Itamar Moses on His Fiercely Timely New Play, ‘The Ally’

In the tragic aftermath of the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, college campuses have turned into crucibles of dissent, with student activists organizing sit-ins and other actions to call attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and demanding that their universities divest from companies that support the Israeli military. 

Somewhat inadvertently, The Ally, a new play by Itamar Moses opening at the Public Theater on February 27, cannonballs directly into the fray. Set on an American college campus in 2023, it centers on Asaf (Josh Radnor), a liberal Jewish adjunct writing professor who is asked to sign a manifesto in the wake of a local Black person’s killing by a cop. Asaf agrees with most of the document—which discusses, among other things, “how, under the incentives of brute capitalism, nothing matters more than profit, not even people”—but one thing gives him pause: a sentence singling out Israel and its “settler-colonialist oppression of the Palestinians through its ongoing occupation of the West Bank, blockade of Gaza, and refusal to recognize any right of return for the refugees of 1948.” As Asaf tells his wife, “Israel is the only country whose own policies are condemned, where it says not ‘we shouldn’t be involved there cuz of what we do,’ but rather ‘we shouldn’t be involved cuz of what they do.’” Complicating matters, the petition he’s been asked to sign turns out to be the brainchild of Asaf’s former girlfriend Nakia (Cherise Boothe), an African American community organizer.

The play is rife with ideas—not just about settler colonialism and indigeneity but also about Zionism, anti-Asian racism (Asaf is married to a Korean American woman), and gentrification. It’s surely one of the most topical productions you’ll see all year, but, as Moses told me in a recent Zoom interview, the seed of the play was planted seven years ago. As far back as 2017, the California-raised playwright sensed “a fissure or a division opening up on the left, where I basically am and have always been politically, having to do with questions around Israel and America’s relationship to Israel.” He also clocked a generational divide among Jewish people, “where what had been the standard left-wing position in the 1980s was now almost a centrist vision, according to a new generation of left-wing Jewish activists.”

The Ally considers that breach at both a microcosmic level—at its core, the play is “about what happens when two of a person’s unconscious tribalisms are in conflict with one another,” per Moses—and at a macrocosmic one: Over about three hours, Asaf has his views challenged by both an active and lapsed member of the campus chapter of the Jewish Student Union, as well as a member of Students for Palestinian Justice. (For starters, more than one character wants to know why Asaf hasn’t watched the video of the Black student’s killing; he repeatedly weasels his way out of an answer.)