About the work
“Fake Jews” is an autofictional monologue by Noam Brusilovsky, who wrote the text and also directed its premiere. It opened on 29 January 2026 in the Box studio of the Deutsches Theater Berlin as a solo evening for Moritz Kienemann. The staged scenes are intercut with interviews in which eyewitnesses and experts talk about comparable real cases.
Plot
A first-person narrator poses as a Jew, gains prestige through it and sets himself up as a sharp-tongued critic of mainstream German society until his deception is exposed. Beside him stands a non-Jewish actor friend who has chosen to specialise in Jewish roles; one performer plays both of them as well as several minor characters. Satirical episodes, such as a visit to the Jewish Cemetery in Weißensee with a gesture recalling Willy Brandt’s Warsaw genuflection, gradually give way to a more serious look at the memory of the Holocaust.
Cultural significance
The play draws on real cases of invented Jewish biographies, including those of the journalist Fabian Wolff and the blogger Marie Sophie Hingst, and on the term Wilkomirski syndrome, named after Binjamin Wilkomirski. In doing so it asks why such impostures often go unchallenged for so long in German remembrance culture. Reviews in taz, nachtkritik.de and Jüdische Allgemeine praised its combination of wit and precise social observation.