Journal articles on the topic 'Jewish State Theatre'
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1
Pukelytė, Ina. "Reconstructing a Nomadic Network: Itineraries of Jewish Actors during the First Lithuanian Independence." Nordic Theatre Studies 27, no. 1 (May 12, 2015): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/nts.v27i1.24241.
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This article discusses the phenomenon of openness and its nomadic nature in the activities of Jewish actors performing in Kaunas during the first Lithuanian independence. Jewish theatre between the two world wars had an active and intense life in Kaunas. Two to four independent theatres existed at one time and international stars were often touring in Lithuania. Nevertheless, Lithuanian Jewish theatre life was never regarded by Lithuanian or European theatre society as significant since Jewish theatre never had sufficient ambition and resources to become such. On the one hand, Jewish theatre organized itself in a nomadic way, that is, Jewish actors and directors were constantly on the road, touring from one country to another. On the other hand, there was a tense competition between the local Jewish theatres both for subsidies and for audiences. This competition did not allow the Jewish community to create a theatre that could represent Jewish culture convincingly. Being a theatre of an ethnic minority, Jewish theatre did not enjoy the same attention from the state that was given to the Lithuanian National Theatre. The nomadic nature of the Jewish theatre is shown through the perspective of the concept of nomadic as developed by Deleuze and Guattari.
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Shem-Tov, Naphtaly. "Shimella Community Theatre of Israeli-Ethiopian Jews." New Theatre Quarterly 39, no. 3 (July 28, 2023): 223–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x23000131.
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Shimella (‘stork’ in Amharic) is an Israeli community theatre of Ethiopian Jews residing in Netanya and directed by Chen Elia. Shimella was founded in 2010, and has produced four different performances focusing on the Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Ethiopian Jews suffer from racism and discrimination in all areas of life, including housing, employment, education, and healthcare. These issues surfaced in Shimella’s performances, and the political aspect of Shimella’s performances therefore ranges from performing critical protest against the attitudes of the Israeli state and society toward Ethiopians, to a utopian performative moment, which emotionally and physically dramatizes the community’s desired future.
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Гамалей, С. Ю. "The History of Creating and Developing the National Jewish Theatre named for L. Kaganovich in the 1930s." Вестник Рязанского государственного университета имени С.А. Есенина, no. 3(72) (October 18, 2021): 27–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.37724/rsu.2021.72.3.003.
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В 1920-е годы в РСФСР начинается процесс развития национального искусства, который тесно переплетался с задачами национальной политики, проводимой в стране. Российская Федерация так же, как и советская власть, предоставляет всем гражданам обширные права и свободы. Однако Советское государство давало возможность всем народам, проживающим в тот период, развивать свое национальное искусство, создавать собственные театральные коллективы; именно этот опыт, на наш взгляд, следует использовать при проведении национальной политики в ХХI веке. Именно поэтому автор статьи исследует особенности развития театрального дела в Еврейской автономной области. Автор подробно изучает процесс создания и работы театрального коллектива Еврейского театра имени Л. Кагановича на протяжении 1930-х годов, уделяя особое внимание формированию актерской труппы, ее профессиональным успехам. Статья повествует о начальном периоде становления театра, когда в условиях переселенческой политики евреев на Дальний Восток начинается его формирование как профессионального коллектива. При этом автор отмечает, что актерский состав на протяжении всех лет работы оказывал поддержку всем учреждениям культуры автономии: организовывал самодеятельные кружки, участвовал в смотрах, осуществлял шефскую работу над частями Красной армии. В период массовых репрессией члены творческого коллектива подвергались арестам, но это не сломило творческий настрой актеров, их профессионализм продолжал расти. В заключении статьи автор приходит к выводу, что профессиональная деятельность Еврейского театра Биробиджана, его жизнь в условиях формирования и развития Еврейской автономной области стала отражением национальной политики советского руководства в отношении еврейской диаспоры в 1930-е годы. In the 1920s Soviet Russia witnessed rapid development of national art which was intricately connected with the national policy promoted by the Soviet government. Soviet Russia as well as the Russian Federation granted all its citizens ample rights and freedoms. The Soviet State enabled all peoples inhabiting its territories to develop their national art, to create national theatres. The author of the article believes that this experience is worthy and should define the national policy of the 21st century. Driven by this conviction, the author of the article analyzes the peculiarities of the development of the theatre in the Jewish Autonomous Region. The author focuses her attention on the development of the National Jewish Theatre named for L. Kaganovich in the 1930s paying special attention to the theatre staff and their achievements. The article tells about the initial stage of the theatre formation when due to the resettlement policy many Jewish actors were forced to move to the Far East. The author underlines that the actors of the theatre supported all the cultural establishments of the autonomous region by helping organize amateur dramatic societies, giving patronage to the Red Army. The author concludes that the professional development of the National Jewish Theatre of Birobidzhan was a reflection of the Jewish policy of the Soviet government in the 1930s.
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Michalak, Hubert. "Transmisje pamięci." Pamiętnik Teatralny 68, no. 3-4 (December 20, 2019): 213–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.36744/pt.14.
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The paper is dedicated to Powiedz, że jestem… (“Tell me that I am…”), one of the last productions directed by Jan Dorman (The State Drama Theatre in Wałbrzych, prem. June 16, 1985). It addresses the issue of memory, linking it to the theme of hiding Jews during World War II. Both these motifs were firmly inscribed in the production, and they referred to a fresh and almost unrecognized issue on Polish stages at the time of the premiere. By addressing the issue of various media of memory and several models of its stage representation, the text attempts to reconstruct both the director’s concept and the artistic shape of the production. And by pointing out the most important departures from Dorman’s previous art practices, it sketches the evolution of Dorman’s concept of his art. Invoking subsequent realisations of the director’s staging concept and the theme of The Jewish “Renaissance” Theatre operating in Wałbrzych (unknown to artists), as contexts, expands the issue of memory in the theatre through including multilateral, performative, functioning of this particular staging.
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Rokem, Freddie. "Ideology and Archetypal Patterns in the Israeli Theatre." Theatre Research International 13, no. 2 (1988): 122–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300014425.
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From a contemporary Israeli perspective there is a clearly discernable connection between the concrete expressions of the national theatrical culture and some of the most comprehensive and fundamental ideological assumptions of this society. These assumptions are primarily based on its Jewish culture and religion and the national movement of Zionism as it has developed ideologically as well as practically during the last century, in particular through the establishment of the state of Israel. This article will examine the expression of some of these ideological trends and developments in the Hebrew and Israeli theatrical culture from the early 19208 until the mid-1970s.
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Urian, Dan. "The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre—from Competition to Exploitation (1912–1990)." Theatre Research International 17, no. 1 (1992): 46–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300015601.
