Within the tragic aftermath of the October 7 assaults on Israel by Hamas, faculty campuses have became crucibles of dissent, with scholar activists organizing sit-ins and different actions to name consideration to the humanitarian disaster in Gaza and demanding that their universities divest from firms that assist the Israeli army. 

Considerably inadvertently, The Ally, a brand new play by Itamar Moses opening on the Public Theater on February 27, cannonballs straight into the fray. Set on an American faculty campus in 2023, it facilities on Asaf (Josh Radnor), a liberal Jewish adjunct writing professor who’s requested to signal a manifesto within the wake of an area Black particular person’s killing by a cop. Asaf agrees with a lot of the doc—which discusses, amongst different issues, “how, below the incentives of brute capitalism, nothing issues greater than revenue, not even individuals”—however one factor offers him pause: a sentence singling out Israel and its “settler-colonialist oppression of the Palestinians by its ongoing occupation of the West Financial institution, blockade of Gaza, and refusal to acknowledge any proper of return for the refugees of 1948.” As Asaf tells his spouse, “Israel is the one nation whose personal insurance policies are condemned, the place it says not ‘we shouldn’t be concerned there cuz of what we do,’ however fairly ‘we shouldn’t be concerned cuz of what they do.’” Complicating issues, the petition he’s been requested to signal seems to be the brainchild of Asaf’s former girlfriend Nakia (Cherise Boothe), an African American group organizer.

The play is rife with concepts—not nearly settler colonialism and indigeneity but additionally about Zionism, anti-Asian racism (Asaf is married to a Korean American girl), and gentrification. It’s certainly one of the topical productions you’ll see all 12 months, however, as Moses advised me in a current Zoom interview, the seed of the play was planted seven years in the past. Way back to 2017, the California-raised playwright sensed “a fissure or a division opening up on the left, the place I principally am and have all the time been politically, having to do with questions round Israel and America’s relationship to Israel.” He additionally clocked a generational divide amongst Jewish individuals, “the place what had been the usual left-wing place within the Eighties was now virtually a centrist imaginative and prescient, in response to a brand new technology of left-wing Jewish activists.”

The Ally considers that breach at each a microcosmic stage—at its core, the play is “about what occurs when two of an individual’s unconscious tribalisms are in battle with each other,” per Moses—and at a macrocosmic one: Over about three hours, Asaf has his views challenged by each an energetic and lapsed member of the campus chapter of the Jewish Scholar Union, in addition to a member of College students for Palestinian Justice. (For starters, a couple of character desires to know why Asaf hasn’t watched the video of the Black scholar’s killing; he repeatedly weasels his manner out of a solution.)