JTA — Just about the last thing I wanted to do on a summer weekend in the Berkshires was to see a play called “The Zionists.”

The title alone practically dares audiences to arrive with their defenses up. Its subject is the bitter family and communal fractures that followed October 7, 2023. Its Jewish characters argue angrily, sometimes violently, over Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, the politics of protest and Jewish identity, blurring the personal and the political.

And yet the play, now running at Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, after a premiere earlier this year at Miami New Drama, manages to turn the post-October 7 debates that have torn many Jewish families apart into something like catharsis.

“This is ultimately what the world needs right now,” the playwright, S. Asher Gelman, told me Monday. “It needs us to lean into discomfort and to work through our discomfort with each other.”

“The Zionists” (subtitled “A Family Storm”) follows the affluent Rosenberg family as ideological fault lines open up during a vacation in the Caribbean.

Mom’s a philanthropist and Jewish communal leader. One daughter is married to an Israeli. The family’s youngest son has embraced anti-Zionism and contributed to groups supporting the pro-Palestinian (and often anti-Israel) encampments. Other relatives hold varying relationships to Israel, Judaism and Jewish communal life. Nobody leaves unscathed. (Did I mention it’s set during hurricane season?)

Since October 7, artists and cultural institutions have frequently found themselves pressured to choose sides or avoid the subject altogether. A play called “The Zionists” risks alienating audiences before the curtain even rises, a possibility that suggests why there have been so few attempts by writers of fiction to tackle the ugly discourse. Two short stories published in The New Yorker since the bloody Hamas invasion of Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza — “My Camp” by Joshua Cohen and “From, To” by David Bezmogis, each about families deeply split over Israel — are the conspicuous exceptions.

Perhaps that’s shifting. In New York, Jonathan Spector’s play “Birthright,” running off-Broadway through July 26, explores some of the same territory as “The Zionists.” The play by Gelman, 42, who wrote the Off-Broadway hit “Afterglow,” emerged from his own sense of alienation in the weeks after the October 7 Hamas atrocities in Israel.

He recalls learning about the attack through social media posts from people he considered........

© The Times of Israel