Ari’el Stachel, an ‘Arab Jewish’ actor with a Tony Award, has a message about antisemitism for Zohran Mamdani
Starring in a new one-man show, the Ashkenazi-Yemeni-Israeli Stachel has become increasingly vocal about antisemitism and the complexities of Jewish identity
Ari’el Stachel is the writer and star of “Out of Character,” a one-man show running at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theater in Stockbridge, Massachusetts until July 26, 2025. Photo by Clean Carlough
By Andrew Silow-Carroll July 11, 2025
(JTA) — STOCKBRIDGE, Massachusetts — At the climax of his one-man show, “Out of Character,” the actor Ari’el Stachel declares, “I am a Yemenite, Israeli, Ashkenazi, Jewish, American actor with anxiety.”
It’s a complex identity that has brought him major attention since his Tony Award-winning turn as an Egyptian trumpeter in the hit 2018 musical “The Band’s Visit,” set in an Israeli backwater. It’s also an identity that has drawn some welcome scrutiny: Some critics and fellow actors complained that a Jew shouldn’t have played an Arab, and Stachel says he was fired in 2021 from another musical, “The Visitor,” when he challenged the way his Syrian character was being portrayed.
Stachel is now drawing on his crisscrossing identities during a month-long run in the Berkshires, the third production of a show he hopes to bring to Broadway, and also in a busy Instagram feed in which he has become increasingly outspoken about antisemitism and the invisibility of Jews of color.
Late last month, he drew those threads together in a video appeal to Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for New York City mayor, who many Jews and their allies say does not appreciate why Jews are feeling threatened by anti-Israel rhetoric post-Oct. 7.
“Zohran – I’m just like you. I’m 33, I’m brown, I love New York City, and most people can’t pronounce my name,” says Stachel (rhymes with “satchel”). He tells Mamdani that it is “thrilling” that New York might soon have its first Muslim mayor, but also describes feeling alienated and unwelcome as a Jew with an Israeli father.
“What’s frightening is that, in some circles, antisemitism isn’t recognized as hate, it’s framed as justice,” says Stachel. “Attacks against Jews aren’t condemned, they are celebrated, seen as a righteous response to a government miles away.”
He calls on Mamdani to “denounce explicitly any of your supporters who are blatantly antisemitic,” and to “create a coalition of Jews and Muslims of every race, every background, who believe in a New York that belongs to everyone without erasure.”
The video drew over 56,000 likes, and 7,000 comments.
In an interview Wednesday after a performance of “Out of Character” at the Berkshire Theatre Group’s Unicorn Theatre here, Stachel said he hadn’t heard back from Mamdani’s office. But he believes his own background — he calls himself an “Arab Jew,” knowing it confounds Jews and Arabs alike — gives him a distinct perspective and standing that “white-presenting” Jews can’t draw on in a moment of polarized conversations around race and identity.
“I recognize that I have an intersectional privilege in this country, which is that I’m also seen as a person of color, and everyone in this moment in this culture says, well, people of color are oppressed. We all agree on that,” said Stachel. “And so I’ve been trying to toe the line really delicately about saying, ‘Listen, I stand for all Jews, and I’m going to use my voice as a person of color to speak up and force people to listen who wouldn’t listen to what they would call a white-presenting Jew.’”
Mamdani, he said, has a responsibility to help his supporters understand the complexities of Jewish and Israeli identities.
“I think that we are multicultural, and that’s another reason why I call myself an Arab Jew,” he said. “We are many things, and we’re one tribe, but we’re an expansive tribe. And if I don’t speak out, I mean, it’s not to say no one else will, but I have a bit more capital [as a brown Jew], and I’m going to spend it to stand up for my people.”
“Out of Character,” which he started writing in 2018, depicts Stachel’s often tortured efforts to reconcile his various identities, even as he struggles with anxiety disorders for which he received a diagnosis as a young boy. The show begins on the night he won his Tony for best featured actor, when he retreated to a men’s room rather than face a horde of admirers. It concludes in the months after Oct. 7, when Stachel felt compelled to speak out for the victims of the Hamas attacks and against the anti-Israel protests that too often landed as antisemitism.
