Vermont Conversation: Zephyr Teachout on theater, politics and being ‘willing to fight’

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Zephyr Teachout has blazed a high-profile path on state and national political stages. But lately, the 52-year-old law professor and politician has been spending her time on a tiny stage in Vermont, directing a play about the saga of Israelis and Palestinians.

Teachout, who grew up in Norwich, gained national attention in 2004 when she was director of internet organizing for former Gov. Howard Dean’s presidential campaign , helping to vault the small-state governor to briefly run at the front of the pack.

In 2014, Teachout ran for governor of New York against the powerful incumbent Andrew Cuomo, winning one-third of the vote ( Cuomo resigned in 2021 over sexual misconduct allegations). Two years later, Teachout ran for Congress. And, in 2018, she ran for attorney general of New York. She won the endorsement of the New York Times but lost to Letitia James, who later appointed Teachout as a special adviser on economic justice.

Teachout is a professor of law at Fordham Law School. She is the author of “Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom From Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.”

Far from the halls of power in Albany or the bright lights of Broadway, Teachout has maintained another passion: acting and directing at Unadilla Theater in Marshfield. When Unadilla founder Bill Blachly, who turned 100 this year, asked if she would direct the play “ Returning to Haifa ” this summer, Teachout quickly agreed.

“The more intensely one is involved in whatever it may be professionally and certainly involved in politics, the more that I seek and need art, whether that’s visual arts or music or theater as a way to be fully human, to experience both the joys and the griefs that we experience,” she said.

“Returning to Haifa” links two tragedies: the Nakba (“catastrophe)” experienced by Palestinians when more than 700,000 of them fled or were driven from their homes following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948, and the Holocaust , in which 6 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II. Some 140,000 Holocaust survivors moved to Israel, many of them into homes abruptly abandoned by Palestinians.

The play is based on a novella by Palestinian activist and writer Ghassan Kanafani , who was assassinated at the age of 36 in an operation by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. The story was adapted into a play by Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi. It was commissioned by the Public Theater in New York in 2016, but the production was canceled due to political pressure. It finally premiered in the United Kingdom.

“Returning to Haifa” depicts a Palestinian couple returning to Israel in 1967 and visiting their house and their son who they abandoned 20 years earlier in a terrified flight from Israeli forces. The play is described by the Guardian as “a poignant family drama, as a plea for Israeli-Palestinian understanding and as a warning of what will follow without some form of reconciliation.”

Teachout was moved to direct the play by a current catastrophe, Israel’s war in Gaza that has killed some 40,000 Palestinians , according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel invaded Gaza following the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas that killed more than 1,200 Israelis.

“It feels very important right now to celebrate Palestinian culture, to introduce people to great writers like Kanafani” who understood “the critical role that literature plays in tying together a community of people,” Teachout said.

On the political stage, Teachout offered insights about the special challenges that Vice President Kamala Harris and other women face when running for high office.

“It is harder to express anger as a woman and not be dismissed,” said the former gubernatorial candidate. “Men expressing anger on behalf of an angry public don’t get the same kind of scrutiny and, frankly, sometimes disdain or disgust that women expressing anger get.”

“You’ve noticed that Harris has chosen to run as a happy warrior,” she said. “If you’re in politics, you know these things are choices. It is also a choice that I made in my campaigns and that you see Elizabeth Warren making. There’s a lot more comfort with joyful women than angry women … Harris, as a Black woman in particular, faces extraordinary challenges, and she’s doing an extraordinary job not letting those challenges define her candidacy.”

Teachout credits Harris’ rise in the polls to the desire that people have “to see past the next two years, to see a collective future. What I think Harris is tapping into in the last few weeks is a sense that a future is possible. … We’re not stuck with these frankly ancient politicians. And I also think that is insufficient,” she said.

Teachout, who has been a leading scholar and critic of corporate monopolies, said Harris needs to “take on big power.”

People “think everybody’s in big money’s pockets. There’s no point to politics (so) why don’t we just cause chaos,” Teachout said. “There’s kind of a real nihilism to those who either don’t vote or decide to vote for Trump just out of a kind of irritation with what’s going on.”

Harris needs to show that she is “willing to fight, to actually make enemies … (and) take on corporate power,” Teachout said. “For Harris to beat Trump, really leaning into that populism is critical.”

Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont Conversation: Zephyr Teachout on theater, politics and being ‘willing to fight’ .