Israeli Theatre Research Articles

The theatrical ammunition of the 1967 war

This article discusses the effects of the Six Day War on plays performed in the 1967/68 and 1968/69 theater seasons, in an attempt to demonstrate the great variety of the plays produced and their direct and indirect links to the cultural narrative. Israeli theater exploited the cultural ammunition furnished by the war, thereby demonstrating its own relevance and active participation in the battle waged by the state. At the same time, however, it exposed its limitations as a critical medium: whether the shows reacted to the war explicitly or implicitly, most of them avoided the issues of the occupation, bereavement, and loss.

Cultural Collateral Damage: The Cancellation of Jordan’s Jerash Festival 2006

Fall 2008 93 Katherine (Kate) Wilson spent a dozen years as playwright and theatre artist before returning to the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is writing a dissertation on the playscript in the industrial U.S.; her secondary research areas are Arabic theatre and peformance and communitybased theatre. Cultural Collateral Damage: The Cancellation of Jordan’s Jerash Festival 2006 Kate Wilson Jerash Festival of Arts and Culture ran twenty-five times between 1981 and 2007. The festival had been suspended twice, both times because Israel invaded Lebanon, first in 1982 (the festival’s second year), and again in 2006, which would have been the festival’s quarter-century anniversary—an event I had traveled to Jordan to witness and research.1 This essay contextualizes the nonevent of Jerash Festival. I read the absence of this cultural event as revealing a presence of another kind, that is, of looming forces of international politics, especially Israeli and U.S. military operations, which render powerful repercussions on live entertainment performance, especially in the elaborate setting of festivals, and especially festivals in theArab world. Borrowing a military euphemism, these effects can be considered “cultural collateral damage,” indirect repercussions of military violence on the cultural sphere. En route to those ideas, I consider Jerash in the context of festivals generally and describe the geopolitical landscape of Jordan, in which festivals, alongside other modes of public expression, do or do not happen. What Jerash Festival Was “Festival” is not a monolithic phenomenon, so a brief taxonomy helps to position Jerash amid the variety of types. First is the question of scale, in which Jerash would be considered one of the larger, state sponsored affairs in contrast to smaller, local events, as in neighborhood religious celebrations. Another broad distinction lies in the content, in what a festival offers. One class of content irrelevant to this paper is the noncultural (for instance, Dubai’s Shopping Festival). Festivals that do present culture can be split broadly into mixed genre or single genre (e.g., music, dance, film, or theatre). Both Jordan’s Jerash and Lebanon’s Baalbakk [or Baalbeck or Baalbek] offer an array of music, dance, and theatre, including traditional or folk performances. Several Arab world festivals are dedicated solely to theatre, and like festivals elsewhere, these further refine their focus by geography or subgenre. At least two specialize in theatre from the Arab or African regions: Syria and Tunisia alternate years presenting the former’s Damascus Theatre Festival and the latter’s Carthage Theatre Days (Journées Théâtrales de Carthage). Israel’s 94 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Acco Festival ofAlternative Israeli Theatre, which purports to include Palestinians, frames itself by both place (nation) and sub-genre (alternative theatre).2 Two Arab-world theatre festivals limit themselves to contemporary, avant-garde, or experimental work. In Jordan, an independent theatre company, Al-Fawanees (“Lanterns”), hosts theAmman Festival (the most government-independent festival of the region),3 and Egypt has the Cairo Experimental (Tajribi) Festival, which has drawn the most English-language coverage.4 Other Arab world festivals focus on children’s theatre, music, or dance. Marvin Carlson’s survey names many of these Arab-world varieties.5 Athird variable involves the setting. Such festivals call attention to one specific location. Jerash Festival thus promoted a particular space, a compound of Roman ruins, for reasons I return to below. Lebanon’s Baalbakk and Tunisia’s Carthage Theatre Days are also set amid ruins. Festivals set in and named for large cities (e.g., Damascus) often aim for urban rejuvenation.6 Jordan’s recent subsuming of Jerash into a nationwide Jordan Festival marks a shift in the symbolic strategy of setting, with hopes to spread tourism across multiple sites and perhaps to highlight the nation in the map of world culture.Afourth variable speaks to festivals’orientation to audience, as in connoisseur or general public. In geographic terms, a festival can target foreigners, its own country, or its region (a taxonomy Al-Hamarneh and Steiner use to compare the effects of Arab tourism after September 11).7 Jerash Festival targeted a mixture of Jordanians,Arabs across the region, and also cultural tourists...