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The Arab, as presented in plays of the early days of settlement, is linked by his manual labour to the land of his birth. He might be primitive and his encounter with the chalutzim may be necessary to improve his situation and show him how the world has progressed, but he is also an example to be copied for his sheer work capability. He is seen as a powerful competitor with the Jewish work-force, due both to his ability to be content with little and to his forced acceptance of meagre wages. Towards the end of this period and for several decades afterwards, the Arab was pushed aside into the fringes of the labour market. Work that was previously thought by the Zionist pioneering ideology to be of utmost importance, was no longer considered as such. As occasionally the Arab image served as a reminder of an ideology of manual labour that no longer existed.The Israeli playwright is a representative of the beliefs and opinions of a particular group in Israeli society; mainly that of the western intelligentsia. Almost all of the playwrights mentioned in this article are from the ranks of the Labour Movement and Zionist tradition. Their attitude regarding Jewish labour and towards the Arabs who do the ‘dirty work’, derives from a yearning for standards and values that had formerly stood at the centre of education and debate for many prominent sectors of Jewish society. From the early 1950s, and particularly after the 1967 war, the ideology of Jewish labour, especially manual labour, became one of mere slogans, symbols, songs and folk dances, or as subject for study matter, but no longer an active component in the life of the Israeli Jewish citizen.From the beginning of the 1970s, but mainly towards the end of that period and continuing into the 1980s, the Israeli playwright saw the driving of the Arab work-force into despised jobs, under degrading conditions of exploitation, as a central cause for the unrest that led to the Palestinian uprising. The image of the exploited Arab was no longer an ideological, nostalgic reminder but, rather, a social time bomb that might explode at any time and fragment the Israeli social and economic structure. It is interesting to compare the reasoning given by the Jewish Israeli playwrights for the outbreak of the Intifada with an Arab-Israeli play staged in 1990 in Nazareth. In The Ninth Wave by Riad Massaraweh, although the playwright describes the labourers that line up daily in the Haifa ‘slave market’ as exploited, degraded and slave labourers, his main emphasis is on the Palestinian longing for national identity. Research too reveals that the nationalistic element and the state of the refugee camps are the most serious causes of the Intifada. Despite this, the Jewish Israeli playwright presents the economic factor as the important one. This discrepancy between the Israeli theatre and Palestinian reality, derives from the playwright's ignorance of, and lack of attempt to study the actuality of the Palestinian population in the occupied territories, as well as their ignorance of the conditions of daily life there. The playwright meets Palestinians in the local (Israeli) cafe or restaurant, on building sites and in other places where the Arabs work and where Jews are not willing to do so. He deals with the problems that bother him and with his target audience, and not necessarily with the problems that bother the Palestinians. However, the Jewish Israeli playwright nonetheless senses the indignity of their exploitation and the dangerous dependency of the Israeli economy on a hostile population, and he tries to express his reservations about this Israeli ‘work schedule’ when he takes refuge on occasion in ideals that no longer exist.
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Berek, Peter. "The Jew as Renaissance Man." Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1998): 128–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2901665.
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AbstractThe Jew available to be known in England in the 1590s is a Marrano - a covert figure whose identity is self-created, hard to discover, foreign, associated with novel or controversial enterprises like foreign trade or money-lending, and anxiety-producing. By and large, non-theatrical representations of Jewishness reveal less ambivalence than does Marlowe's Barabas. In the plays of Marlowe and then of Shakespeare, the Jew becomes a figure which enables the playwright to express and at the same time to condemn the impulse in both culture and theatre to treat selfhood and social role as a matter of choice. By becoming theatrical, the anxiety about identity and innovation implicit in the Marrano state gains explicitness and becomes available to the culture at large. Marlowe and Shakespeare play a central role in creating - not imitating - the frightening yet comic Jewish figure which haunts Western culture. But the immediate impact of their achievement is felt in the theatre, and is barely visible in non-theatrical discourse about Jews in the decades after their plays.
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Puga, Ana Elena. "TRANSLATION AND PERFORMANCE: A PREVIEW OF THEATRE SURVEY'S FIRST WORKING SESSION (NASHVILLE, NOVEMBER 2012)." Theatre Survey 53, no. 2 (August 28, 2012): 309–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557412000117.
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I recently translated and then served as dramaturge on the English-language world premiere of Patricia Suárez's Matchmaker (Casamentera), a contemporary Argentine play about the early twentieth-century sex trade in Jewish women imported from Eastern European villages to Buenos Aires brothels. Matchmaker was published in an anthology I edited, Spectacular Bodies, Dangerous Borders: Three New Latin American Plays, along with my translation of The Girls from the 3.5 Floppies (Las chicas del tres y media floppies) by the Mexican playwright Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (who goes by the acronym LEGOM) and Heather McKay's translation of Passport by the Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott. In February 2012, Matchmaker was staged in the Thurber Theatre at The Ohio State University. The production was directed by Lesley Ferris.
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Ben-Yehuda, Omri. "The Retribution of Identity: Colonial Politics in Fauda." AJS Review 44, no. 1 (April 2020): 1–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009419000862.
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In its first season, Israeli television thriller Fauda proclaimed an utter symmetry between Israel “proper” and its Occupied Territories, by humanizing Hamas militants and treating them as equals to the Israeli characters. Throughout the story the Jewish warrior's body becomes a site for the detonation of explosives and a potential vehicle for suicide bombings, in a false but intriguing reenactment of the trauma of the second intifada, which has been repressed in Israeli consciousness. In this unwitting manifestation of Jewish martyrdom, the façade of the rule of law in the State of Israel is dismantled in what seems like a religious battle between clans. The discourse of pain in the series suggests a stream of constant retribution in a vicious circle that can never historicize the allegedly eternal conflict and work through its traumatic residues. Nonetheless, this dynamic of retribution and martyrdom also informs a multilayered structure whereby the secular, modern Jew returns to his roots by engaging with Arabness in the theatre of mistaʿaravim: in becoming Arab he also becomes, finally, a Jew.
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Abramson, Glenda. "Israeli Drama and the Bible: Kings on the Stage." AJS Review 28, no. 1 (April 2004): 63–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009404000054.
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Drama is the most neglected genre within Hebrew cultural development. In fact, until shortly before the foundation of the State of Israel, few plays in Hebrew had been staged. Although a large number of works in dramatic form had been written, particularly in the nineteenth century, few of them were viable theatrical dramas. They fell into the categories of rhetoric and allegory, devoid of believable dramatis personae. There were some milestones along the way, such as Somi's Zahut Bedihuta de-Kiddushin (An Eloquent Marriage Farce, c. 1600), Luzzatto's Leyesharim tehilla (Praise for the Righteous, 1743), and some modern plays, but these were not sufficiently feasible for the establishment of a dramatic tradition. An important factor qualifying the late development of Hebrew drama was the language, for within the communities' diglossia throughout the ages, Hebrew was reserved for more elevated discourse than playacting. Moreover, Hebrew, the language of the sacred texts, was inadequate for the expression of everyday life. Nowhere in the diaspora was there a Hebrew-speaking audience; there was no folk life in Hebrew as there was in Yiddish. Also, the potential playwrights were faced with the problem of the divine imperative in Jewish history, which precludes anything like the theodicy that gave rise to classical tragedy. Other religious restrictions against certain forms of representation, together with the small value Jewish religious authorities traditionally placed on theatre for its own sake, were also crucial factors mitigating against the drama's development.
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SHEM-TOV, NAPHTALY. "Performing Iraqi-Jewish History on the Israeli Stage." Theatre Research International 44, no. 3 (October 2019): 248–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883319000294.
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The analysis of the following two Israeli plays is the focus of this article: Ghosts in the Cellar (Haifa Theatre, 1983) by Sami Michael, and The Father's Daughters (Hashahar Theatre, 2015) by Gilit Itzhaki. These plays deal with the Farhud – a pogrom which took place in Iraq in 1941, in which two hundred Iraqi Jews were massacred by an Iraqi nationalist mob. The Farhud has become a traumatic event in the memory of this Jewish community. Using the concept of ‘performing history’ as advanced by Freddie Rokem, I observe how these plays, as theatre of a marginalized group, engage in the production of memory and history as well as in the processing of grief. These plays present the Farhud and correspond with the Zionist narrative in two respects: (1) they present the traumatic historical event of these Middle Eastern Jews in the light of its disappearance in Zionist history, and (2) their performance includes Arab cultural and language elements of Iraqi-Jewish identity, and thus implicitly points out the complex situation of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
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Zer-Zion, Shelly. "Theater for Kindergarten Children in the Yishuv: Toward the Formation of an Eretz-Israeli Childhood." IMAGES 12, no. 1 (October 24, 2019): 70–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18718000-12340110.
