Review: The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, Shouting About Israel on the Upper West Side

A 13-year-old student once told me that when she can’t choose between two options, she makes the decision by having a thumb war with herself. Writing a debate play, the kind where characters are positioned oppositionally across a social or political issue, is kind of like having a thumb war with yourself.

Even though playwright Debbie Goodstein clearly intends to represent both sides fairly in The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, a family drama about a nice Jewish college boy from the Upper West Side bringing home an anti-Zionist organizer for Shabbat, it’s obvious which way this thumb war is going from the beginning.

How can a playwright—an individual trying to depict a multiplicity of views that differ from her own—avoid putting her thumb on the scale? Recent Middle East debate plays have landed most successfully when they approach the squabble sideways: Jonathan Spector’s Birthright, for example, focuses with quite a bit of bite on how we argue these days rather than on the arguments themselves.

But Goodstein draws her characters right into the heart of the debate without setting up stakes beyond this heated conversation. The entirety of her characters’ relationships with each other, their closest family members, seems to hinge upon the outcome of those fights.

Complicating the challenge of deepening her characters beyond their positions on a political spectrum, Goodstein imagines The Blue Violinist as a contemporary gloss on the Sholom Aleichem short stories that inspired Fiddler on the Roof. The parents Abe (Adam Heller) and Dina Stein (Barbara Walsh) both narrate to the audience Tevye-style, sometimes quoting directly from Fiddler’s libretto. At the start of the second act, Dina wakes Abe to describe her own version of Tevye’s dream, complete with ghostly ancestors and the pre-recorded strains of “If I Were A Rich Man.”

Like Tevye, Abe and Dina must confront and learn to tolerate each of their children’s marriages. Yitzhak (Etai Benson) lives with his wife and children on an Israeli kibbutz; Rachel (Lauriel Friedman) is having the child of an Italian cop (Mike Labbadia); Joseph (Harrison Bryan) is gay. (His full name is Joseph Stein, which he shares with Fiddler’s book writer. Oy gevalt.) For most of the debate scenes, there are four couples participating, and every character holds almost exactly the same position as their romantic partner. That’s twice as many people arguing as there are arguments, making these squabbles both underbaked and overpopulated.

Unlike Tevye, Abe’s bridge too far is not an interfaith coupling (nor a queer one, although he remains sullenly homophobic) but a pairing with mixed politics. Favorite child Jake (Rory Kulz), who gave up his prodigious klezmer violin career for Harvard, is dating Jenna (Ali Axelrad), a Jewish campus leader for the (uh oh!) Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee.

The suspenseful leadup to the revelation of Jenna’s position on Israel suggests the ominousness of a horror jump-scare, and the discovery that she owns a keffiyeh is treated as if she’s been found sleeping in a coffin and hiding from the sunlight. Goodstein’s attempt to lighten the melodrama with comedy makes for some tonal muddiness. “She works for Harvard’s version of SJP,” Rachel announces portentously, referencing the campus network Students for Justice in Palestine. To which Dina cries out in excitement, “She works for Sarah Jessica Parker?”

There’s something theatrically clever about asking what would push a 2026 Tevye to disown his child. But Goodstein seems far more invested in her Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner setup, which inevitably centers the guest over the father-son relationship. Jake, the only character who seems to change (symbolized, inevitably, through violin imagery), plays second fiddle throughout to Jenna’s militancy. A very brief scene between Abe and Jake that seems to be getting somewhere in cracking open this fraught but underdeveloped relationship, comes to a halt when Jenna barges in, literally holding a “From the river to the sea” poster.

The Stein family’s near-unanimous fervent Zionism derives from personal history, both the inherited trauma of the Holocaust and the experience of Yitzhak’s offstage children who are hiding in an Israeli bomb shelter during much of the play’s action. Those specific perspectives anchor their political stances, and Jenna’s anti-Zionism is similarly linked to ancestry: “I don’t protest despite being Jewish,” she insists. “I protest because I am.” This could be a compelling study in contrasts, but Goodstein portrays Jenna as a moral outlier in her support for Palestinian freedom. Vastly outnumbered, her rhetorical failures become representative of an entire movement. Whatever your own views, you can see it’s not a fair fight.

As directed by Jonathan Silverstein, The Blue Violinist’s greatest asset is its cast, credibly cozy in oft-amusing familial banter, with Walsh bringing her usual glowing warmth to Dina and Benson particularly moving in communicating Yitzhak’s ever-present anxiety for his endangered family. If only we knew more about who these siblings and parents are to each other outside of the arena.