From a Transient to a Resident: The Acco Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre, 2001–2004

As artistic director of the Acco Festival (2001–2004), Atay Citron turned the Festival into a showcase of intercultural and interdisciplinary events. Citron established Acco as the site for Arab-Jewish dialogue, a place where Jewish and Arab artists worked together for the first time.

Goethes 'Lehr'- und 'Wanderjahre': Eine Kulturgeschichte der Moderne (review)

MLRy 100.3, 200S 863 Gibbons's essay is complemented by Brita Hempel's in the next section ('Freundschaft , Liebe, Sexualitat'), and it too draws on unpublished material. She concludes that in the short fragmentary text 'Loix des femmes Soldats' written in connection with Uber die Soldatenehen, Lenz endorses the divine, patriarchal world order and the sexual morality derived fromit. Johannes Lehmann shows that Lenz's concept ofhap? piness was derived from the Enlightenment but that italso reveals the strains within it and points towards the separation of happiness and morality. Similarly, Martin Kagel shows how Lenz reveals the cracks in the classical models of the ideal of friendship. Gerd Sautermeister resurrects Lenz's play Die Freunde machen den Philosophen with an ingenious interpretation of it as a psychological experiment. Christine Kiinzel draws our attention to the fact that the eighteenth century viewed rape and seduc? tion differentlyfrom our own age, mostly to the disadvantage of women, but that Lenz's dramas were beginning to show a shiftof opinion. Claudia Benthien examines non-verbal communication in a welcome close reading of Der neue Menoza, which highlights the occurrence of fainting and failing, while finally in this section, Helga Madland takes a personal stance in her farewell to a lifetime of Lenz studies and makes some original observations about Lenz's forward-looking view of women. The final section has papers on reception. Heidrun Makert traces the beginnings of research on Lenz in his home region of Livonia, Ariane Martin shows that the claim that Naturalism discovered Lenz needs revision, and Jan Knopf analyses the 'emasculation' of Lenz's Der Hofmeister in Brecht's adaptation through the addition of anachronisms and notion of 'die deutsche Misere'. Ken-Ichi Sato shows how the reception of Lenz in Japan at firstlatched onto the idea ofthe forerunner and the open form, but has become more differentiated. The final essay here is the bracing account by the Israeli theatre researcher Gad Kayner of a very provocative production of Die Soldaten at Tel Aviv University. Finally, the volume also has a list of the Lenziana in Cracow compiled by Gesa Weinert, and notices on the latest website and on the Internationale Lenz-Gesellschaft. Kayner's account of the production in the politically and culturally tense location of Tel Aviv gives us a sense of Lenz's works as provocation, as 'Wunde', though it seems also to be at the cost of authenticity. The title of this volume is not altogether happily chosen, for indeed, as one of its contributors, Ariane Martin, notes, the 'wound' metaphor implies an element of mythologizing and pays lip service to what is now a cliche: Lenz as forerunner, modernist, rebel pure and simple. In fact, most of the papers here show how deeply rooted he was in his times as well, and our understanding of that has been increasing. The wounds that still need healing are the gaps in our knowledge and understanding of him. There is only one gap I noticed here in the editing: a paper by Martin Rector is referredto on p. 352 as in this volume but not actually included. Apart from that omission, the editors and contributors are to be congratulated on helping us to fillyet more gaps in our knowledge of the unusually original writer Lenz. New Hall, Cambridge John Guthrie Goethes 'Lehr'- und 'Wanderjahre': Eine Kulturgeschichteder Moderne. By Franziska Schossler. Tiibingen: Francke. 2002. 379 pp. ?44. ISBN 3-7720-2782-2. Drawing heavily on New Historicist theory of an avowedly Foucauldian type, the author seeks to confirm the (sociologically oriented) critical consensus that Wilhelm Meister is 'modern', in the sense of presenting the reconstruction and reconfiguration of discourses contemporary with Goethe. In moving from the Lehrjahre to the Wanderjahre, it is argued, we move from Genie discourse (centred on individual 864 Reviews autonomy) to economic and medical discourse (centred on socio-historical, cultural issues). In tune with recent scholarship's 'leaving behind' the 'restrictive' category of the Bildungsroman, the text is viewed as a dialogistic archive of specialist dis? courses, revealing its genetic origin amid the social power positions it records. In other words, Wilhelm Meister profiles the 'Kultur-Zivilisation antagonism' that (since at...