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Abstract “The Children’s Theatre by the Kindergarten Teachers Center,” that was founded in 1928, was the first Hebrew repertory theatre exclusively addressing the audience of children attending kindergarten and the first grades of elementary school. This article explores how The Children’s Theater conveyed a set of performative practices that consolidated a habitus of Eretz-Israeli childhood. The theater articulated the embodied repertoire of Eretz-Israeli childhood and established it on two pillars. First, it epitomized the concept of an innocent and secure childhood. The world performed on the stage created a utopian notion of childhood. Second, it encouraged the children to participate in the world of adults, but in a way suited to their age and psychological needs. The ability of this theatre to create an enriching and a secure environment for children was deeply needed in the Jewish settlement of Palestine of the 1930’s and 1940’s, which was constituted of immigrants struggling to build a future in the land.
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LIPSHITZ, YAIR, and NAPHTALY SHEM-TOV. "‘Why Were Our Yemenite Brothers Insulted?’: Love as Strong as Death as a Prequel to Mizrahi Presence in Israeli Theatre." Theatre Research International 49, no. 1 (February 26, 2024): 50–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883323000366.
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The article traces the production and reception of Love as Strong as Death, a dramatization of the Song of Songs that was performed in Mandatory Palestine in the years 1940–42 by a group of Yemenite Jewish actors. We argue that the tensions between the actors’ amateur status and their image as embodying a long-lost Biblical heritage were emblematic of the inherent contradictions within the hegemonic Ashkenazi Zionist discourse and the Orientalist perception of the role of Yemenite Jews in it. By exploring both Yemenite and Ashkenazi voices in and around the production, we analyse how the stage, the theatre hall and the written press all served as contested sites regarding the participation of non-European Jews in Hebrew theatre and culture. In the paper's conclusion, we demonstrate how Love as Strong as Death anticipated later debates in Israeli theatre about the place of Mizrahi Jews on stage and in the auditorium.
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Greene, Jonah. "Jewish summer camp theatre and Sondheim, the Talmudic scholar." Studies in Musical Theatre 17, no. 3 (December 1, 2023): 263–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/smt_00139_1.
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This article explores how Jewish American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, in his musical theatre works, engaged in a distinctly Jewish lyrical style that resembles a Talmudic dialectic. The author argues that Sondheim’s argumentative, self-referential, quick-moving, pitter-patter lyrics and music, a writing style that values the performance of ambivalence and repeated questioning, resembles contemporary Jewish discourse as influenced by Talmudic dialogue. The author explores Sondheim’s work through a reflection of his experience piloting a new two-week musical theatre specialty programme at Ramah Darom, a Jewish summer camp in Clayton, Georgia, in July 2023. The programme, called Ramah Bamah (bamah is a Hebrew word that translates in this context to ‘stage’), aimed to teach campers valuable performance skills from professional theatre-makers, while simultaneously encouraging campers to explore their identities as Jewish artists. Ramah Bamah presented Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods JR. as its premiere production, as programme leaders used Jewish texts, thought and values to help campers connect emotionally and thematically to Sondheim’s play-text. This article considers the relationship between Jewish text study, Jewish education, storytelling, youth/amateur theatre-making and Stephen Sondheim.
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Bezarov, Oleksandr. "The documents on the history of the Sholom Aleichem State Jewish theater in the foundations of the State archives of the Chernivtsi region (1945-1950)." Scientific Papers of the Kamianets-Podilskyi National Ivan Ohiienko University. History 41 (October 2, 2023): 51–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.32626/2309-2254.2023-41.51-59.
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The purpose of the study is to analyze the content and nature of unpublished documents on the history of the Sholom Aleichem State Jewish Th eater, which are stored in the funds of the State Archives of the Chernivtsi Region. Th e research methodology is based on the principles of the concrete-historical approach, objectivity, comprehensiveness, and integrity, systematicity, as well as the use of the following methods – of analysis and synthesis, historical- genetic, historical-comparative, historical-typological, and problem-chronological. Th e scien- tifi c novelty is that, for the fi rst time in historiography, unpublished archival documents on the history of the Sholom Aleichem State Jewish Th eater from 1945 to 1950 have been circulated and analyzed. Th e main groups of documents are singled out, which refl ect the stages of forma- tion, development, and liquidation of the famous theater, namely: minutes of the meeting of the Th eater’s Artistic Council; posters of performances, annotations of plays, programs of con- cert performances of theater acting groups; acts of reception of theatrical performances; reports and information on the theater’s activities, orders and directives of the Arts Committee of the Soviet People’s Committee of the Ukrainian SSR, the Chernivtsi Regional Executive Committee, the theater directorate, in particular, on the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the theater and the organization of touring activities; information on calculation and payment of wages; theater profi ts; reports of the liquidation committee of the theater; act of documentary audit of the theater for 1949-1950 and other documents. Conclusions. It has been proven that these materials are an important historical source for the history of Jewish theatrical art. Th e Sholom Aleichem State Jewish Th eater turned out to be the last state Jewish theater (GOSET) that oper- ated on the territory of the USSR. It has been established that the “Chernivtsi” collection of docu- ments relates, fi rst of all, to the history of the Kyiv GOSET, whose staff did not fi nd themselves in Chernivtsi in 1945 of their own free will, but evidently enriched the cultural life of post-war Bukovyna with their talented creativity.
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Safran, G. "The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage." Common Knowledge 9, no. 2 (April 1, 2003): 347–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/0961754x-9-2-347-a.
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Goodman, Giora. "Censorship of Arab Cinema in the State of Israel, 1948-1967." Iyunim Multidisciplinary Studies in Israeli and Modern Jewish Society 39 (December 31, 2023): 199–224. http://dx.doi.org/10.51854/bguy-39a158.
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This article examines government censorship of Arab films in the first two decades of the State of Israel, through extensive archival use of documents of the Israeli Film and Theater Censorship Board. The state authorities had wanted to ban altogether the import of films made in Egypt, where the majority of Arab films were produced, but this was impossible due to the entertainment needs of the Arab minority in Israel, and of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries. The article sheds light on the government's efforts to restrict as much as possible the showing of Arab films and censor their content. The censorship's dual purpose was to prevent Arab films from awakening the national and political consciousness of the Arabs living in Israel, and to distance Jewish immigrants from their Arab culture, in order to promote their assimilation into hegemonic Israeli culture. However, the censorship's attempts at political control over Arabs and cultural control over Jews was doomed to failure due to the emergence of a new means of communication and entertainment in the Middle East – television. This ended the cinema theaters' monopoly over the consumption of Arab films, and thus the Film and Theater Censorship Board's ability to censor them.
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Goodman, Karen. "Synthesis in Motion." Experiment 20, no. 1 (October 27, 2014): 86–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2211730x-12341260.
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This paper discusses the importance of Russian-born choreographer, theatre director, and teacher Benjamin Zemach (1901-1997) to Los Angeles. It contextualizes the sustained influences of his Jewish heritage, his training with Stanislavsky and Vakhtangov in the Habima Theatre, Russian dance and theatre synthesis and early American modern dance. The article focuses on his work in Los Angeles during two different periods of American culture and politics preceding and following World War ii (1931-35 and 1946-71), examining closely his contributions to Los Angeles Jewish and mainstream dance and theatre through an analysis of his choreographies for the stage and film as well as his teaching methodologies.
