For example, in New York City in September, 1946, a new show debuted on Broadway that was called A Flag Is Born and it was all about the rightness of finally turning the Palestine created after World War I into a Jewish state. It was a social cause play whose cause was the rightness of having a Jewish state in Palestine finally – what with at that very moment hundreds of thousands of Jews still confined to Displaced Persons camps in Europe.

Two of the cast of this three-person drama were two of the finest actors at the time: Paul Muni and Celia Adler and a third one just making a name for himself, a young actor by the name of Marlon Brando.

This play was a plea for the creation of a Jewish state. It was written by Hollywood’s most successful screenwriter, Ben Hecht. It was directed by Luther Adler, also of the famous Adler family; with music by Kurt Weill. It was produced by the American League for a Free Palestine, an organization headed by Hillel Kook a/k/a Peter Bergson.

The play with its three-character cast concerned a husband and wife, Tevye and Zelda (Teyve is the Yiddish/Hebrew “Tobias”), two survivors of the death camp at Treblinka who are desperately trying to get to the Land of Israel. And they are traveling with their angry teenage son played by young Marlon Brando. He too survived the concentration camps.

The play opens as the older couple halts for the night in the journey and Zelda lights Shabbos candles on a broken tombstone. And Tevye recites the Shabbath prayers. And then he dreams of the town where he was born, as it was before the Nazis destroyed it.

He dreams of King Saul at war in Gilead and dreams up a conversation with King David after which, in his dream, he addresses the Security Council of the United Nations – England, France, the United States, the Soviet Union – and pleads for the creation of a Jewish state. Of course in his dream they all ignored him.

Then he awakes to find wife Zelda has died during the night. He says Kaddish, and welcomes the Angel of Death who has come for him too, he believes. He too wants to die.

And his angry young son David also ruminates on suicide, but then three Jewish soldiers appear and promise to take them them to the Land of Israel to fight for Jewish independence.

As Wikipedia has it, in the play’s stirring finale David (Marlon Brando) delivers a moving Zionist speech and marches off to fight for Jewish freedom holding a Zionist flag made out of Tevya’s prayer shawl.

Well, that was 1946, and today is today…