The Sons And Daughters Of Abraham

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, whose The Who And The What recently opened in New York, considers the similarities between Jewish and Muslim identity, particularly in America:

My relationship to Jewish artists and writers began when I was very young. It started with Chaim Potok, and in college I discovered Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Woody Allen, Seinfeld. All of that stuff was hugely influential in helping me think about my experience. There seemed to be so many commonalities; I found myself and my community in those works, oddly.

I think there is a lot of continuity between the Jewish and the Islamic traditions. We know this historically, though people don’t want to talk about that – especially Muslims. There is a common source for both Judaism and Islam, or let’s say that Islam finds its source in Judaism. The commonalities of practice and sensibility, ethos and mythos, create a lot of overlap.

Post-9/11, the notion of “Muslims” taking on a potential truculence [corresponds to] – although it’s different – ways in which Jews were seen pejoratively within dominant Western cultures. Something about the orientation of faith being your identity marker as opposed to nationality or ethnicity. Post-9/11, that is an issue: folks get labeled “Muslim” no matter where they’re from. If you are Muslim, then that is part of it, but here’s the complicating factor for me: growing up, the only part of my identity that mattered was being Muslim, and I knew that. Being Pakistani was not as important as being Muslim. So the black guy whom I met who’s a Muslim, I’m much closer to him than the Christian Pakistani guy who is my dad’s friend. We have a closer bond. This was innate to me as a kid.

I don’t know what it’s like to be Jewish, but I suspect there is some aspect of that: being Jewish is the thing that bonds you as opposed to being Jewish from Poland, or Jewish from Hungary.