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Grün, Lili. "To the Theatre!" Scenario: A Journal of Performative Teaching, Learning, Research X, no. 2 (July 1, 2016): 1–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/scenario.10.2.1.
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The rubric Texts around Theatre features historical and contemporary cross-cultural and culture-specific perspectives on theatre – unexpectedly funky, unusually enthralling, disturbingly fascinating. https://www.aviva-verlag.de/autor-innen-co/lili-gr%C3%BCn/ Young Loni Holl, the protagonist in Lili Grün’s autobiographical novel, desires to become an actress. Only the theatre gives Loni the feeling of escape from her boring day to day life. She pursues her goal with determination, and a theatre engagement in the province seems to be the long-awaited chance for her debut. She straddles rehearsals, performances and private life; learning her lines, paying her rent, and allaying her hunger. The following excerpt from Grün’s novel , first published in 1935, traces Loni’s first steps on the stage that means the world to her. Apart from Zum Theater, Lili Grün also wrote the cabaret novel Herz über Bord (now in a new edition as Alles ist Jazz) in 1993. Mädchenhimmel, a collection of poems and stories was first published in 2014. Her novel Junge Bürokraft übernimmt auch andere Arbeit ..., first published 1936/37 in the newspaper “Der Wiener Tag”, was issued in book format in 2016 (all edited by Anke Heimberg). As a Jewish author, Lili Grün was not allowed to publish after 1938. In 1942, she ...
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Hein, Nina. "The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (review)." Theatre Journal 54, no. 1 (2002): 178–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tj.2002.0017.
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Shternshis, Anna. "The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (review)." Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 3 (2007): 116–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jqr.2007.0050.
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Nakhimovsky, Alice S. "The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage (review)." Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 22, no. 4 (2004): 176–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sho.2004.0105.
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Lipshitz, Yair. "Biblical Shakespeare: King Lear as Job on the Hebrew Stage." New Theatre Quarterly 31, no. 4 (October 9, 2015): 359–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x15000664.
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Comparisons between King Lear and the biblical Book of Job have become commonplace in scholarship. This paper traces the impact of the Lear–Job connection on the staging and reception of Shakespeare’s play in Hebrew theatre. Due to this connection, King Lear was put within the orbit of a central cultural endeavour for Zionism: the re-appropriation of the Hebrew Bible for the formation of a new national identity. In the mid-twentieth century, the play appealed to directors who searched for Hebrew ‘biblical’ theatre, and a web of intertextual allusions in the press tied Shakespeare’s tragedy to the Book of Job and to rabbinic interpretations of it. However, the equivocal position held by Job within the Zionist imagination undermined the place of King Lear as well. Ultimately, the two were intertwined in the politics of their reception in Hebrew theatre. Yair Lipshitz is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Theatre Arts in Tel Aviv University. In his research, he explores the various intersections between theatre, performance, and Jewish religious traditions. He is the author of two books in Hebrew: The Holy Tongue, Comedy’s Version (Bar Ilan University Press, 2010) and Embodied Tradition: Theatrical Performances of Jewish Texts (forthcoming).
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Malkin, Jeanette R., and Eckart Voigts. "Wrestling with Shylock." European Judaism 51, no. 2 (September 1, 2018): 175–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2018.510224.
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Abstract How does Shakespeare’s ambivalent character Shylock affect British theatre artists of Jewish heritage today? Since the 1970s, stage adaptations of The Merchant by British Jewish directors and actors have struggled to glean an interpretation that would make The Merchant relevant or palatable for a post-Shoah generation. This article has a double focus: we discuss the difference between the adaptations of the older generation – Arnold Wesker’s character rewriting in The Merchant (1976) and Charles Marowitz’s deconstruction in Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) – and the contemporary revision in Julia Pascal’s 2008 The Shylock Play. Secondly, we focus on the reaction of contemporary Jewish theatre artists in Britain to the centrality of Shylock as the canonical figure of the Jew in Britain. We asked a number of contemporary British Jewish theatre artists – from Tom Stoppard to Samantha Ellis – about their personal relationship to Shylock and we present a digest of their responses.
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Malkin, Jeanette R., and Eckart Voigts. "Wrestling with Shylock." European Judaism 51, no. 2 (September 1, 2018): 175–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.3167/ej.2017.510224.
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How does Shakespeare’s ambivalent character Shylock affect British theatre artists of Jewish heritage today? Since the 1970s, stage adaptations of The Merchant by British Jewish directors and actors have struggled to glean an interpretation that would make The Merchant relevant or palatable for a post-Shoah generation. This article has a double focus: we discuss the difference between the adaptations of the older generation – Arnold Wesker’s character rewriting in The Merchant (1976) and Charles Marowitz’s deconstruction in Variations on the Merchant of Venice (1977) – and the contemporary revision in Julia Pascal’s 2008 The Shylock Play. Secondly, we focus on the reaction of contemporary Jewish theatre artists in Britain to the centrality of Shylock as the canonical figure of the Jew in Britain. We asked a number of contemporary British Jewish theatre artists – from Tom Stoppard to Samantha Ellis – about their personal relationship to Shylock and we present a digest of their responses.
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Veidlinger, Jeffrey. "Let's Perform a Miracle: The Soviet Yiddish State Theater in the 1920s." Slavic Review 57, no. 2 (1998): 372–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2501855.
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The history of the Soviet Yiddish State Theater (Gosudarstvennyi evreiskii teatr, or Goset) provides an illuminating glimpse into the life of Jewish entertainers and the position of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. While Solomon Mikhoels, the theater's star actor and director from 1929 until 1949, is well known for his role in chairing the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during World War II, and for becoming the first victim of Stalin's anti-Semitic purges with his 1948 execution, little research has been conducted on the theater to which he dedicated his life. Art and theater historians have evaluated the theater's aesthetic approach to selected productions, and Mikhoels's contemporaries have provided anecdotal glimpses into that artist's life by writing biographies of him, but there has not yet been an attempt to assess the theater's relationship to the state during its heyday or to place the theater within the context of Soviet culture of the 1920s.
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Gamalei, Sofya Yu. "The Creative Life of E. L. Gelfand — Actor And Director of the Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater Named After L. Kaganovich." Izvestia Ural Federal University Journal Series 1. Issues in Education, Science and Culture 29, no. 3 (2023): 89–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/izv1.2023.29.3.050.
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The relevance of the research topic is due to the specifics of cultural policy implemented in the Russian Federation, according to which culture has been elevated to the rank of national priorities and recognized as a guarantor of the preservation of single cultural space and territorial integrity of the Russian Federation. The modern reality cannot ignore historical experience, which is why the purpose of the article was to study the work of the actor and director of the Birobidzhan State Jewish Theater named after L. Kaganovich — E. L. Gelfand. By recreating the history of the functioning of the Birobidzhan Jewish Theater in the 1930s and 1940s, — when E. Gelfand worked as an actor and director, the author of the article, based on archival documents, revealed some facts of Yefim Lvovich’s biography, the peculiarities of his creative and sociopolitical life. The author comes to the conclusion that the life of actor E. Gelfand was inextricably connected with the Birobidzhan Jewish Theater, and his work there contributed to the formation of his own creative style.
