My friend Garrett Eisler informs me that film director Mike Leigh’s new play, Two Thousand Years, which has sold out in London, has come to off-Broadway, and is all about stuff I talk about on this blog: Jewish identity around issues of assimilation and Israel… From Eisler’s review in Time Out:
Like Leigh himself, the middle-aged parents hail from a Socialist
Zionist background and retain their utopian leftist passion, but have
grown disillusioned with Israel. Their cosmopolitan daughter (Natasha
Lyonne) makes her parents proud as an international human-rights
activist, but their son horrifies them when he turns to Orthodox
Judaism for answers. The work crackles with Leigh’s signature humor (a
characteristically Jewish sense of tragicomedy, he feels), but
underneath it seems to lie, in the laudatory words of Guardian
critic Michael Billington, an exploration of “the loss of faith” in “a
world in which people have increasingly lost their beliefs in politics,
religion and social progress.”
Further evidence that European attitudes towards Israel are invading our shores. Hallelujah!
