Joshua Harmon’s latest play, Prayer for the French Republic—set primarily in France in 2016 and 2017, with flashbacks to 1944—follows a Jewish family confronting many of the same questions their forebears faced 70 years earlier. Those questions revolve around whether it is safe to remain in their home country. In conversation with Ruthie Fierberg, David Cromer, its director, discusses the work and its relevance to American Jews.

The thing that I identify with most [in the play]—the one thing I’ve learned about life—is it is very easy to look back and say, “it’s so much worse now. The world is so much worse.” No. It’s always been worse. The difference about the past is we know what happened. So for good or ill, it’s concluded. The present, you just don’t know what’s going to happen a second from now. So when we’re in theater, when we’re talking about living in the moment, that is the reality.

What’s great about this play is that some people in the room are saying, “it’s time to get out.” And other people are saying, “What are you talking about? You sound like a crazy person. It’s fine. [The far-right French presidential candidate Marine] Le Pen’s never gonna win.” One of the great and chilling things about the play is Pierre [a ninety-one-year-old Holocaust survivor] saying at the end of the play, “We couldn’t leave—all our money was tied up in the pianos.”

If I say to you, “Leave now, Ruthie,” you’re gonna say, “Now I have to write this piece, walk the dog, all my stuff is here. I’m supposed to go to Vegas next week” or whatever. So you hope it’ll be okay. You hope cooler heads will prevail. And our life is the difference between whether we just keep hoping or whether we go when it’s time to go. Hope for the best or expect the worst.

You can make an argument that a person’s sense of safety is merely an illusion. If you were realistic, you would understand that danger is constant and everywhere. But the thing is—like we were saying earlier—I also hope. We have to live in some kind of hope.

Steve Witkoff, the American special envoy leading negotiations with the Islamic Republic, has sent mixed signals about his intentions, some of them recently contradicted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Michael Doran looks at the progress of the talks so far, and explains why he fears that they could result in an even worse version of the 2015 deal, known formally as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA):

This new deal will preserve Iran’s latent nuclear weapons capabilities—centrifuges, scientific expertise, and unmonitored sites—that will facilitate a simple reconstitution in the future. These capabilities are far more potent today than they were in 2015, with Iran’s advances making them easier to reactivate, a significant step back from the JCPOA’s constraints.

In return, President Trump would offer sanctions relief, delivering countless billions of dollars to Iranian coffers. Iran, in the meantime, will benefit from the permanent erasure of JCPOA snapback sanctions, set to expire in October 2025, reducing U.S. leverage further. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps will use the revenues to support its regional proxies, such as Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis, whom it will arm with missiles and drones that will not be restricted by the deal.

Worse still, Israel will not be able to take action to stop Iran from producing nuclear weapons:

A unilateral military strike . . . is unlikely without Trump’s backing, as Israel needs U.S. aircraft and missile defenses to counter Iran’s retaliation with drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles—a counterattack Israel cannot fend off alone.

By defanging Iran’s proxies and destroying its defenses, Israel stripped Tehran naked, creating a historic opportunity to end forever the threat of its nuclear weapons program. But Tehran’s weakness also convinced it to enter the kind of negotiations at which it excels. Israel’s battlefield victories, therefore, facilitated a deal that will place Iran’s nuclear program under an undeclared but very real American protective shield.