Just about the last thing I wanted to do on a summer weekend in the Berkshires was to see a play called “The Zionists.” A drama about the familial and communal ruptures that followed Oct. 7, 2023, it promised to be a reprise of the kind of painful conversations that have haunted so many of us over the past two and half years. If I wanted to wallow in family broigus over Israel, I could have just followed New York’s Democratic primaries.
But I went, and I was surprised: The play, which runs through July 3 at Great Barrington Stage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, transforms these arguments into an experience that feels surprisingly cathartic.
In my conversation with playwright S. Asher Gelman, I learned how deeply autobiographical the play really is. Drawing on his upbringing in a prominent Jewish philanthropic family, his years living in Israel, and his own sense of isolation in the aftermath of Oct. 7, Gelman created characters whose conflicts reflect real tensions within American Jewish life. Rather than offering a political manifesto, he set out to capture the emotional reality of a community arguing with itself.
The result is one of the first major fictional treatments of the post-Oct. 7 Jewish experience — and a powerful argument that art can do what social media cannot: hold multiple truths at once and keep people talking through their disagreements.
