“Birthright” and “Giant” Tackle Jewish Identity

Each act takes place at the suburban home of Chaya’s family: the first, “Two Jews, Three Opinions,” weeks after the trip, and the second, “A Palace in Time,” in October, 2016, around a hot tub, where the gang assembles to celebrate (and debate) Alona’s wedding to an Israeli. The final act, “Right of Return,” marks a sadder occasion, in 2024. Between the acts, a screen displays an ingeniously calibrated cascade of digital interactions: initially, Yahoo and “.edu” e-mails; then a Facebook group, BirthLeft; and gradually—as the political landscape tilts ominously—a WhatsApp group. These feeds sparkle with good news, from shiny jobs working for Barack Obama or for the PAC J Street to marriages and babies. Then, not long after October 7th, someone abruptly exits the chat.

The moment made me gulp. I’ve seen similar splits occur in my own circles, and it was exciting and disturbing to imagine these conflicts made visceral onstage. Spector is clearly concerned with the pernicious consequences of technology, its ability to numb emotions and steer people into ideological cul-de-sacs. During the third act, in a cunning effect, when anyone picks up a phone, the screen’s contents are displayed on a wall as the lights fade, muting the friends onstage. These techniques echo a brilliant scene in Spector’s best-known play, “Eureka Day,” a satire of wokespeak at a Berkeley private school, in which a Facebook Live chat turns feral during an argument over vaccines. In its richest moments, “Birthright,” like “Eureka Day,” nails the struggles of flawed do-gooders to find meaning, along with the pain of seeing friends age. It’s especially touching when dramatizing the dimming of Lev’s youthful glow into wary alienation, summed up in a passing remark: “You would have been a good rabbi if you hadn’t fallen for the wrong chick.” Critics have rightly tagged “Birthright” as a Jewish “Big Chill,” but it also has the puppyish verve of “Friends,” had Ross, Rachel, and Monica been allowed to talk like real Long Island Jews. There’s a sensual specificity to the staging, from the Proustian sight of a teal-butted 2001 iMac to the sounds of news junkies snarking about Thomas Friedman or trading in-jokes about the shrimp at an Israeli wedding.

And yet a bratty skepticism welled up in me as the play unfolded. Clashes flared only to be tamped out; repercussions were softened, often comedically, as an outsider crashed the debate. Lines were uncrossed. Plays, like people, have value systems. I share the ones central to “Birthright”: talking across divides, keeping the conversation going. I, too, am frustrated by the online reflex to sneer. But those ideals block the play from being fully honest—by letting ugliness stick around. “Birthright” culminates in a fiery showdown in Act III, when the left-wing Izzy and the liberal Chaya wield phones like knives, competitively Googling “Theodor Herzl colonialism” and “1930s partition plan Israel” as Noah struggles to talk them down. The moment has a trace of Aaron Sorkin; I usually mean this as an insult, but in Spector’s case it’s not all bad. Everyone—including Alona, the only one who’s lived in Israel—gets to make their case in full, just as the anti-vaxxers did in “Eureka Day.” But is it enough to hear people out? To retreat to “It’s complicated”?

I kept sensing the elisions. We hear about MAGA Zionists—Fox News-watching fathers, Tel Aviv neighbors—but they’re all offstage. By design, this is a play about a narrow slice of Ashkenazic Jews, college-educated members of Conservative shuls. (This isn’t a political category; it’s the middle of the continuum of Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, or, as the joke goes, “lazy, hazy, and crazy.”) It’s a play about two-state Zionists resistant to the term “genocide” and anti-Zionists pushing them to use it, a demographic just left of the women from the hilarious “JAP Battle” rap track, from the TV show “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” who spar over their anti-racist bona fides, then add, politely, “Though of course I support Israel.” Yet “Birthright,” despite having been written, daringly, into the current crisis, feels one step behind.

Or perhaps the problem is that it’s too short! This may be the first time I’ve thought a play might work better as a television series, with space for its characters to grow. As it happens, there is a series like that: “Long Story Short,” an emotionally chewy animated Netflix series by Raphael Bob-Waksberg, the creator of “BoJack Horseman.” A portrait of the Schwoopers, a liberal Jewish family in the Bay Area, “Long Story Short,” like “Birthright,” jumps across decades, allowing for a prismatic portrayal of Jewish identity, in all its pride and ambivalence. Nobody mentions Israel, which is, I guess, a cop-out—but also a magic trick that lets the show explore Judaism as distinct from Zionism. The standout episode—the conversion history of Kendra, a Black striver married to the Schwoopers’ daughter, Shira—sticks its landing, enabling the viewer to see faith as a refuge, not a cage.