Poster for 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank' On 4 December 2011 The New Yorker published a remarkable short story by the Jewish-American writer, Nathan Englander. He had just turned forty and had already established himself as one of the key figures in the new generation of Jewish-American writers who broke through at the beginning of the 21st century. You could even say that his extraordinary debut, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999), launched this new wave. But then Englander had seemingly been left behind by such celebrated writers as Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss and Michael Chabon. Then this astonishingly original short story appeared in the New Yorker. A few months later it was republished as the title story in his second collection of short fiction. Now Englander’s story has been turned into a play, just under two hours long, with a cast led by Joshua Malina of West Wing fame, in a production at the Marylebone Theatre in London. The play was first performed in the States in 2022, but has now been radically rewritten to include the conflict between Israel and Hamas. As the director of the London production told Englander, he couldn’t just pretend nothing had happened. It risked being a museum piece, woefully out of date. Now it takes in the events of October 7 and the war that followed. The story is about two Jewish-American couples, Debbie and her husband Phil (played by Malina), living in a big suburban home in South Florida with their son, Trevor. They are waiting for a visit from another couple, Debbie’s best friend from schooldays, Shosh, and her husband, Yuri, who now live in Israel. Both girls have changed completely since schooldays. Debbie married Phil and became secular. Shosh and Yuri ran off to Israel twenty years ago and became Hassidic Jews, with eight children. Now they are Shoshana and Yerucham. She wears a wig and doesn’t touch other men; he wears the full Hassidic kit — black hat, black suit, long beard, tzitzit. And that’s when the fireworks start. In the original story, it’s about whether friendship can survive big cultural differences. Years ago, Debbie and Shosh were teenagers together from the suburbs, getting stoned. Now Debbie is Jew- ish , big house, small family, weeping over the Holocaust. Shosh, now Shoshana, has reinvented herself completely. She has become ultra- Orthodox and ultra- Zionist. This is the twist in the new play. They don’t just differ about what their Jewishness means. Now they fight over Israel. Debbie and Phil accuse Israel of war crimes, and can’t forgive what [they believe] Israel is doing to the Palestinians. Shoshana and Yerucham defend Israel passionately. It’s not just their home. It’s the heart of their Jewishness. What was a play about friendship, family life and what it means to be Jewish has become a play about Israel. Not entirely. The old tensions are still there. “It’s a small part of the play,” Englander told one interviewer, “but it is an extraordinarily fiery part of it.” “Fiery” indeed, but this is where the problem starts with the play. Many of us have argued about Israel with old friends. Old friendships have teetered on the precipice and sometimes fallen off. What is missing from Englander’s play is the pain so many of us feel when friendships, sometimes going back over forty years, start to break up over Israel. Friends who celebrated Blair’s landslide in 1997 and Obama’s victory in 2008 are fiercely divided over Israel today. That’s an understatement, of course. Some believe the false accusations of “genocide” and “war crimes”, others speak of the October 7th massacre, the terrible fate of the hostages and the constant bombardment from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, driving tens of thousands of Israelis from their homes. (And perhaps they should also speak of the many IDF soldiers, young boys as well as fathers of families, who have given their lives for the Jewish State, ed.) Englander doesn’t bring much to the party. These last few years have been so angry and divisive, here and in the US and, of course, in Israel. In the UK we’ve had Brexit, then Corbyn, then last summer’s election. Our American friends have had three Trump elections in twelve years. In Israel hundreds of thousands marched against Netanyahu’s wish to change the Supreme Court. But this time, what’s been happening in Gaza and now Lebanon is different. Is our closest ally in the Middle East really guilty of 'genocide' (or is it trying to destroy an enemy that has made genocide of the Jews it stated goal and saw the October 7 massacre as the first step of a larger plan,ed.)? This isn‘t just a fight between Jews and gentiles, though there is that divide. It’s a fight which divides Jewish friends and colleagues even more fiercely. Four well known Jewish journalists, longtime contributors to The Jewish Chronicle — Jonathan Freedland, David Aaronovitch, Hadley Freeman and Colin Shindler – recently resigned because they couldn‘t abide the pro-Netanyahu party line the newspaper had followed throughout the war. Freedland’s father wrote for the JC for many years, as he pointed out in his resignation letter. His son, too, recently wrote for the paper for the first time. That’s three generations. So we know these arguments. We’ve been through them again and again, on X, in angry letters to newspapers and in ugly rows at dinner parties with once dear friends. It hasn’t all been bad. I was hugely touched when so many non-Jewish friends wrote sympathetic letters after October 7. Some were friends I hadn‘t been in touch