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Zer-Zion, Shelly. "The Shtetl in the Hebrew Theatre of Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s." New Theatre Quarterly 36, no. 2 (May 2020): 177–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x20000330.
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During the 1930s, the two Hebrew repertoire theatre companies in Palestine – the Habima and the Ohel – performed a large corpus of plays dealing with the landscapes of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl. Their fascination with the shtetl is surprising, considering the fact that these two companies were deeply committed to the Zionist project, whose ethos was building a new society in Eretz-Israel and negating the diasporic condition of Jewish existence. This article explores the landscapes of the shtetl as they were presented on the Hebrew stage of the 1930s and analyzes their aesthetic and cultural meaning for their audiences at that time. It shows that the shtetl plays formed a memory landscape that served the formation of a modern, consolidated, ethnic Jewish collective in Palestine, which shared a unified narrative of its past, as well as national aspirations for the future. Shelly Zer-Zion is a lecturer of theatre at the University of Haifa and was previously a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar at New York University. Her recent publications include Habima in Berlin: The Institutionalization of a Zionist Theatre (Magness Press, 2015), and her research is currently supported by the Israeli Science Foundation.
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Dąbrowska, Agata. "Żydowskie aktorki z Polski w rolach szekspirowskich w teatrze jidysz." Studia Judaica, no. 2 (48) (2021): 343–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.4467/24500100stj.21.015.15070.
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Jewish Actresses From Poland in Shakespearean Roles In the Yiddish Theater The article aims at analyzing the role played by Jewish actresses in the development of the Shakespearean Yiddish theater. The paper includes the profiles of artists coming from Poland and/or working in the Polish lands: Bertha Kalisch, Miriam Orleska, and Ester Goldenberg, who contributed to popularization of Shakespeare’s works among the Jewish community. Moreover, the article illustrates their contribution to the changes in the perception of Jewish theater from the “jargon drama” enterprise to an ambitious cultural institution with a Shakespearean repertoire. Among those discussed are the characters of Hamlet performed by Kalisch, Portia (The Merchant of Venice) played by Orleska, Jessica (The Merchant of Venice), and Ariel (The Tempest) interpreted by Goldenberg, and their assessment. The reception of these stage creations of Shakespearean heroes is analyzed on the basis of press materials published in daily newspapers and weeklies in Yiddish, Polish, and English. Some academic studies on the premieres of Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest with participation of Jewish female artists have already been conducted, but their authors did not analyze the roles performed by those actresses and did not refer to the sources in Yiddish at all. The article discusses not only the artistic activities of Kalisch, Orleska, and Goldenberg, but also attempts to analyze the reception of the characters created by the latter two artists from the perspective of the social and political relations in the Second Polish Republic. Moreover, efforts were made to show that Jewish actresses, by impersonating heroines and heroes of Shakespeare’s plays, proved with their style of acting, professional preparation, and understanding of the nuances of the performed characters that Yiddish theater definitely deserved to be called a temple of art. Their creations became an inherent part of the history of Jewish, and thus the world’s Shakespearean theater.
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Cieślak, Agnieszka. "Bronisław Mirski - Polish Music Director of the Silent Film Era1." Musicology Today 17, no. 1 (December 1, 2020): 72–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/muso-2020-0006.
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Abstract Bronisław Mirski (b. 1887 as Moszkowicz in Żyrardów near Warsaw, Poland – d. 1927 in El Paso, Texas) belongs to the substantial group of Polish émigré artists of Jewish origin. A violinist and conductor educated in Europe, he permanently settled in the United States at the end of 1914 under the name of Nek Mirskey and soon began working as a music director in movie theatres. He was in charge of the musical settings for elaborate artistic programmes composed of silent films as well as music and stage attractions. His first widely acclaimed shows were presented at the Metropolitan Theatre of Harry M. Crandall's chain in Washington, D.C. Based primarily on the American press of 1921–23, this article discusses Mirski's work methods and his involvement in improving the quality of live musical accompaniment for silent films. The work that he continued till the end of his life places him among the foremost musicians of the silent film era.
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Weiner, Amir. "Reviews of Books:The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage Jeffrey Veidlinger." American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (April 2003): 607–9. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/533387.
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Jay, Jeff. "Spectacle, Stage-Craft, and the Tragic in Philo’s In Flaccum." Journal of Ancient Judaism 8, no. 2 (May 19, 2017): 222–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.30965/21967954-00802007.
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This article provides a literary analysis of how references to spectacle and stage-craft function in Philo’s In Flaccum, which is a valuable text for understanding Philo’s complex and seemingly contradictory attitudes toward the theater, stage-craft, and drama. After marching Jews into the theater of Alexandria for punishment during the pogrom, Flaccus becomes a spectacle himself when Philo portrays Flaccus’s deportation to exile as a procession. By staging an elaborate textual spectacle starring the deposed Flaccus, Philo exploits the well-attested punitive dimension of spectacles. Through exhibition he is able to maximize justice, comfort the Jewish victims, and issue a deterrent to future powerholders over Jews. Philo, moreover, imbues the narrative of Flaccus’s demise with an overriding sense of tragedy by eliciting several of tragedy’s motifs and moods, including reversal, revenge, recognition, lamentation, and emotionalism. This elicits sympathy for Flaccus, which reinforces the warning that his plight could be the plight of any Roman ruler, each of whom must decide how like or unlike Flaccus he will govern. Philo thus shows himself to be deeply acculturated in the communicative dynamics of the spectacles and, through these references, is able to craft his own complex textual display. He thus participates in spectacle-creation himself, and this allows him to comfort and defend his people and speak powerfully back to leading power holders.
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Irchak, Iryna. "Commemoration of Solomon Mikhoels in 1948 (in the light of the materials of the newspaper «Eynikayt»)." Ethnic History of European Nations, no. 69 (2023): 123–29. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2518-1270.2023.69.15.
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The article highlights the measures taken and carried out to honor the memory of Solomon Mikhoels in 1948. This happened in the context of the Soviet leadership’s position of expectation regarding the liquidation of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee and the deployment of the struggle against «rootless cosmopolitanism». The basis of the research was the issues of the newspaper «Eynikayt», which were published throughout 1948 until the closing of the newspaper’s editorial office on November 20 (now copies of the newspaper are kept in particular in the funds of the Department of the Jewish Foundation of the Manuscript Institute of the National Library of Ukraine named after V. I. Vernadsky). It was found that the initiative for planning and implementing these events belonged to both the authorities and representatives of the Jewish public, who were connected to Solomon Mikhoels by friendly and professional ties. The latter’s motives should be explained by the desire to honor the memory of a loved one. Instead, it is suggested that the Soviet leadership could thus pursue the goal of dispelling possible suspicions of involvement in the man’s murder. The measures mentioned above included the payment of one-time financial support to the artist’s family members; granting the name of Mikhoels to the Moscow State Jewish Theater, a school that functioned at the theater and cultural center in the city of Birobidzhan; establishment of scholarships named after the deceased for students of the State Institute of Theater Arts named after A. V. Lunacharsky and the Moscow Jewish Theater School; a lengthy article by Itsik Fefer dedicated to the memory of Mikhoels; publication of a book in memory of the man; memorial evenings, «Mikhoels-lectures», the creation of a sculpture of an artist by a graduate of the Repin Institute of the Academy of Arts of the USSR. The article defines the open issue of the payment of the scholarships declared in the newspaper’s publications to the recipients of education at two educational institutions and the pension of Mikhoels’ daughter Nina as measures initiated by the authorities.
