Alan Zeitlin
Born in Philadelphia, Yair Ben-Dor’s childhood was spent going back and forth from the City of Brotherly Love to Israel.
“My parents divorced, and my dad lived in Israel and my mom wanted to stay in Philly,” Ben-Dor said. “So, it was kindergarten in Philly, elementary school in Israel, middle school in Philly, high school in Israel.”
He said he enjoyed his days at Robert Saligman Middle School (now integrated into Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy) and acting may have served as therapy when he did it in high school. He served three years in the Israeli Army and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York. About seven months ago, he was in a show called “The Holy Landers,” which was a sketch comedy show about Israel.
“October 7th happened, and we had to cancel the show,” Ben-Dor said. “It was inappropriate to do this comedy show — there were lines where we were joking about Hamas attacks. In hindsight, it blows your mind. This is not the first time Hamas has attacked or taken hostages, though obviously nothing to this extent has happened before. We became too nonchalant, and our guard was down.”
Now Ben-Dor is starring in what is believed to be the first Oct. 7 play in Manhattan called “October 7: A Verbatim Play” by Phelim McAleer who used the words from his interviews of Israelis from his November trip there with his wife Ann McElhinney, who produced the show at Actors Temple Theater. The husband-and-wife duo are bestselling authors, filmmakers and podcasters as well as journalists.
He said he knows “an insane number of people whose friends or relatives were killed or kidnapped.”
He said it is emotionally tough to do the play, but it is important to him to do so, and he hopes people will learn the facts about the situation.
“For those of us Israelis who live here, there is a sort of helplessness,” he said. “We’re here fighting the PR fight on social media, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. For me to be able to use my acting abilities to do this felt right.”
He said when Iran launched the missiles against Israel, he called in a panic, asking if everyone was OK.
“The response was ‘business as usual.’ Missiles were launched, and everyone goes back to work the next day or the day after. That’s the response. A bus blows up. You get on a bus the next day and go to work. If terrorists stop us from living, they win.”
Ben-Dor, who has appeared on several episodes of the hit ABC show “Quantico,” said he supports freedom of speech but that some of the campus protesters had good intentions yet were largely uneducated.
“It makes me sad because these are the people next in line to run the country; the willful ignorance is so obvious,” he said. “Nobody wants to be educated. They just want to be heard. They are influenced by social media. It’s not only misinformation. They feel the need to take sides immediately, lest they be subject to some sort of social death. So they take sides, and they scream slogans they don’t understand because they feel like they have to say something, or silence is violence. You know what else is violence? Loud, uneducated opinions. They’re not bad people. These are people that want to be vocal about other people’s suffering and nobody should condemn them for that, but many are not educated about the topic.”
Aside from the Oct. 7 play, Ben-Dor had a brush with a star in recent years.
During the making of the Apple TV+ hit “WeCrashed” about Israeli entrepreneur and WeWork founder Adam Neumann, Ben-Dor got the call to work with star Jared Leto, who played Neumann. While he and “Shtisel” star Neta Riskin and a friend helped, Ben-Dor got a lot more time.
“For five months, I made sure he was Israeli and had the accent down,” Ben-Dor said. “He was great and nothing but nice. When he does an accent, he likes to surround himself with actors that speak in that accent to run lines. Because it was during COVID, the pool of Israeli actors was smaller. When we came to set, I had the chutzpah to say, ‘Hey man you need someone on set with you every day,’ and he was like, ‘Great!’ I was there from day one, running lines, giving notes, working not only on the accent but idioms, hand gestures … It was hard to shoot during COVID, but it was such an amazing honor to shadow this Oscar winner and see how he works. He is so talented and dedicated to his craft. He has a knack for accents.”
He said he relished a small part where he got to chastise Leto’s Neuman for not being more judicious.
Ben-Dor said he hopes for peace and security for all innocent people in the world and noted the play may come to colleges in the fall. What message does he hope people take away from “October 7: A Verbatim Play?” He said art may entertain but also educate and inspire.
“Israelis and Jews are not going anywhere despite people trying to force us to go somewhere,” Ben-Dor said.
Alan Zeitlin is a freelance writer.