The Language of Plays Translated into Hebrew from English and French - A Cultural-Stylistic Study

Cette étude traite des caractéristiques linguistiques et stylistiques du théâtre hébraïque traduit de l'anglais et du français entre la fin des années 1940 et la fin des années 1970. Cette période cruciale de 30 ans fut marquée par les grands changements qui affectèrent la langue hébraïque, la littérature et le théâtre. Le corpus étudié comprend 180 pièces dont des pièces en un acte, traduites en hébreu, soit 125 (américaines et anglaises) traduites de l'anglais et 55 traduites du français. (Ces chiffres reflètent la place relative occupée par ces deux sous-systèmes dans le théâtre israélien.) L'étendue du corpus a permis une description générale des phénomènes stylistiques du genre. On a pu tirer des conclusions concernant les phénomènes et les processus sociolittéraires et sociothéâtraux qui affectaient les pièces de théâtre de la période traitée. Le style des pièces traduites a été étudié tant du point de vue synchronique que diachronique.

Zionism in the Israeli theatre

Zionism in the Israeli theatre

The Bible and the avant-garde: the search for a classical tradition in the Israeli theatre

The Israeli theatre has frequently employed the Hebrew Bible as a source for theatrical performances. Analysing three such performances, this article shows that the Bible, with its charged ideological implications for the establishment of the state of Israel, has perhaps somewhat unexpectedly inspired avant-garde productions that have frequently criticized the accepted ideological and aesthetic norms. The first of the three performances analysed is Hanoch Levin's play based on the book of Job called ‘The Torments of Job’ (Yisorei Iov), which Levin directed at the Cameri theatre in 1981. The second is the play ‘Jehu’ by Gilead Evron, directed by Hanan Snir at the Habima National Theatre in 1992, and the third is the ‘Bible Project’ directed by Rina Yerushalmi, which consists of two independent, but interrelated productions: ‘And He Said And He Was Walking’ (Va Yomer Va Yelech), which premiered in 1996, and ‘And They Bowed. And He Feared’ (Va Yishtachu. Va Yerra) which premiered in 1998.

Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in the Israeli theatre

(2001). Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in the Israeli theatre. Arabic & Middle Eastern Literature: Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 19-36.

אנשי בראשית, תימנים בתיאטרון העברי: Yemenites in the Hebrew Theatre: Constructing and Deconstructing the Stereotypes

This article is an archeological exploration of the representations of Yemenite figures in Hebrew drama and Israeli theatre during the twentieth century. It studies a repertoire that helps to illuminate transformations in the representation of an ethnic group in Eretz Israel. The study of the character of the Yemenite Jew in Hebrew drama and Israeli theatre necessitates familiarity with related fields because Hebrew culture is characterized by strong links between its various parts, such as those between theatre and other dramatic arts such as cinema and television. Accordingly, data from the cinematic and television repertoires that influenced the theatrical representations of the Yemenite Jews are described. Conversely, the article examines the ways in which cinema and television were affected by theatrical stagings of Yemenite characters. This paper argues that up to the establishment of the state of Israel most plays were treated as literature and were published to be read rather than performed on the stage. Therefore, the study of the Yemenite Jew in that period is mainly literary. In plays from the post-establishment period, the character of the Yemenite Jew in Hebrew theatre assumes the stereotypical dimensions of the Oriental Jew. For the immigrants from East and Central Europe, the Oriental represented the other, a stranger who awakens attraction, repulsion, and fear. Considered this way, the creators of Yemenite stereotype can be seen as the disciples of the colonialist heritage. In this article I draw from some of the theories of Stuart Hall and Richard Dyer to illuminate the position of Jewish Yemenite characters as others in Hebrew culture and especially in the theatre. The study of the repertoire delineates a few central directions in the representation of Yemenite Jews. Until the establishment of the state, the Yemenite Jews were culturally placed between "Arabs" and "Hebrew-Jews". From the 1950's, the period of the large immigration, they were categorized with the "Mizrachim." In the 1970's, a process of change affecting the stereotype of the Yemenite Jew began, due, in particular, to the emergence of Yemenite playwrights and their influence on the Israeli stage.

Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in the Israeli Theatre

Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in the Israeli Theatre

Chekhovian Women in the Israeli Theatre

Chekhovian Women in the Israeli Theatre

Theater in Israel (review)

Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 203 Reviews THEATER IN ISRAEL. Linda Ben-Zvi, ed. Theater: Theoryrrext/ Performance. Pp. xxi + 450. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Cloth. Both as producers and consumers, Jews are remarkably well represented in the perfonnance arts of the last century. This is particularly true of "show business." No cultural history of American Jewry, for example, can ignore the flourishing Second Avenue Yiddish theater of the mass migration era, nor its subsequent influence on the motion picture industry. However, this enthusiastic diaspora participation can be dismissed as ultimately expressing an effort to assimilate to the larger society. What happens in Israel, where Jews constitute the majority? How effective is a theater language which derives both from biblical cadences and contemporary army slang? How are the sensibilities, moods, visions, and nightmares of its diverse, heterogeneous public reflected onstage? What unique themes and original strategies can Israeli theater claim? Professor Linda Ben-Zvi has assembled an impressive array of essays, articles, reports, and interviews which, with her own contributions, explore these questions and many other facets of Israel's theater world. As has long been apparent, whatever inhibitions remained stemming from ancient associations of the theater with Hellenism and hedonism have been overcome for the vast majority of Israelis. Theater in Israel is a very popular and significant feature of the cultural landscape. In proportion to its population, theater attendance is quite high and the socio-economic range of theater patrons is unusually broad. This seeming fervor for the stage may be due in part to the special context of theatrical activity in Israel. The reader learns that about 60% of the total is state-supported or municipally affiliated, and 70% of theater tickets are purchased at the workplace. Theater criticism figures notably in the reading habits and conversational topics of the cultural elite. The colorful background of Israel's present day theater is the first subject scrutinized. Its history and the unfolding of its dramatic traditions are traced from the earliest pre-state beginnings to the latest fringe theater components. In one professional sense, it has come full-circle, from the arrival of the Habima players schooled by Vakhtangov and Stanislavsky to the founding of the top-rated Gesher Theater, made up-like Habima in its day--of newcomers from Russia. Succeeding sections are devoted to characteristic trends in Israeli drama. Included are an examination of the image of the Arab in the country's plays Hebrew Studies 38 (1997) 204 Reviews and a symposium on independent Arab drama and theater. Important European influences interpreted by Israeli playwrights are analyzed as well as the persistent leiunotif materials of the Holocaust and the Akeda trauma, evoked directly or indirectly. For the most part, these sections are wellwritten and avoid the turgid prose and esoteric terminology of dramaturgical specialists. However, the prime feature of this book is its success in familiarizing the reader with Israel's best-known playwrights: Nissim Aloni, Hanoch Levin, and Yehoshua Sobol. The combined studies, comparative descriptions, and interviews highlight the messages inherent in their work and vividly clarify why their plays, as commentaries on the Israeli reality, provoke intense and painful controversy. Two shortcomings blunt the book's impact. One is easily corrected. Inadequate proofreading and copy editing left a trail of typos and inconsistent usages that confuse or jar the reader. The second involves content. As Ben-Zvi readily concedes, Israeli theater is strongly secular, leftist, and liberal. Yet it seems an excess of political correctness to deem specific Jewish attachment to the land "racist" whereas Arab attachment is depicted as romantic. The term "sexist" is reserved for the religious or conservative critic; the misogyny in Hanoch Levin's plays does not earn him this title. Thorough adoption of Arab perceptions in Arab-Israeli disputes is likened to recent Hollywood focus on the cause of the Native American. Butabsent any Native American threat to the continued existence of the United States-the parallel is certainly clumsy. Moreover, even a secularized Jewish culture would identify Hanukkah as an eight day holiday everywhere -not, as appendix 3 claims, "seven days in Israel." It would date Purim as the fourteenth of Adar rather than "the...

