Jewish Currents July 10, 2026
Are you now or have you ever been?
Alisa Solomon (contributing
writer): When Eric
Bentley’s 1972 documentary play Are You Now
or Have You Ever Been
began performances last month, its
too-timely alarm was impossible to miss.
Assembled verbatim from proceedings of
the House Un-American Activities
Committee’s investigation of show
business, Bentley’s courtroom drama
presents 17 “witnesses” called by the
committee between 1947 and 1956, with
the expectation that they would confess
their own alleged subversive
activities—activities that involved
First Amendment-protected speech—and to
finger others involved alongside them.
The play’s title condenses the central
question of these hearings: Are you now
or have you ever been a member of the
Communist Party? Its characters—drawn
from more than 100 witnesses called by
HUAC in its investigation of alleged
Communist infiltration of
Hollywood—include defiant refuseniks
like Lionel Stander, Arthur Miller, and
Paul Robeson, and stool pigeons like
Jerome Robbins and Elia Kazan. Many were
blacklisted—losing reputation and
livelihood—simply for being subpoenaed.
Some went to prison for refusing to
cooperate.
In our own moment of criminalized
protest, the production brought echoes
of a shameful period when America
squashed dissent in the name of
protecting the Constitution. Lately
those resonances have become even louder
and more ominous. A couple of weeks into
the run, protesters at the Prairieland
immigrant detention center in Texas were
handed draconian,
decades-long sentences
as “antifa terrorists.” Soon after, a
Florida law, passed in April, went into
effect, enabling state leaders to
designate activist groups as terrorist
organizations and to expel state
university students who support them.
Governor Ron DeSantis wasted no
time in tagging the
Council on American-Islamic Relations
and “antifa”—which is not actually an
organization.
By the time I caught the show last
night, the mildest opposition to the
Trump regime—that is, from the
Democratic Party—was being threatened in
terms that seemed to come directly from
the play. Trump, standing at Mt.
Rushmore last week, declared that
Communism is currently “the greatest
threat to our country, including World
War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or
even 9/11,” perpetrated by “illegal
immigrants, criminals and everybody that
doesn’t want to work.” It was as if he
had pulled a 75-year-old Joe McCarthy
speech from a file. The modest reforms
proposed by democratic socialists—like
universal healthcare and affordable
housing—are being besmirched, like the
labor and anti-racist organizing of the
Hollywood lefties of yore, as efforts to
overthrow America. “This is not your
granddaddy’s Democrat Party,” White
House Press Secretary Karoline
Leavitt declared on
Fox News. “This is a full-blown
communist revolution.”
Red scare tactics always
surge when
progressive movements gain ground in the
United States. They’re as American as
Fourth of July fireworks and their
toxic spew. So, as I
sat in the theater at City Center,
watching director Anna D. Shapiro’s
crisp, perfectly paced production
featuring a top-notch rotating cast (a
new group of guest stars takes over on
July 13th) play out on a sleek set (two
wooden tables on blue patterned carpet,
a cyclorama onto which headlines about
the hearings are projected, along with
occasional background text that clacks
into view with the sound of a
typewriter), I couldn’t regard Are
You Now as a history play, not
when the specter of anticommunism is
haunting America.
The audience seemed to concur. We
all groaned at those who named
names—though with sympathy as we watched
actor Larry Parks gradually broken down
over a grueling day of questioning. And
we burst into applause for those who
ridicule the three-man team of
investigators—for instance, when they
remind Stander of the committee’s duty
to “investigate reports regarding
subversive activities in the United
States,” and he readily agrees. “I have
knowledge of subversive action!,” he
offers, amiably. “I know of a group of
fanatics who are trying to undermine the
Constitution of the United States by
depriving artists of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness without due
process of law! I can cite instances! I
can tell names. I am one of the first
victims, if you are interested. A group
of ex-[German American, pro-Nazi]
Bundists, America Firsters, and
antisemites, people who hate everybody,
Negroes, minority groups, and most
likely themselves.” (In his introduction
to the published script, Bentley likens
Stander to a “New York Jewish
comedian.”)
Even more stirringly, the play ends
with Robeson. An investigator tells him:
“You are here because you are promoting
the Communist cause.” Robeson rejoins,
“I am here because I am opposing the
neo-Fascist cause. Jefferson could be
sitting here, and Frederick Douglass
could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs
could be sitting here.”
Nowadays, many of us could be, too.
