So for my first post, I'd like to share an essay I wrote for Theatre Criticism a few years ago. While The Whipping Man closed on Broadway some time ago, I find the issues of Jewish identity and persecution to be relevant to the current struggles inside and outside of our community. Matthew Lopez's play examines the little-known revelation that Jews, formerly a persecuted people, in fact owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. While as I history buff I always enjoy exploring esoteric footnotes in the grand narrative, I found his treatment of the subject frustratingly shallow and lacking in any kind of empathy or understanding of what it was actually like to be a Jew in the 19th-century and why Jews would participate in the vile institution of slavery. In Theatre Criticism I was so pissy after seeing the play that I decided to write research paper to prove how shallow I found the play.
