewish state is singled out for condemnation in a manifesto supposedly about racial and economic justice in the United States. Nakia argues that Israel earned its spot in a matrix of patriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy, but fails to see how antisemitism figures into that same network. Jews, she reasons, don’t need protections as urgently as others; Asaf says it’s this same myth of Jewish power that gets Jews killed.
While Moses had been writing notes for this play for years — in a bold-type section of a program note, he writes that the piece wasn’t inspired by “any one particular event or incident”— he knows Oct. 7, and the college controversies that ensued, will dominate our reception of it. I can’t decide for myself whether the current context makes the piece more timely or, indeed, more irrelevant.
What Moses, who won his 2018 Tony for The Band’s Visit, brings to the table is a golden ear for the talking points on all sides and he mostly opts to deploy their best arguments to his increasingly conflicted protagonist. He perfectly channels the anti-Zionism-is-antisemitism rhetoric of Reuven (Ben Rosenfield, whose one scene is a barnburner that earns its exit applause) and the Never-Again-for-Anyone ethos of Rachel (Madeline Weinstein, gradually complicating some pat characterizations and social justice buzzwords). By the second act, I was waiting for the one Palestinian voice to break his silence.
Michael Khalid Karadsheh, as Farid, a student activist from Gaza, delivers a painful monologue calling out Asaf’s selective allyship and the world’s neglect of peaceful Palestinian activists. A defensive Asaf can quibble with the semantics of loaded words like “apartheid,” or hunt for “analogic perfection”; Farid, like Baron, has no such luxury, speaking from the experience of one perceived as “the threat of violence incarnate.”
With the play ending right on the cusp of a new reality for Israeli-Palestinian discourse, we can’t glimpse what’s to come. Asaf’s fear of signing the manifesto is purely personal, while today his name — or, for that matter, any student’s — on such a document could lead to professional consequences, or doxing via a mobile billboard just outside the quad. At the same time, the betrayal Asaf feels from his fellow progressives would likely only grow more acute in the days after Hamas’ attack, when statements from student groups and national organizations overlooked murdered and kidnapped Israelis, or exclusively blamed Israel for the bloodshed.
The Ally is a brave work for its uncertainty, though some will surely damn it for this same quality. At my performance, an Israeli man left at intermission, calling the play “bullshit,” and others booed a mention of BDS. Yet I could just as easily see a pro-Palestinian spectator balk at centering a Jewish perspective at this moment of intense suffering in Gaza, even as the play permits us to find fault in Asaf’s narcissism.
Though Moses presents, and Neugebauer gamely stages, what Asaf describes as a “complicated, five-sided argument,” you can’t escape the practical reality that given the subject matter and The Public’s subscription base, these external arguments are reaching a crowd that, at my matinee showing, more closely resembled Asaf than any of the Black or brown actors. (It’s telling if not ironic that the production will have a conversation at 92NY, a venue that cancelled an event, and eventually a whole reading series, after an invited author signed a letter accusing Israel of “indiscriminate violence.”)
Put another way, as Reuven says to Asaf, warning him not to platform the Israel-critical scholar, “the meaning of a performance depends most of all on who is in the audience.”
Itamar Moses’ The Ally is playing now through March 24 at The Public. More information and tickets can be found at The Public’s website.
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