The Musical—Yes, Musical!—about the Rabin Assassination

If you’re jarred by the idea of a musical about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, try watching the iconic Israeli prime minister singing a duet with the man who murdered him, Yigal Amir.

Danny Paller, who wrote the music and lyrics to November 4, and Myra Noveck, who wrote the book, know the penultimate scene in their musical, set to debut on November 12 in Washington DC, will stir strong feelings. That’s the point.

“People do injustice to their cause when they think that people who oppose them, and radically oppose them politically, are either stupid or crazy,” Noveck tells me. “You don’t have to accept what the person did. You don’t have to like what the person did. I certainly don’t like what the person did, but it doesn’t do your side any good to just say, ‘I don’t see, I don’t hear.’”

The musical couples the conventions of the form—there are love songs, there’s humor, there’s dancing, there’s even a chorus of Shin Bet agents—in a bid to convey to present-day audiences how profoundly the night in 1995 when Amir shot Rabin after a peace rally in Tel Aviv changed history.

Paller, a songwriter, and Noveck, a retired journalism researcher and a writer of screenplays, each remember exactly where they were and what they were doing on November 4, 1995. What made the musical urgent, says Paller, is that a generation of Israelis and Americans do not grasp the meaning of the moment that the musical’s playbill says “changed the course of history.”

“It’s hard to be hopeful,” Paller says, because of the current war in Gaza and the wars that preceded it dating back to the collapse of the Oslo Israeli-Palestinian peace process after Rabin’s assassination. He recalled the reactions of Israeli highschoolers who saw an early Hebrew language version.

“We did it for young people, and they said, ‘Really?’” he said, referring to youthful amazement at a time when peace seemed at hand. “You get the broad brushstrokes [of Oslo] in school, but this tries to make it much more real.”

The play mixes real characters—among them Rabin’s wife, Leah, and his beloved granddaughter Noa Ben Artzi-Pelosoff, as well as Amir’s brother—with composite characters: Shoshi, a weathered and wise personal assistant to Rabin, and a young woman, Shalhevet, struggling with the attraction she feels for Amir.

Paller and Noveck started working on the musical in 2016 and grappled with how to relate the events of 1995 to contemporary times. An earlier cabaret version had the actors step out of their roles and extemporize their personal reminiscences of November 4. However, the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel and massacred close to 1,200 people, launching Israel’s longest war, made the need to reflect on the current moment all the more urgent.

“You can’t talk about Israel today without talking about what’s happened the last two years,” Noveck says.

At a reading in Washington in February, the playwrights had peripheral characters in the 1995 events reflect on how October 7 had changed them—including some who had moved to the right. In the first read-through of the current production last month, the script has Shoshi and Shalhevet meeting in a bomb shelter during a missile raid, recognizing each other, beginning to argue—and then leaping into each other’s arms at the sound of a boom.

Alexandra Aron, the director, told the playwrights the encounter didn’t work—it was confusing because the play was adding a plot development in the present that did not quite jibe with the events of 1995. So now, the characters will speak separately to the audience—and show that despite the initial effect of the war bringing people together, Israelis remain apart.

“At the beginning of the war, everybody was together, everybody was in it together,” Noveck says. “Where we are now, Shoshi is where she is and Shalhevet is where she is.”

The scene—Israelis apart—is an echo of how the play depicts the period leading up to the assassination. Rabin, who in real life has been advised by those close to him to take greater precautions in public as the national mood soured over the peace process, and Amir duet in a song about facing one’s mortality.

“Should I be afraid of death?” they both sing (Amir was certain he would be felled.) 

In program notes, Ari Roth, the founder of the Voices Festival, which is staging the play, lists the many artistic interpretations Rabin’s assassination has spawned, including concertos and plays. This play, writes Roth, who fathered Jewish theater in the capital when he ran Theater J from 1997-2014, is “the most compelling, dynamic, and provocative of all tellings of Rabin’s death that I’ve encountered because of its powerful, realistic focus on the collision between leader and assassin, with full dialectical combat embedded in its piercing lyrics.”

At both readings I attended, the penultimate scene, when Rabin joins Amir in a duet, was a discomfiting moment. I met the real Rabin and he was a curmudgeonly but kind man who was deeply interested in the lives of his interlocutors. If Amir had shot questions instead of bullets, he would have gotten a hearing. Noveck drew her portrait in part from a book by his adoring granddaughter, Ben-Artzi Pelosoff. 

But Amir was an assassin—a sexy one perhaps, per the play, but an assassin, a murderer of good.

And yet the play’s approach may be the necessary tonic to understand the current moment: Vilification and polarization has only intensified since 1995, in Israel and in the United States. The man whose refusal to condemn the incitement that propelled Amir—and who benefited with his election to the prime ministership six months later is still in that position, Noveck points out.

“The same person who was up on the balcony above Zion Square” when anti-Oslo protesters loudly denounced Rabin as a traitor and a Nazi “is the same person who never reprimands people when they diss the hostages and the hostage families,” she says, referring to right-wing attacks on critics of Benjamin Netanyahu’s October 7 war failures. “Same perp.”

Photos by Peggy Ryan.