The following lines are dedicated to playwright Jonathan Spector, director Teddy Bergman, and the brilliant and resilient cast of “Birthright.”

“In the beginning was the Collective Unconscious and that Collective Unconscious was all the gods that ever were or ever will. The Collective Conscious became Human and dwelled among us around the sacredness of the table.” David’s retelling/reimagining of John 1:3

If we were able to all be in our Collective Conscious mode, I wouldn’t need to go any further. However, exactly because of the important dynamics of “Birthright” currently playing at MCC Theatre, I will take a deep dive into this remarkably relevant play.

“Birthright” takes its title from the free heritage trips that have sent nearly a million young Jews to Israel since 1999, but Spector is less interested in the program itself than in what it promises and cannot keep. The six friends at the center of his play meet on a 2006 Birthright trip that is meant to forge exactly the kind of collective consciousness my opening lines describe—a shared table around which a scattered, assimilated generation of American Jews might finally recognize each other. For a moment, in Chaya’s (committed and emotionally stable Zoë Winters) parents’ suburban living room, it seems to work: they light Shabbat candles together, argue over challah, fall in and out of each other’s beds. But Spector’s real subject is what happens to that fragile unity across eighteen years of ordinary American life and extraordinary Jewish history—October 7th chief among them. By 2024, the same friends who once passed a bottle of wine around a hot tub are Googling at each other mid-argument, each one certain the internet will vindicate what they already believe. The play’s enduring question is whether a birthright—a claim to identity and belonging one is simply born into—can survive the accumulated weight of politics, grief, and the sheer erosion of everyday attention. Spector never answers that question cleanly. He answers it, instead, with a funeral.

Between the three parts, Spector inserts mediated interludes that function as a second narrative device—one that mirrors and deepens the play’s central theme. The progression is deliberate and damning: emails from 2007 give way to Facebook posts, then texts, then WhatsApp messages, until finally, in 2023, Izzy simply leaves the group chat. With each technological shift, the illusion of collective presence erodes. What began as direct communication becomes reactive, then fragmented, then silent. The medium itself becomes the message: we are scattering, we are losing each other, we are choosing distance over dialogue. These interludes don’t merely transition between time periods—they narrate the slow dissolution of the very Collective Unconscious Spector’s opening invoked.

By 2016, the fractures have widened into genuine rifts. Chaya’s father has died, and grief has become the family’s new domestic reality. Marriage and parenthood have consumed the others—some joyfully, some with strain. Emerson has spiraled into addiction, a dark turn until his rescue through work as an EMT becomes, paradoxically, his salvation. It is at Alona’s (a confident and deeply religious Molly Ranson) wedding that the Zionism argument surfaces for the first time without restraint. The toast becomes a confrontation. What Spector shows us is not people who have changed their minds, but people who have stopped trying to understand each other’s minds. The arguments are no longer negotiations—they are declarations of incompatibility.

By 2024, the rifts have become chasms. Izzy is estranged from her mother, unable to reconcile her political convictions with her family’s Zionist history. Chaya’s professional life is unraveling—success has become complicated by the same contradictions that plague the group. When they gather, ostensibly to prevent Alona from moving permanently to Israel, the reunion becomes a reckoning. They pull out their phones mid-argument, Googling facts to vindicate positions they’ve already taken, proving to each other that the internet confirms what they already know. It is the death of dialogue. Alona delivers a monologue about her nanny and Ilan’s grandmother—a moment of raw vulnerability that forces the group to confront what they’re actually fighting about: not politics in the abstract, but the lived experiences of real people whose lives don’t fit neatly into ideology. The weight of eighteen years—October 7th, four years of Trump, the dissolution of friendship into tribal positioning—settles heavily on all of them. They are no longer the six friends who once shared a table. They are six strangers who remember sharing one. It is into this fractured silence that Lev’s death arrives, and with it, the necessity of gathering once more.

After Lev’s death by suicide, documented in the second interlude spanning 2007-2013, the remaining five friends gather again in 2024 at Chaya’s mother’s newly redecorated house to observe Shiva. Once everyone has settled and caught up, Emerson—now dressed fully in Hasidic garb—shares a story from the Talmud that Lev had become “particularly obsessed with” and kept returning to. Noah asks what Lev made of it. Emerson’s answer carries the weight of years of their friendship: although Lev’s understanding of the story “shifted over time,” what preoccupied him was this: “how far they had fallen, how far they had strayed—that they valued the laws of ritual purity over human life. The question of responsibility. It weighed on him. He seemed to be very afraid of valuing the wrong things.”

