A new front in the battle between pro-Palestinian and Zionist forces in the arts opened in July, when Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (TW4C) called for a boycott of Birthright, a new play that currently running at MCC Theater in Manhattan. This boycott differs from many previous Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns in the arts, which frequently target productions that are directly supported by Israeli state funds.
The current production of Birthright, written by award-winning playwright Jonathan Spector, does not receive any Israeli state funding. However, organizers with TW4C (a coalition of theater workers in solidarity with Palestine) and the BDS campaign determined that this production violates BDS anti-normalization guidelines and is therefore complicit in Israel’s ongoing oppression of Palestinians.
According to these guidelines, cultural products that acknowledge oppression without aiming to end it are attempts to “colonize the mind of the oppressed with the notion that oppression is a fact of life that must be coped with, not resisted.” Birthright certainly fits the bill.
How to Normalize a Genocide
In his 2026 book How to Sell a Genocide, media critic Adam Johnson argues that news organizations like The New York Times and MSNBC have supported Israel’s genocide in Gaza by offering liberal readers a mix of rationalizations, falsehoods, and obfuscations to “deny the most inconvenient of truths: a genocide carried out, defended, and authored by elite liberals and liberal institutions.” Birthright seems to target a subset of that liberal demographic, namely audience members who may have begun questioning their support for Israel since the genocide began.
As described in its promotional materials, Birthright starts with “a reunion among six young friends after a Birthright trip to Israel in 2006” and then charts these friends’ changing relationships over the next 18 years amidst “fracturing communities…and the struggle to stay connected across difference.” What is fracturing these characters’ communities? As The New York Times drama critic wrote in a glowing review, it’s the “estranged friends’ attitudes about modern Israel.”
At its worst, Birthright aggressively encourages its audience to turn inward and stop worrying about the genocide. In a pivotal monologue toward the play’s conclusion, the character Alona – who over the course of the story decides to move to Israel, becoming a settler – describes how due to the violence of October 7, she feels no compassion for the victims of Israel’s genocidal aggression: “I know there’s thousands of kids in Gaza who are just as scared or worse, and I wish I did, but I just don’t have the space for them in my heart right now, not after what they did.” This rejection of basic human compassion on ethnonationalist grounds (Alona only has “space” in her heart for other Israelis) receives no rebuttal.
At its worst, Birthright aggressively encourages its audience to turn inward and stop worrying about the genocide.
At other moments, the play offers its audience a mix of misinformation and false equivalencies. During one exchange, Izzy (the play’s token anti-Zionist) correctly states that “from the very beginning, Zionism has been premised on expulsion, subjugation, and oppression,” only to have Chaya, her Zionist interlocutor, retort, “That’s an insane thing to say” and then declare that “Zionism has always meant a million different things.”
In another monologue, Alona equates “Hamas and Hezbollah and these ultra-orthodox settler lunatics…and Netanyahu and the sociopaths in his cabinet.” In this construction, there is no difference between the perpetrators of a genocide, its victims, or a non-state actor (Hezbollah) that formed in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an invasion that itself included atrocities deemed genocidal by the United Nations. For Alona, all of these entities are simply the “cancer” that’s “eating [Israel] alive.”
Throughout Birthright, arguments like these shoot back and forth at a furious pace – as the Times critic noted, the characters’ exchanges about Israel “are delivered at speeds that are deliberately impenetrable” – and this is itself a form of obfuscation. As Chaya and Alona’s anti-historical, pro-genocide claims blend with Izzy’s historically accurate claims into a mix of indistinct verbiage, the overall effect is a sense that the historical truth of Israel’s crimes is unknowable. What matters in Birthright is not the actual genocide that the characters are arguing about, but how these arguments affect the characters’ friendships.
This is particularly egregious since Israel’s genocide is the only thing that makes Birthright “piercingly contemporary,” as the play’s producers describe it. Without the genocide adding weight to the story, Birthright is a 200-minute play about a group of friends trying to stay connected. In this sense, Spector pulls a slick double-move with Birthright, dismissing Palestinian suffering to the point of erasure while simultaneously appropriating that suffering for a play that The New Yorker described as “eager…to become a healing ritual for the audience.”
Theater’s Normalization Formula
A survey of the current theater landscape suggests that Birthright is not a standalone work of theatrical propaganda, but functions (knowingly or not) as part of a broader Zionist attempt to resuscitate Israel’s public image through arts and culture. As Birthright was opening at MCC, a play titled The Zionists: A Family Storm,was finishing its run at Barrington Stage, an award-winning regional theater in Massachusetts.
What matters in Birthright is not the actual genocide that the characters are arguing about, but how these arguments affect the characters’ friendships.
The synopsis for The Zionists reads similarly to that of Birthright: “A prominent Jewish family, fractured by the politics and aftermath of October 7, gathers for a fragile reunion at a luxury Caribbean resort. But as a sudden hurricane bears down outside their bungalow, an even fiercer storm erupts within—forcing them to confront old wounds, clashing values, and the ties that may no longer bind them.” Once again, the genocide is referenced indirectly (the “aftermath of October 7”), established here as background for a story about the challenges facing a Jewish family.
Meanwhile, earlier this summer a casting call went out in New York for a new play titled The Blue Violinist, set to open at Prism Stage Company in late October. The play’s synopsis reads: “A Jewish family on the Upper West Side unites for a celebration that quickly unravels as buried resentments and politics erupt.”
Theater’s normalization formula seems clear: rather than engage with Palestinian voices, erase them altogether and flood the zone with a new variant of family drama wherein genocide is acknowledged (“politics erupt”), but its supporters are humanized while arguments against Israel’s crimes are portrayed as obstacles interfering with Jewish family and community. In fact, creating theater along these lines is essentially the mission statement of the Y6K Project, the arts incubator that commissioned and developed both Birthright and The Zionists.
Y6K was founded in 2024 as a partnership between Miami New Drama (a regional theater) and Wasserman Projects (a Detroit-based arts organization). The project’s mission is to respond to what it calls “unprecedented vulnerability for Jewish communities” by “amplifying Jewish narratives” to raise awareness of “challenges faced by Jewish communities.” Y6K co-founder Gary Wasserman emphasized these goals in a 2025 interview where he announced that he’s only interested in offering support to “contemporary Jewish content that speaks to antisemitism and contemporary Jewish life.”
For decades, support for Israel and anti-Palestinian racism were so normalized in American culture that projects like Birthright were unnecessary.
Beyond his work as an arts philanthropist, Wasserman is the CEO of Allied Metals Corporation, a Michigan-based company that supplies metal and scrap products both directly to the U.S. military and to companies in the defense supply chain. While Allied Metals has no public links to the Israeli military, that Birthright was commissioned and funded in part by a military contractor serves as a reminder of the myriad ways that the arts are bound up with American imperialism.
For decades, support for Israel and anti-Palestinian racism were so normalized in American culture that projects like Birthright were unnecessary. Today, however, popular support for Israel is at historic lows, and Israel’s government and its supporters have responded by announcing their intention to dramatically increase their propaganda efforts. With three plays coming down the normalization pipeline in this year alone, it seems likely that the campaign to boycott Birthright is only the beginning of a long fight over the role of the arts in normalizing Israel’s crimes.
William Johnson is a co-chair of TW4C’s PACBI Committee. His writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Electronic Intifada, Mondoweiss, and The Nation.