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McAllister, Lucy, Siwaporn Hiranput, and Paul Devakar Yesudian. "H19 Not only a finder of ‘solutions’: Max Jessner, Holocaust survivor and discoverer of Jessner–Kanof lymphocytic infiltrate." British Journal of Dermatology 191, Supplement_1 (June 28, 2024): i173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bjd/ljae090.367.
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Abstract Max Jessner’s name is renowned for his codiscovery of Jessner–Kanof disease and his eponymous peel. However, unknown to many, Jessner faced many uncertainties in his lifetime and lived in a frequent state of movement. Max Jessner read medicine at the universities of Munich and Königsberg (now Kaliningrad). After graduation, he trained in dermatology clinics under Albert Neisser in Breslau (now Wroclaw) before moving to Bern, Switzerland to become assistant to Joseph Jadassohn from 1912 to 1914. Like his father, dermatologist Samuel Jessner, Max Jessner initially developed his specialism in the studies of syphilis, namely through an expedition to Buryat-Mongolia, to study the effect of salvarsan, an antisyphilitic agent. On his return in 1920, he moved to the University of Breslau, where he continued to work alongside Jadassohn as head of the dermatology department. Due to growing anti-Semitism in Europe, Jessner’s resignation was forced just 4 years later. He was permitted to emigrate to Switzerland but ultimately evaded persecution by leaving Europe and continuing a career in New York, like many other European dermatologists of Jewish descent facing oppression during the Third Reich. In the USA, Jessner lived in a tight-knit community socializing with other dermatologists including Hans Biberstein. Arguably Jessner’s greatest accomplishment was achieved in 1953 while working at the New York Skin and Cancer unit, with the description of Jessner–Kanof lymphocytic infiltrate, a photosensitive lymphocytic disorder now believed to be on the same disease spectrum as lupus tumidus. In the same decade, Jessner published his seminal paper on his self-named solution, an augmented formula of a well-known peel containing lactic acid, salicylic acid and resorcinol. The modified form is a tolerable and effective agent for hyperkeratotic disorders and remains popular in the treatment of acne scarring, pigmentation and rhytides. Max Jessner was born on 2 November 1887, in Slupsk, Poland. In 1971 he returned to Europe, where he spent much of his retirement. Jessner died in Switzerland at age 91. Max Jessner was survived by his wife Marianne, and children Peter and Sabine Jessner. His only sibling, Fritz Jessner, was a theatre director in Boston. Jessner’s esteemed career, his contribution to the field of dermatology and his resilience to continue in his profession despite many major obstacles will be remembered for years to come.
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Lofton, Kathryn. "Pausing on a Sunday: Sondheim and the Composition of the Secular in the American Musical." Modern Drama 65, no. 3 (October 1, 2022): 355–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/md.65-3-1199.
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The abundance of Bible story–based plots and preponderance of Jewish lyricists in musical theatre suggests religion should play a central role in its study. Yet religion is not a major theme in musical theatre criticism. This article suggests this silence is a symptomatic forgetfulness of the default secular operative in American musical theatre and its analysts in theatre studies. Focusing on Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) as an artist of particular accomplishment within the raced, gendered, and religious aesthetic of the American musical’s secularism, it examines “Sunday,” the Act One closer to Sunday in the Park with George (1984), as a climax of such expression. “Sunday” is an instruction manual on what the secular is, conveying in its lyrics, compositional location, and author’s autobiography the story of religion’s hiddenness in the American musical. Sondheim’s “Sunday” is a way to see how musical theatre regulates religion on stage.
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Elmaliach, Tal. "Jewish Radicals: Zionism Confronts the New Left, 1967–1973 A Comparative Look: Introduction." Hebrew Union College Annual 93 (June 1, 2023): 187–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.15650/hebruniocollannu.93.2022/0187.
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The identity crisis that many Jewish radicals in the West grappled with in the 1960s and early 1970s was the subject of Sol Stern’s essay “My Jewish Problem – and Ours,” which appeared in the August 1971 issue of Ramparts, one of the most important organs of the American New Left.1 Stern, a key New Left activist and a former editor of the magazine, pointed to a paradox at the root of this crisis. Classical Marxism viewed Jewish nationalism as diametrically opposed to Marxist ideology. Nonetheless, in the wake of the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel, the global Left supported the Jewish national cause. This support was, however, short-lived. It was shaken first by Israel’s collusion with Britain and France during the Suez crisis of 1956. The escalation of the Israeli-Arab conflict in the second half of the 1960s then completed the global Left’s turn against Israel.2 Stern and his Jewish comrades consequently found themselves torn between their allegiance to the New Left and their continued support for Israel, sustained by their conviction that the Jewish state had faced a deadly threat from its enemies in 1967. Following a series of aggressive military and diplomatic moves by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser during the tense early months of that year, war broke out on June 5 and ended six days later in a decisive and unanticipated Israeli victory. Israel captured large swathes of Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian territory, most consequentially the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas densely populated by Palestinian Arabs, including many who had become refugees just nineteen years earlier in the war of 1948. Most Jews, and many in the Israeli leadership, viewed these two areas as part of the Jewish birthright and saw their capture as the liberation of territories that justly belonged to the Jewish people and state. While the Jewish members of the New Left believed that Israel should relinquish the West Bank and Gaza Strip and permit them to become an independent Palestinian Arab state, they maintained that Israel had captured them in a war of self-defense. As they saw it, Israel’s astonishing victory was the triumph of a country with a strong socialist tradition against the forces of reaction. Stern maintained that the West’s Jewish leftists found themselves facing a new edition of the classic Jewish Question – to integrate into the modern world, they were expected to divest themselves of their particularist identity and adopt exclusively universal values. This volume examines the social, political, and ideological manifestations of this resurgence of that dilemma. Each article focuses on how the issue played out in a particular country – the United States, France, Argentina, and Israel – between 1967 and 1973, when the drama reached its climax. In each of these places, the New Left attacked Israel and pro-Zionists activists reacted, leading to internal tensions on each side. University campuses emerged as the main theater of action. In tracing these confrontations, this collection casts new light on the difficulties faced by experience of young Jewish radicals struggling to integrate their particularist ethnic sentiments with their socialist universal values. The conflict that followed the Six-Day War can, however, only be understood against the background of the relationship between the Jews and the Left prior to 1967.
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Gilula, Dwora. "The First Greek Drama on the Hebrew Stage: Tyrone Guthrie's Oedipus Rex at the Habima." Theatre Research International 13, no. 2 (1988): 131–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0307883300014437.
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On the Hebrew Stage, Greek and Roman drama was never a first priority, The Habima Theatre, from its inception in 1917 to the present day, staged only six classical productions (out of more than four hundred), the Cameri Theatre – four, the Haifa Municipal Theatre – five, the Ohel theatre, in all of its forty-four years of activity (1925–69), although it staged 163 plays, never found the need or drive to produce a Greek or a Roman drama, and the young Beer-Sheba Theatre, the last addition to Israel's theatrical establishment, although daring and innovative, has yet to venture into the classical world. The reasons are not far to seek, and there are weighty local reasons in addition to the general cultural factors, which have contributed to the scarcity of classical drama productions. Hellenism and Hellenization, according to the view held even today by some educated and secular Israelis, are not neutral entities. The terms themselves are polemic, connote cultural assimilation, and stand for departure from national Jewish values and the forfeit of cultural originality and independence. From the times of the Hebrew Enlightenment movement, however, classical languages and culture became an integral part of the curriculum of Jewish studies even in religious institutions of higher learning, such as the Bar-Ilan University. On the other hand, as a reaction to the classical culture becoming an embodiment of secular, anti-clerical Zionist renaissance, the extreme Orthodox establishment in contemporary Israel has continued to treat it as a dangerous desecration and even extended the derogatory use of the term ‘Hellenization’ to cover the entire Western cultural influence. As a result until today classical literature has only a marginal place in the high-schools' curriculum, it is not an immediate, and certainly not the most important source from which Hebrew writers and playwrights draw their inspiration, and even well educated spectators have at best only a very superficial knowledge of the classical heritage. The few classical plays produced on the Hebrew stage were chosen at random, chiefly because leading or popular directors insisted on directing a certain play, or because a play, which achieved success in Europe, was transplanted lock, stock and barrel to Israel, sometimes together with its director.
