In America’s post-October 7 cultural landscape, telling the truth about Israel has become a radical act of defiance; a feat that turns every Zionist into what Hannah Arendt called a “conscious pariah,” delivering facts about the Jewish state to a culture saturated in antizionist falsehoods.

That is what makes The Zionists: A Family Storm — S. Asher Gelman’s play running at Miami New Drama on Miami Beach — so deliciously subversive.

Consider the cultural terrain on which the play is competing. Journalist Matti Friedman recently coined the term “Gazology” to describe the glut of anti-Israel fabrications and propaganda being passed off as high-minded literature, art, documentary, and serious film and journalism. The antizionist films The Voice of Hind Rajab and Palestine 36 are two prominent examples, as is the book The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth, a fever-dream of anti-Jewish racism absurdly peddled as a work of nonfiction.

These antizionist works, among countless others, construct fictional narratives about Israel and present them with the visual grammar of historical fact, trusting that audiences won’t examine the seams too closely. Meanwhile, Jewish and Israeli artists whose works attempt an honest reckoning with October 7 and the Gaza war routinely find themselves passed over, their work treated as suspect by the same cultural gatekeepers who have made antizionist bigotry fashionable and career-enhancing.

And so The Zionists enters our upside-down world as something genuinely unexpected: a significant work of American theater in which Zionists are placed on stage and allowed to state unvarnished facts about Israel, the Palestinians, Hamas, and the Arab world without being boycotted, harassed, or ridiculed for it. In our post-October 7 culture, few things could be more audacious.

The Zionists, we learn, are pro-Israel members of a wealthy, multigenerational Jewish family — the Rosenbergs — who become stranded in a Caribbean resort bungalow as a rapidly-strengthening tropical storm rages outside. It is November 2024. One brother, David, has spent the year since October 7 raising money for the Friends of the IDF, publicly and prominently. The other, Aaron, has spent that same year channeling his inheritance into antizionist campus organizations — the very network responsible for the protests and harassment that made his sister-in-law’s professional life at Columbia University a nightmare. The family has been successfully avoiding a confrontation for over a year, until the storm removes that option.

What erupts is the most substantive creative engagement with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7. The pro-Israel characters are not straw men propped up to be knocked down. They know their people’s history, and they use it. The Zionist case that emerges from this family’s arguments covers subjects that mainstream culture would prefer to suppress: the unbroken Jewish presence in the land across millennia, the Arab world’s rejection of the UN partition and its subsequent two decades of control over Gaza and the West Bank without ever moving........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)