Arguing is our ‘Birthright’
Playwright puts six Jewish lives under the microscope in long, powerful show
‘Birthright,” now at the MCC Theater in Manhattan, is over three hours long, so long, in fact, that it requires two intermissions. But it is the most rewarding time you can spend in a theater this summer. It is enthralling, insightful, inciteful, and very much speaks to the time.
It follows six young people who bond during a Birthright trip to Israel in 2006 — and the mother of one of them — as they meet in the mother’s house three times over the next 18 years. The first of those three in-person meetings is shortly after they return from their trip, the second is in 2016, and the third is in 2024.
In between, their group chats — first via email, then FaceTime, and ultimately WhatsApp — are cleverly flashed onscreen: marriages, children, and the ups and downs of life.
And they do what Jews do. They discuss. Okay, they argue. About whether Alona (Molly Ranson) should make aliyah because she fell in love with one of the IDF soldiers assigned to guard the group. Whether Lev (Hale Appleman) can find what he’s searching for in rabbinical school.
And of course they fight abut Israel. Izzy (*Molly Barnard) is the most outspoken (and as it happens very eloquent) opponent of the nation’s actions. Chaya (Zoé Winters) is its equally vociferous and eloquent defender. And the two represent the fractured nature of American Jewry.
There is not a caricature in the bunch, not even Chaya’s wise Jewish mom. All seven characters are full-blown: real, intelligent, and recognizable. When you get to the surprising and explosive third act, you will be very much involved in their disparate lives and satisfied by an emotionally charged, Tevya-like denouement suggesting that as divided as we can sometimes be, 5,000-plus years of tradition ultimately unites us. You’ll also wonder where the time went.
Playwright Jonathan Spector is best known for “Eureka Day,” winner of the 2025 Tony for best revival of a play. It is about a liberal Berkeley private school, built on consensus and inclusion, and what happens when there is an outbreak of the mumps there. The board has difficulty convincing parents that a mumps vaccine should be mandated. The play was first produced in 2018, and in a way it was prescient, anticipating the debate that would occur three years later about the covid vaccine, and in the current administration, about vaccines generally.
“Birthright” also is prescient. It was commissioned by Miami New Drama, a highly regarded Miami Beach-based theater group. “The artistic director [Michel Hausmann] called me a few weeks after October 7 and commissioned me to write a play about this kind of American Jewish moment, which I was very reluctant to do,” Mr. Spector said during a Zoom interview from his home office in Oakland, Calif.
“I said no several times, but he was persistent. I was myself trying to make sense of that time. I wasn’t ready to say yes, but I started doing a series of interviews with other Jews, people I knew, and then expanding out to people I didn’t know, trying to get a wide range of not just political beliefs but their relationship to Judaism, their religious background, kind of all of it.
“I was really struck by the way, to a person, everybody was really struggling in this time — whether that was their own changing political beliefs or the way their relationship with family or friends had become strained — and they were trying to figure out the right way to navigate that.
“I felt something I couldn’t articulate. I recently read a piece that described this very concerted move in the second half of the 20th century among various Jewish denominations for a kind of tolerance in the Jewish community that says that every Jewish institution is open to all Jews. We don’t care if you’ve never been to synagogue. You’re all welcome. You’re all Jewish.
“That was then.
“Now the dividing line has shifted to your position on Israel. I think there was a kind of simultaneous move away from tolerance by people on both sides, and that’s kind of a new phenomenon in American Jewish life. That was one of the things I was trying to understand and wrap my head around.”
“Birthright” was much more difficult to write than “Eureka Day” because the subject matter “was not a thing a lot of people were talking about,” Mr. Spector said. “It was generally accepted that vaccines were good and unless you had a young child.” The question of whether or not to vaccinate your child was “not likely part of your daily discourse.
“But ‘Birthright’ was much harder because it was a subject everybody was talking about. So finding a framework on how to explore the subject that was new or different was much more difficult.”
Initially, Mr. Spector thought that the whole play would be an expanded version of its brilliant third act, but soon he realized “it needed something bigger, a bigger lens, a bigger scope.”
He had to figure out how long a time the play should cover. “I decided it should be 18 years because of the significance of that number to Jews,” he said. “So I worked backward and realized that 2006 was the year before the iPhone came out, before Facebook went beyond colleges into wide usage, and the play kind of clicked into place.”
During his research, Mr. Spector would “encounter an argument and say, ‘This is a great idea. I should get it into the play.’ But any time I put something in the play and it wasn’t coming out of something that was organic, that there was a deep need for that character to say at that moment, then the play just became dead. So there were many things I put in the play but that the play rejected, because I had to let it all come from the people and what they were going through.”
But still, even with all the trimming he did, three-plus hours is a stretch. And yes, he was concerned about the play’s length. “But also, I knew the play needed time, and it’s much shorter. I think the first run-through was 4 1/2 hours, but we got it down.”
Mr. Spector grew up in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. He set the play there, “to make it easier on myself, let me put this somewhere I know very intimately.”
He went to Hebrew school, had a bar mitzvah, but did not go on a Birthright trip, which, as he remembers it, was not a big thing then. “Also, to the degree I heard about it, it was not very appealing to me.”
He participated in theater in high school, but he was “a bad actor,” he said. He went next to New College in Florida, and then came to New York, hoping to become a director. That didn’t pan out, but while studying at the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab he met his wife, Molly Aaronson-Gelb, who is a high school drama teacher. They have two children, they live in Oakland, and they are members of a Jewish Renewal synagogue, “which I throw in a little joke about in the play.”
I asked Mr. Spector if he is one of the characters in the play, and he responded: “I think I’m all of them in some way, but maybe Deborah.”
Deborah is the mom. All the young people in the play are searching for something. Her attitude, as described by Mr. Spector, is “what’s with all the searching?”
“Birthright” will be at the MCC Theater on West 52nd Street until July 26. Go to mcc.theater.org and click on shows & tix for tickets.