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Rovit, Rebecca. "An Artistic Mission in Nazi Berlin: The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre as Sanctuary." Theatre Survey 35, no. 2 (November 1994): 5–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557400002751.
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These remarks made by the actor, Fritz Kortner, stem from a 1932 book in which the leading stage performers of the Weimar Republic portray themselves in photographs and through their own words. In response to the editor's questions, Kortner—among other artists—analyzes his role as an actor within Germany's greater cultural and historical context, linking the crisis in theatre to existent economic and intellectual crises. Given the unstable socio-economic situation at the end of the Weimar Republic, the cultural years ahead looked particularly grim. The actor's commentary reveals the vulnerable situation of German theatre in a country on the brink of dictatorship.
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Iyengar, Sujata. "Queen of Egypt and Queen of the Bey-Hive: Sophie Okonedo's Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018)." Shakespeare Bulletin 41, no. 2 (June 2023): 201–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/shb.2023.a910439.
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Abstract: Combining the methods of traditional theater history with semiotics and digital cultural studies, this article focuses particularly on Simon Godwin's production of Antony and Cleopatra at the National Theatre (2018) and on the avowed inspiration of the Nigerian-Jewish-descended British actress Sophie Okonedo by the world-famous vocalist, digital producer, and media celebrity Beyoncé Knowles-Carter (usually known simply as Beyoncé). Godwin's production carefully used a multiethnic cast and placed particular emphasis upon the relationship between Cleopatra and other women, both allies and enemies, in part by strategically reassigning Dolabella's lines to Octavia and thus creating an encounter between Cleopatra and Octavia that never happens in the Folio text. The article speculates that using allusions to Beyoncé out of context (away from the rich intertext of the film Lemonade [2016], for example, and away from transnational Black feminist debate) and to a majority-white British audience membership risked diluting Beyoncé's nuanced and politicized commentary—and, perhaps, diminished the nuanced treatment of labor and gender in Shakespeare's play. The investigation concludes, however, with a reflection upon the pros and cons—for artists and for audiences—of foregrounding digital subcultures in this way on stage and in academia.
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Walden, Joshua S. "The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139, no. 1 (2014): 89–136. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2014.886428.
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ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.
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Lev-Aladgem, Shulamith. "Bare Theatre of a Bare Life: a Community-Based Project in Jaffa." New Theatre Quarterly 33, no. 2 (April 12, 2017): 113–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x17000033.
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In this article Shulamith Lev-Aladgem focuses on The Bride from the Sea, a community performance by three young Israeli-Palestinian mothers, presented in a sand box in a multi-functional kindergarten in Jaffa in 2008. From the beginning of the creative process, the Jewish facilitator and the performers had to struggle to overcome the various barriers erected by the intricate, oppressive daily life of the young Palestinian women. They eventually managed to perform a ‘short, thin performance’, which, despite resembling a misperformance, had an emotional and even exceptional effect on the audience. This performance is examined as a special kind of women-based community theatre, termed here ‘the bare theatre’, to indicate a form that articulates the bare daily life of women trapped between internal and external oppressive power regimes. Shulamith Lev-Aladgem is chair of the Theatre Arts Department at Tel Aviv University, a trained actress, and a community-based theatre practitioner. Her recent publications include Theatre in Co-Communities: Articulating Power (2010) and Standing Front Stage: Resistance, Celebration, and Subversion in Israeli Community-Based Theatre (2010), as well as articles in Research in Drama Education and Israeli Sociology.
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Abdulameer NAYYEF ALHUDEEB, Faeza. "THE IMAGE OF JERUSALEM IN HEBREW CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: THE PLAY (JERUSALEM TO ME) AS A MODEL." International Journal of Education and Language Studies 03, no. 01 (March 1, 2022): 58–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.47832/2791-9323.1-3.5.
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The Zionist movement, in all its stages, relied on Hebrew literature in order to achieve its aggressive and colonial goals. The celebration of Hebrew literature, in its various expressive and poetic forms, was a celebration of describing the conditions of the Jews, and directing them to emigrate to Palestine. Hebrew education books at various school levels described many Zionist concepts and in accordance with smart educational policies. Likewise, Hebrew literature directed at children played an important and vital role that differs from the rest of other literatures, as it carried with it Zionist ideological orientations according to ideological and political ideas and thus succeeded in creating children of a nature. Especially, Jewish writers focused on raising children through literature and focused on important historical issues and special educational trends. All this led to the success of the Zionist project. Zionism began caring for the Jewish child from the beginning, as it issued newspapers for children next to public libraries, and the movement began to revive the Hebrew language and enrich Hebrew children's literature from 1890-1891. Many Hebrew works directed to children have appeared, including story, poetry, and drama. In 1893, the first Hebrew magazine directed at children was published, entitled ( ולם קטן) (a small world). The Zionist movement did not neglect those who direct and take care of children’s literature because the child is the first building block of the state. Therefore, it placed the Jewish child within the framework of its project to accommodate the various Jewish immigrations to Palestine and the production of Hebrew children's literature. With the revival of the Hebrew language at the end of the nineteenth century and the increase of the Zionist presence in Palestine, it became one of the goals of Zionism to make the Hebrew language a language of dialogue between children and to consolidate the values of secular Zionism. One of these methods was to stage theatrical performances in the Hebrew language in front of young children. In this research, I will deal with the play (Jerusalem is mine) by the writer Galia Yei, as this play is concerned with Jewish assimilation in Jerusalem and linking the past with the present. And the Hebrew theater tried to prove the Jewishness of Jerusalem through historical events
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Block, Geoffrey. ""Reading Musicals": Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004)." Journal of Musicology 21, no. 4 (2004): 579–600. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2004.21.4.579.
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Andrea Most's Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical studies eight musicals (The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I) in an effort to explore "how first- and second-generation American Jewish writers, composers, and performers used the theater to fashion their own identities as Americans."Most offers imaginative and often insightful sociological readings of musical librettos, lyrics, even stage directions, but virtually ignores music. That music can sometimes elucidate or contradict an exclusively social or literary reading may be seen, for example, in Emile de Becque's immobility at the end of "Some Enchanted Evening." In other cases, when the social assimilation of Jewish characters is revealed to be a musical one as well, music can support Most's argument. The problem exemplified by writings such as Most's-the distortions and misreadings that may result from a social history that does not engage music-may be seen in the broader context of Broadway and opera scholarship. Lessons to be learned from studying the musical Show Boat and the works of Sondheim point to the need for scholars and critics to consider how the music in musicals might convey social meanings, intellectual content, and dramatic ideas beyond words, stories, and stage directions.
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Lewkowicz-Shenholz, Lior Ester. "In pursuit of the rejected "Jew from the Golah”. On life and works of dr. Jacob (Kobi) Weitzner." LUD Organ Polskiego Towarzystwa Ludoznawczego i Komitetu Nauk Etnologicznych PAN 107 (November 10, 2023): 274–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.12775/lud107.2023.10.