with for years and yet they reached out with such warmth. Others didn’t. There is also a larger sense of isolation for many of us. How could BBC News programmes be so biased, again and again, falsifying the news, refusing to balance Israeli interviewees with Palestinian Arabs, or with anti-Israeli voices from the UN and the NGOs? How could universities allow anti-Israel protests and encampments? How could Home Secretaries, London’s Mayor and the Metropolitan Police Commissioner refuse to ban anti-Israel hate marches? So we know the arguments. Englander should have brought something new and alive to the party. Of course, there’s the great finale, in the play as in the story, which gives both their powerful name, the game about Anne Frank. I won’t give it away. It packs a punch and if you don‘t already know it, I won‘t spoil it. A few weeks ago I saw a very different play, by David Edgar, Here in America . It’s another play about old friendships which break up over politics. This time it’s about Arthur Miller and the director Elia Kazan, who directed some of Miller’s greatest work. Then comes the issue of whether they should name names to Joe McCarthy’s HUAC, betray friends who had once been Communists, or perhaps just been suspected of being Communists, which was enough to destroy careers in the early 1950s. Despite the many good reviews, it is a museum piece, just as Marber had feared Englander’s play would be if he didn’t rewrite it. Edgar’s play is a museum piece because, just as Marber and Englander knew in their bones, Israel is the only game in town right now. It might not be in a year’s time, let alone in five years’ time, and it certainly isn’t if you’re in Lviv or Odessa, or even if you’re in Poland or the Baltic republics. And again certainly not if you’re a woman in Iran or Afghanistan, or a Christian in many parts of Africa and the Middle East. But what Edgar missed, just as Englander did, was the pain of isolation, of feeling betrayed, or watching old friends behave as if nothing had happened when your world has changed completely. That became the subject of Miller’s greatest political play, The Crucible , and one of his most underrated later plays, Broken Glass , about American antisemitism and the rise of Nazism. I thought, perhaps unkindly, that Edgar should have re-written Here in America . Many of us already know Arthur Miller’s story. Shouldn’t Edgar have found a way of engaging with Israel and the Left? Others clearly thought differently. Why shouldn’t he write the play he wanted to write? Does everyone really care that much about Israel or antisemitism? But of course McCarthyism was also about antisemitism. Everyone involved in the Rosenberg trial were Jews. Most of those who were accused of being Reds were Jews. Miller was Jewish. His first novel, Focus , was about antisemitism. Kazan’s first political film was Gentleman’s Agreement (1947), with Gregory Peck , which was about antisemitism in America . Perhaps the subject both plays should really have been about was neither Israel nor McCarthyism. They should have been about betrayal and isolation. What we talk about when we talk about breaking up old friendships. And then there is the biggest surprise of all. Both plays are by major writers and have good casts and terrific productions. Both are deeply political and one engages openly with a hugely topical subject. So why are they both showing at small theatres? Edgar’s play has already closed. It doesn’t look as if either, despite good reviews and full houses, will transfer to the West End. One uneasy thought. I recently spoke with an old friend who works for a literary agency and he told me about how nervous some publishers are about going near the subject of Israel. Yes, it’s a hot subject right now, but is it perhaps too hot for publishers of a nervous or possibly even anti-Israel disposition? Perhaps that’s why the likes of Shoshana and Yerucham, and so many British and American Jews, feel so isolated. It’s not just that old friends are so divided. Some stand by and watch while Israelis and Jews who feel differently are being condemned in Parliament and on campuses, on TV news programmes and in once-reputable newspapers. And what do Phil and Debbie do? Do they feel for their old friends, when they and their country are condemned on both sides of the Atlantic? No. They join the lynch mob with their self-righteous politics. Englander wanted to find a happy resolution, a way of bringing his characters together. That is an easy way out. The truth is there isn’t an easy way out. As I write, friendships are breaking up, old friends feel cast aside, their country is being rejected by smug middle-class American Jews with their “white bread” Jewishness and Holocaust pieties. That’s the play Englander should have written. For readers in the UK: What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank is showing at the Marylebone Theatre, 35 Park Road, NW1, until 23 November. David Herman is a freelance journalist. He has written for the Guardian, the New Statesman, Prospect and Standpoint, among others. Reposted from The Article: TheArticl e aims to be "a website which helps you make sense of the news through free access to exchanges of ideas, rather than echo chambers of prejudice. We have no ideological agenda and we promise never to tell you what to think. Our aim is simply to preserve the integrity of the free press in this country by embracing nuance and complexity – and showing the world in all its shades of grey. To read TheArticle is to see a story from every angle with no abuse, no extremism - and proper editing."
