Jonathan Spector’s ‘Birthright’ puts Jewish history and memory on the stage - opinion

In a lifetime of theater-going I have never heard the word “historiography” on stage.

But that is exactly what the Tony-Award winning playwright Jonathan Spector served up in his astonishing new play “Birthright.”

I was stunned. “Zakhor” 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, or even many of my graduate students, have read.

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, “Zakhor” lays out the tension between the Jewish people’s collective memory and the disruption the modern scholarly study of the Jewish past raised for the Jewish faith.

A few weeks after Oct. 7, 2023, Spector was invited by Miami New Drama’s 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.

Early in his research, Spector stumbled on a single quotation from “Zakhor” in the playwright Tony Kushner’s edited collection of essays “Wrestling with Zion.”

That led Spector to Yerushalmi’s meditation on memory and Jewish history. He considers its analysis so significant that in an earlier draft, Lev’s discourse about Zakhor went on for 10 pages.

Lev wrestles, as does the play, with the Jewish past and the fractures of the Jewish present.

The Bible commands Jews to remember, “zakhor," his past “like 200 times,” Lev tells us. (Yerushalmi actually counted 169 times.)

“Zakhor” 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.

Then history writing once again vanished from Jewish literature until it was again sparked by trauma.

In 1819, antisemitic “Hep! Hep!” 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.

This scholarship, as Wolpe shows us, challenged and continues to challenge Jews and Judaism. Yerushalmi ruefully captured, as Lev reminds us, that today’s Jews may know much more about their past thanks to the writing of history. Yet, as a collective, they remember much less.

Spector told me that he was drawn to Yerushalmi’s assertion that “history has now become the faith of fallen Jews”; 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 “in search of community,” call their group “Fallen Jews.”

Spector dedicated the play to his father, Ronald H. Spector, the distinguished military historian.

But the son said that it took Yerushalmi’s book, not his father, to introduce him to historiography and to what he has Lev call “the extremely weird and unique relationship” that Jews have with history and historiography.

I am apparently one of only three people to so far have raised “Zakhor” 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 “touchpoint” for “Birthright.”

In the past, one Jewish response to trauma was the turn to Jewish history. When Yerushalmi wrote “Zakhor,” 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.