Jewish Voice for Peace came to protest the opening night of “The Zionists: A Family Storm” at Miami New Drama. By the end of the evening, they said they appreciated the play. They liked its message.
I have spent fifteen years preparing Jewish teenagers to recognize exactly this moment — when something feels like a conversation about us but is actually a verdict against us. So when I heard that, I felt something shift in my chest. Not rage. Something quieter and more troubling. Confirmation.
The Zionists: A Family Storm, written by S. Asher Gelman and directed by Chloe Treat, is a world premiere at Miami New Drama. The production is great. The acting is passionate. Gelman loves his people, and he has written real arguments into this script. The oldest son makes the pro-Israel case with knowledge and conviction. I want to say that clearly before I say everything else.
The play drops a wealthy Jewish family into a luxury Caribbean bungalow as a hurricane closes in — November 2024, in the aftermath of October 7. One brother donated to the FIDF. Another funded antisemitic protests across America that targeted his own sister-in-law on a university campus. Five minutes in, I had tears in my eyes that remained for two and a half hours.
Those tears were not about unfairness to Israel. They were about recognition. I know the brother who funds the protests — not this specific man, but this type. He is not a villain, but a warning. That humanity is the play’s greatest achievement. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Then Ruth spoke.
Ruth, the family matriarch, nearly nominated as the first female US Ambassador to Israel, tells her family that Israel has done “horrible, unspeakable things.” No context. No counterweight. The judicial reforms are presented as unambiguously evil. Settlers are placed on moral par with terrorists. And Sinwar is never mentioned — not once in a play about a Jewish family shattered by October 7.
The narrative of the Israeli majority — the people who went to the polls and chose this government with full knowledge of what it stood for — is not merely underrepresented here. It is treated as something between embarrassment and pathology.
At the talkback, the cast returned repeatedly to two words: peace and coexistence. The play works toward peace. The most obvious solution is peace. I sat in that theater two and a half years after October 7 and listened to Jewish artists talk about peace as though it were a destination we had simply failed to choose.
Peace is not a strategy. It is a prayer. What protects the Jewish people — what has always protected the Jewish people — is strength. Military strength. Communal strength. The refusal to apologize for our existence. To offer peace as the answer in 2026 is not visionary. It does not inspire. It sedates.
I kept thinking about a different Jewish family. Not the Rosenbergs of the Hamptons — the ex of the middle sister who moved to the hills of Judea. The one the play would have us see as the villain. He is not on a stage arguing about Israel. He is living in it. He has six children. They will have children. Those children will be Jewish — not as a political position, but as a simple, stubborn, irreducible fact of life on those hills.
None of the Rosenbergs can say the same. For all their passion, their wealth, their tears, their arguments — the Jewish future is not in that room.
The play asks whether Jewish families can stay in the room together. I am asking a different question: whether the Jewish people can stay strong enough to have a future at all. One of those questions is a luxury. The other is the only one that matters.
Masha Merkulova is the founder and executive director of Club Z, a national Zionist youth movement.
This op-ed is published in partnership with a coalition of organizations that fight antisemitism across the world. Read the previous article by Adam Milstein.