The group then recites the Mourner’s Kaddish, with Chaya’s mother joining via FaceTime from her book club—their bodies completing the minyan through screens and distance. When the prayer ends, they gather around the table to share the food everyone has brought for Shiva. The challah sits between them, returned to its ritual purpose. The scattered people have found their table again, if only for this moment.

Just as Pask’s set design is part of the storytelling process, so do Natasha Katz’s lighting design support the time jumps and Clint Ramos’s costume design reflect the eighteen years of change. The most notable moment where lighting creates emotional impact is the dramatic difference in light intensity when the group is on the porch. The security light is on a timer, and characters have to wave their arms to reactivate the light. Eventually, they adjust the timer, so the light remains on longer. These “light lapses” correspond to the emotional gaps in conversation.

David Bengali’s projection design, including phone texts, WhatsApp messages, and Facetime images, successfully show the passage of time as the sophistication of electronic devices and apps increased from 2006 to 2024. These projections are particularly useful to show changes in the sociopolitical environment and the evolving reactions to Israel’s presence in Gaza and the change in presidents.

Teddy Bergman’s astute and taut staging is remarkable. The director gives the cast the space needed to make the needed tonal shifts between time periods and to infuse the arguments and conflicts with genuine emotional weight and humanity. He brings out the best in his cast so that they do not simply raise their voices at one another; rather, he enables them to bring real inner conflicts and fears to the surface with striking realism. For example, Izzy doesn’t just confront Chaya with what she sees as genocide; rather, she hopes to bring Chaya to a different level of thinking. Despite the play’s fractured structure across three time periods, Bergman keeps the ensemble grounded and present and serves well Jonathan Spector’s enduring theme of the way the Collective Conscious can fragment if not protected from society’s penchant for divisiveness and otherness.

Spector’s characters are well-rounded people with complex, often contradictory impulses that drive an engaging plot. None of them are truly static: they all grow in surprising and not-so-surprising ways.

Izzy is driven by a strong sense of right and wrong, particularly regarding social and political issues, including Israel/Palestine and Jewish identity. Molly Bernard’s Izzy is never conflicted when sharing her convictions with her friends, particularly in her high energy exchanges with Chaya. Although Izzy and Chaya agree on the importance of Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World), they strongly disagree how Israel’s Zionists apply the principle. By 2024, Bernard shows Izzy becoming more temperate. Izzy has children, she muted Chaya to avoid further disagreements over genocide in Israel, and she apologizes to Alona for the way she treated her about moving to Israel.

Hale Appleman gives Lev a physical and spiritual intensity. When he first enters the reunion in 2006, he commands the room with his physical energy. After his extended stay in the Middle East after the Birthright event, he decides to enter Rabbinical school; however, he does not finish his studies but enters a career in real estate. Still, Lev is a deeply spiritual person who believes in the Collective Conscious among Jews and the rest of civilization. Always in search of meaning, he wears his concern about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his soul and in his body. During the 2024 reunion, we learn that Lev committed suicide. Perhaps the world was too much with him.

Emerson is a musician turned EMT turned Hasidic father of a large family with addiction in his backstory. Nate Mann’s Emerson comes to the 2024 reunion and Shiva as the “new” spiritual leader—replacing Lev in that important role for the group of friends. Through his own journey—addiction, recovery, spiritual transformation—Emerson becomes the group’s unexpected spiritual anchor. Mann gives us a grounded Emerson who gracefully leads the group through the Mourner’s Kaddish and then to the gathering around the table. In this moment, with Mann’s grounded presence leading them through prayer and gathering, the Collective Conscious briefly reforms—not restored but reconstituted through the choice to show up.

Eli Gelb (Noah) and Liz Larsen (Deborah) round out the talented cast.

Spector’s “Birthright” does not offer redemption, only the stubborn insistence on gathering. The scattered people find their table again, if only for this moment—around challah, around grief, around the prayer for the dead. What the Collective Unconscious cannot restore, simple presence might: the choice to say Kaddish together, the choice to dwell at the table, even knowing it won’t last. In this, Teddy Bergman’s production finds its ultimate meaning—not in the arguments resolved or the positions abandoned, but in the radical act of showing up for each other despite everything that has pulled them apart. That is all community ever is: people choosing to gather, knowing the gathering is temporary. That is all it ever needs to be.