The Shtetl in the Hebrew Theatre of Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s

Abstract

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.