In between he reenacts his variously awkward, funny and painful attempts to define himself in a world that didn’t know what to do with a Jewish kid who didn’t fit the Ashkenazi stereotype. Kids taunted him with anti-Arab slurs after the Sept. 11 attacks, and in high school Stachel tried to pass as Black. For years he pretended his father, a Yemeni Jew with a thick Israeli accent and a beard that made him look uncannily like Osama Bin-Laden, was not his real father.
“A lot of my struggles growing up were bred out of my phenotype, how I looked,” he said. “Now, would I be writing a play if I didn’t come from a lineage of Ashkenazi thinkers and physicists [on his mother’s side]? Maybe not, but that will be in a different story.”
As an NYU student, he joined MENASA, a group of actors of Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian descent. He portrays head-spinning meetings in which members debate who gets to play what roles, especially after they heard producers were looking for brown actors to play the Egyptian characters in “The Band’s Visit.”
Stachel says those debates extended to the audition process, when his agent confided that, despite Stachel’s Israeli background, he wouldn’t be considered for a role as one of the play’s Jewish characters. Stachel calls that “dramaturgically inaccurate,” noting that perhaps a majority of the Jews in real-life “periphery” towns like the one in the show might hail from North African and other Muslim countries.
After winning acclaim for his portrayal of ladies’ man Haled, Stachel was cast in “The Visitor,” based on the 2008 movie about the callousness of America’s post-9/11 immigration policies. The show was announced in the midst of the debates over race and representation following the murder of George Floyd; some objected that the show would center a white man, and the theater press reported that Stachel was unhappy with his character, a Syrian immigrant disappeared into an ICE detention center.
At the time, The Public Theater and Stachel announced they had made a “mutual decision” for him to leave, but in “Out of Character” he calls it a firing. “It was my second time playing an Arab character, and I thought that it was not handled with delicacy or with authenticity, and I stood up in a way that didn’t make people happy,” Stachel said this week.
Since then Stachel has had a recurring role in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and acted in Olivia Wilde’s 2022 thriller “Don’t Worry Darling,” where he met his fiancee, the actress Kiki Layne.
He hopes “Out of Character,” in which he plays 40 different characters, is his ticket back to Broadway. “This is my career right now,” he said of the play.
The show is also giving him the freedom to speak publicly in ways he might have avoided off stage, especially after Oct. 7. He said he wrote a lot of the play at Qahwah House, a Yemeni-owned café in Brooklyn, where “they look at me like a brother,” he said.
Since the start of the Israeli-Hamas war, however, “I didn’t quite feel comfortable saying that I was Jewish, and I don’t like that. So I feel a little more freedom to say things on stage or in a public platform than I do interpersonally, because the contract on stage or social media is more or less, ‘You’re going to listen to me. I don’t really need to see your facial reaction after I say what I say, but it’s necessary for me to say.’”
It wouldn’t be the first time he has been able to say on stage what he was too anxious to acknowledge one on one. In the show, he reenacts a drama exercise at NYU, when a teacher challenged students to act out their deepest truths. Stachel sang a Yemeni Jewish standard, “Lekha Eli” (“To You, My God”), whose Hebrew lyrics and Arabic melody represent his own hybrid identity.
I asked if Stachel had any qualms about centering his Jewishness at a moment when some Jewish artists and writers are feeling marginalized and scrutinized.
“I don’t worry about that,” he said. “I mean, I have spent so long in silence and compartmentalizing myself, my identity, that I literally don’t care if it costs me roles. I think that this play may be a segue for me to be more political in some way.”
He said the comments on the Mamdani video were largely supportive of his efforts to bridge communities, although some readers objected to him calling himself “Arab,” others denounced Stachel as a Zionist, and others seemed to despair that Mamdani would ever listen to concerned Jews like Stachel.
“The reaction to that Mamdani video is really, really powerful,” said Stachel. ““So I don’t know where it’s going to leave me, but I just know that it feels right and it feels true, and I’m following that.”
“Out of Character,” written and performed by Ari’el Stachel and directed by Tony Taccone, runs at The Unicorn Theatre in Stockbridge, Massachusetts through Sat., July 26.
