Community theater veteran Doug Gladstone, of Saratoga County, is no stranger to antisemitism.

While employed as a movie theater usher five decades ago, the then teenager was approached by a fellow worker who told him that he didn’t “look or act Jewish.”

“I was taken aback,” he says. “I didn’t know how to respond.”

Fast forward to the present, and Gladstone can often be found on social media railing against events such as the October 7, 2023 massacre of Israeli civilians at a music festival and a nearby kibbutz, as well as the killing of 15 people during a Hanukkah celebration at a beach in Sydney, Australia last December.

He is preparing to expand people’s consciousness even more, as he is now in rehearsals to play the real-life journalist, author and screenwriter Ben Hecht in Ron Hutchinson’s Moonlight & Magnolias. The show, a madcap comedy about the drama that occurred behind-the-scenes during the making of Gone With the Wind, will be performed by Classic Theater Guild starting next month, on Thursday, April 23^rd,, at Congregation Beth Israel on Eastern Parkway.

The winner of the first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, as well as the writer of the acclaimed stage comedy The Front Page, Hecht, says Gladstone, helped inspire him to become a journalist.

“He had a huge influence on my career,” continues Gladstone. “And a lot of my own progressive views were formed due to him.”

A passionate civil rights activist who organized campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan, Hecht was also a Zionist who publicized the atrocities perpetrated against the Jewish people. For instance, in a February 1943 Reader’s Digest article entitled “Remember Us”, Hecht accurately predicted that the Holocaust would claim the lives of six million European Jews.