In a lifetime of theater-going I have never heard the word “historiography” on stage. 

But that is exactly what the Tony-Award winning playwright Jonathan Spector served up in his astonishing new play “Birthright.” 

In its first act, set in 2006, we join six friends just back from a Birthright Israel trip. Lev, the seeker of “meaning,” introduces “historiography.” For historians, like me, that is the craft of writing history. Lev drops it into a speech about Yosef Hayim Yersushalmi’s masterwork “Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.”

I was stunned. “Zakhor” was published in 1982. Every historian of my generation has read it. My notes on it are so old that they were typed. But it is not a book that many people outside the academy — or even many of my graduate students — have read. 

Its author, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009), was a professor of Jewish history at Columbia University and a giant in the field. In just a hundred pages, “Zakhor” lays out the tension between the Jewish people’s collective memory and the disruption the modern scholarly study of the Jewish past raised for the Jewish faith. 

To give an example: In 2001, the prominent Los Angeles Rabbi David Wolpe preached at Passover that scholars agree “that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.” By giving voice to the modern historical approach, Wolpe’s sermon caused a firestorm.

A few weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, Spector was invited by Miami New Drama’s artistic director, Michel Hausmann, to write a play about this moment in American Jewish life. The play, which premiered in Miami in 2025 and recently completed an extended off-Broadway run at MCC........

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