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<\/a><\/p>\nHale Appleman, shown with Molly Bernard, plays Lev in the MCC Theater’s 2026 production of “Birthright.” His character delivers a monologue inspired by “Zakhor,” a classic study of Jewish history by the late Yosef Hayim Yerusalmi (inset). (Emilio Madrid)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
In its first act, set in 2006, we join six friends just back from a Birthright Israel trip. Lev, the seeker of \u201cmeaning,\u201d introduces \u201chistoriography.\u201d For historians, like me, that is the craft of writing history. Lev drops it into a speech about Yosef Hayim Yersushalmi\u2019s masterwork \u201cZakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was stunned. \u201cZakhor\u201d 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 \u2014 or even many of my graduate students \u2014 have read.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cZakhor\u201d lays out the tension between the Jewish people\u2019s collective memory and the disruption the modern scholarly study of the Jewish past raised for the Jewish faith.<\/p>\n
To give an example: In 2001, the prominent Los Angeles Rabbi David Wolpe preached at Passover that scholars agree \u201cthat the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened, if it happened at all.\u201d By giving voice to the modern historical approach, Wolpe\u2019s sermon caused a firestorm.<\/p>\n
A few weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, Spector was invited by Miami New Drama\u2019s 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 Theater, follows six American Jews over 18 years, exploring how their friendships, Jewish identities and relationships to Israel evolve in the years before and after Oct. 7.<\/p>\n
Early in his research, Spector stumbled on a single quotation from \u201cZakhor\u201d in the playwright Tony Kushner\u2019s edited collection of essays \u201cWrestling with Zion.\u201d<\/p>\n
That led Spector to Yerushalmi\u2019s meditation on memory and Jewish history. He considers its analysis so significant that in an earlier draft, Lev\u2019s discourse about Zakhor went on for 10 pages.<\/p>\n
Lev wrestles, as does the play, with the Jewish past and the fractures of the Jewish present.<\/p>\n
The Bible commands Jews to remember \u2014\u201czakhor\u201d\u2014 this past \u201clike 200 times,\u201d Lev tells us. (Yerushalmi actually counted 169 times.)<\/p>\n
\u201cZakhor\u201d shows, Lev explains, just which parts of Jewish history claim a unique place within Jewish tradition. The narrative that extends from Abraham to the destruction of the Second Temple became a central pillar of the Jewish faith, embodied in holidays, prayer and ritual, enacted and re-enacted by the community across the millennia.<\/p>\n
But for medieval rabbis, once the Second Temple was destroyed, history became unimportant. Historiography disappeared from Jewish writing until the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492. With that rupture, and stunned by this trauma, some 16th-century Jews took up their pens to write histories of Jewish suffering since the fall of the Second Temple.<\/p>\n
Then history writing once again vanished from Jewish literature until it was again sparked by trauma.<\/p>\n
In 1819, antisemitic \u201cHep! Hep!\u201d riots, perpetrated largely by craftsmen, small merchants and other townspeople who opposed Jewish emancipation, broke out in Bavaria and spread throughout Germany. In response, a small group of young German Jewish men, whose ranks would come to include the not-yet-converted Heinrich Heine, met in Berlin. They founded the Society for the Culture and Scientific Study of the Jews. That laid the foundation for the modern writing of Jewish history based on the evidentiary record.<\/p>\n
This scholarship, as Wolpe shows us, challenged and continues to challenge Jews and Judaism. Yerushalmi ruefully captured, as Lev reminds us, that today\u2019s Jews may know much more about their past thanks to the writing of history. Yet, as a collective, they remember much less.<\/p>\n
Lev\u2019s search for meaning led him to quit his Birthright trip. Heading off on his own, he latched on to a group of Australian aid workers and followed them into the West Bank. Later, having stumbled upon \u201cZakhor\u201d in a Haifa used bookstore, Lev comes to believe that Yerushalmi explains what his friends were trying to understand while they were together on the trip: the disconnect between the miracle that became the Jewish state and the violence and suffering that surround it.<\/p>\n
Spector told me that he was drawn to Yerushalmi\u2019s assertion that \u201chistory has now become the faith of fallen Jews\u201d; that is, as traditional religious belief and practice receded, modern Jews increasingly turn to history as a way of understanding what it means to be Jewish and maintaining a connection to the Jewish past. Spector had to cut that line from the play. But he had Chaya, the character \u201cin search of community,\u201d call their group \u201cFallen Jews.\u201d<\/p>\n
Spector dedicated the play to his father, Ronald H. Spector, the distinguished military historian.<\/p>\n
But the son said that it took Yerushalmi\u2019s book, not his father, to introduce him to historiography and to what he has Lev call \u201cthe extremely weird and unique relationship\u201d that Jews have with history and historiography.<\/p>\n
I am apparently one of only three people to so far have raised \u201cZakhor\u201d with Spector during this run of the play. None of the glowing reviews or interviews I have read grasped that he considers this struggle between collective memory and history a \u201ctouchpoint\u201d for \u201cBirthright.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the past, one Jewish response to trauma was the turn to Jewish history. When Yerushalmi wrote \u201cZakhor,\u201d the explosion of history-making around the Shoah, including the scores of Holocaust museums and memorials presenting this story to the public, had not yet emerged as another example of historians writing in response to trauma.<\/p>\n
I know that historians need distance to write about the past. It is too soon for us to reflect on the story of Oct. 7 and its impact on America\u2019s Jews. But fortunately for theater-lovers, it is not too soon for playwrights to take up the charge.<\/p>\n
American University Professor Pamela S. Nadell, the author of the award-winning \u201cAntisemitism, an American Tradition,\u201d has been the Jewish Studies consultant for productions of \u201cThe Lehman Trilogy.\u201c<\/p>\n