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Since the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 everything related to the Diaspora (“Golah”) such as culture, language, or mentality was considered despicable and Israelis tried to keep away from it. Dr. Jacob (Kobi) Weitzner a writer, playwright and Yiddish theater director. This article is not about his academic achievements or artistic works, but his seminal activity for the preservation of Jewish culture in the Diaspora.
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Caplan, Debra. "Nomadic Chutzpah: The Vilna Troupe's Transnational Yiddish Theatre Paradigm, 1915–1935." Theatre Survey 55, no. 3 (August 18, 2014): 296–317. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040557414000325.
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Consider an unlikely scenario. In the midst of World War I, a motley group of Jewish refugees in their teens and early twenties becomes obsessed with the idea of creating a “Yiddish art theatre” modeled upon Stanislavski's famous Russian company. By day they work as laborers, storekeepers, housepainters, and wartime smugglers; by night they teach themselves the basics of acting and stagecraft from outdated Russian and German books. The only theatre building where they can afford to perform is a dilapidated former circus on the outskirts of town, repurposed by the German army as a military stable. The roof leaks, and the stage reeks of horse dung. It is a bitterly cold winter, and since there is no money for heat, the actors rehearse with frozen limbs and thaw their stage makeup over the footlights. They eat one meal a day—a single boiled potato—and rehearsals are routinely interrupted when actors faint from hunger.
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Nazarova, Evgenia. "Terminological Situation with the Name of the Language of the Mountain Jews." Judaic-Slavic Journal, no. 2 (4) (2020): 60–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.31168/2658-3364.2020.2.06.
Full textAbstract:
The article analyzes the difficult terminological situation with the name of the language of the Mountain Jews. In the article, the author gives different versions of the names of the language, existing in parallel, but in different areas. On the one hand, this is the ethnic name of the language - Juhuri, which is associated with the ethnonym Juhurho and is used by its speakers, the Mountain Jews, in their intra-ethnic communication. On the other hand, there is a second name of the same language – the Tat lan- guage and its modifications like Jewish-Tatian language (Judeo-Tat) etc. This name is currently used in scientific literature, in the state administrative “Nomenclature of the Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation”, in the name of such phenomena of the verbal culture of the Mountain-Jewish people as literature and theater. The author states that the presence of two or more disparate and in no way related names of one language brings confusion into the self-identification of Mountain Jews, complicates the study of its ethnogenesis, interferes with the normal statistical records of native speakers and creates many other difficulties. And because of it the author calls for unifying the name of the language of the Mountain Jews at the legislative level. Such unification will help in rejecting the use wrong term “The Tat language”, which is currently used as official one, and which is treated as erroneous and unacceptable by the Mountain Jews themself. Instead of that name, the author proposes to introduce into the administrative nomenclature the ethnic name of the language of the Mountain Jews Juhuri, thereby giving it an official status. As a result of such a replacement, the language of Mountain Jews will get their own relevant official name, which until now their language did not have for a number of specific historical reasons mentioned in the article. And this, the author believes, will fundamentally change the difficult long-term terminological situation with the name of the native language of the Mountain Jews for the better and bring it into a natural and harmonious state, similar to how it is noted in the vast majority of the peoples of Russia and the world: one people of Juhurho - one correlation it is the name of the native language of Juhuri.
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Kowalski, Tomasz. "Framing Polish-Jewish Relations Through Shakespeare in Post-war and Contemporary Polish Theatre." Multicultural Shakespeare: Translation, Appropriation and Performance 28, no. 43 (December 30, 2023): 193–207. http://dx.doi.org/10.18778/2083-8530.28.10.
Full textAbstract:
The paper aims to analyse how the staging of Shakespeare’s texts in post-war and contemporary Poland reflected the indifferent and hostile attitudes of Poles towards Jews, particularly during the Holocaust, and the distortions and gaps in the collective memory regarding the events. In the first part, the author focuses on Hamlet Study (dir. Jerzy Grotowski) performed in 1964 by Laboratory Theatre of 13 Rows in Opole, which is symptomatic of silencing the matter during the communist period. The second part draws from the statement of Jan Ciechowicz, a Polish theatre historian, who claimed that “the Holocaust killed Shylock for Polish stage.” While verifying it, the author analyses selected aspects of three productions directed by Krzysztof Warlikowski (The Tempest (2003), The Merchant of Venice (1994) and The African Tales by Shakespeare (2011)) and juxtaposes them against the background of the changes in collective memory. He argues that the most cogent productions concerning Polish attitudes towards Jews are those that position the audience as witnesses of the acts of re-enacted violence and thus provoke an affective response.
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Kift, Roy. "Comedy in the Holocaust: the Theresienstadt Cabaret." New Theatre Quarterly 12, no. 48 (November 1996): 299–308. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0266464x00010496.
Full textAbstract:
The concentration camp in Theresienstadt in the Czech Republic was unique, in that it was used by the Nazis as a ‘flagship’ ghetto to deceive the world about the real fate of the Jews. It contained an extraordinarily high proportion of VIPs – so-called Prominenten, well-known international personalities from the worlds of academia, medicine, politics, and the military, as well as leading composers, musicians, opera singers, actors, and cabarettists, most of whom were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. The author, Roy Kift, who first presented this paper at a conference on ‘The Shoah and Performance’ at the University of Glasgow in September 1995, is a free-lance dramatist who has been living in Germany since 1981, where he has written award-winning plays for stage and radio, and a prizewinning opera libretto, as well as directing for stage, television, and radio. His new stage play, Camp Comedy, set in Theresienstadt, was inspired by this paper, and includes original cabaret material: it centres on the nightmare dilemma encountered by Kurt Gerron in making the Nazi propaganda film, The Fuhrer Gives the Jews a Town. Roy Kift has contributed regular reports on contemporary German theatre to a number of magazines, including NTQ. His article on the GRIPS Theater in Berlin appeared in TQ39 (1981) and an article on Peter Zadek in NTQ4 (1985).
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Nahshon, Edna. "Jeffrey Veidlinger. The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000. ix, 356 pp." AJS Review 27, no. 02 (November 2003): 351–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0364009403390129.
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Barker, Anthony. "“Consider Yourself One of Us”: The Dickens Musical on Stage and Screen." Text Matters, no. 7 (October 16, 2017): 241–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/texmat-2017-0013.
Full textAbstract:
Charles Dickens’s work has been taken and adapted for many different ends. Quite a lot of attention has been given to film and television versions of the novels, many of which are very distinguished. The stage and screen musical based on his work, essentially a product of the last fifty years, has been neither as studied nor as respected. This paper looks at the connection between Dickens’s novels, the celebration of “London-ness” and its articulation in popular forms of working-class music and song. It will argue that potentially unpromising texts were taken and used to articulate pride and a sense of community for groups representing the disadvantaged of the East End and, more specifically, for first-generation Jewish settlers in London. This is all the more surprising as it was in the first instance through depictions of Oliver Twist and the problematic figure of Fagin that an Anglo-Jewish sensibility was able to express itself. Other texts by Dickens, notably Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol and The Old Curiosity Shop, were also adapted to musical forms with varying results, but the period of their heyday was relatively short, as their use of traditional and communitarian forms gave place in the people’s affection to manufactured pop/rock and operetta forms. I will argue that this decline was partly the product of changing London demographics and shifts in theatre economics and partly of the appropriation of Dickens by the academy.