“Hawajah Bialik”∗ the double culture of the Israeli Arab in Hebrew drama and the Israeli theatre

“Hawajah Bialik”∗ the double culture of the Israeli Arab in Hebrew drama and the Israeli theatre

The Image of the Arab in Israeli Theatre—from Competition to Exploitation (1912–1990)

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.

‘How Are the Mighty Fallen’: Aspects of Contemporary Israeli Theatre

Even at its most political, contemporary Israeli theatre tends to be self-referential – nowhere more so, suggests Shimon Levy, than in the theatre festivals held at Acre, where year by year over the past decade the plays selected seem to have reflected, more than coincidentally, the preoccupations of the nation, with its haunted past, its militaristic present, and a future full of uncertain or resented accommodations with neighbours for so long perceived as enemies. But Shimon Levy, who teaches in the Theatre Department at Tel Aviv University, also notes two exceptions in a generally gloomy theatrical scene: the exuberant entertainment Yanti Parazi – ‘a metaphor for the yearning for this screwed-up Holy Land’ – and a long-unperformed play on the ‘difficult’ subject of the West Bank occupation, Ephraim Returns to the Army, with its schitzoid title-character ‘deconstructing’ the conflicting elements of Israeli hopes and beliefs, for audiences not presumed to share the play's own progressive but unsentimentalized sympathies.

Ideology and Archetypal Patterns in the Israeli Theatre

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.

Deconstructing the Biblical Sources in Israeli Theater:Yisurei Iyovby Hanoch Levin

When in 1981 the Israeli Cameri Theater performed The Passion of Job, written and directed by Hanoch Levin, the leading avant-garde playwrightin Israel (viewed by some as “the bad boy of the modern Israeli stage”),1 public outrage reached unprecedented heights.The scandal was partially provoked by Levin′s staging.His taste for the carnal and the cruel was much too unpalatable for many stomachs to digest.“People actually walked out, while others covered their eyes,” reported a review in the Jerusalem Post.2 No less detrimental, however, was the specific angle from which Levin th? playwright elected to retell the biblical story.For although the Hebrew title of the play, Yisurei Iyov, may be literally rendered as “Job′s Afflictions,” our translation was advisedly chosen: In his version, Levin catapults Job from the fictional land of Uz to Palestine of the Roman era, thereby embedding Job′s ordeal in that later agon between man and God–the passion of Christ.Accordingly, this dramatized Job does not live to hear an answer from the whirlwind, nor does he see his life redeemed.With a dramatic sleight of hand he is, paradoxically enough, the only character in the play who refuses to deny the existence of God–thus condemning himself to the stake.

National and Imported Culture in Israel

Abstract This study examines the creation and consumption of indigenous culture in Israel in its first 25 years of statehood, from 1948 to 1973. Focusing on the theater, some of the economic, political, and cultural constraints affecting theater-making and theater-going are analyzed. The study shows that the repertoire of the Israeli theater consists for the most part of non-Israeli (foreign) plays which are translated and performed in Hebrew. Analysis of audience reaction shows that there is no preferential attitude toward home-made versus imported culture. The conflict of the theater (and other media) between creating national culture and importing foreign (primarily Western) culture is examined. The study shows that the imbalance between indigenous and imported culture in Israel is also characteristic of other small and new nations. It suggests that this imbalance is a result of the conflict between the homogenizing orientations, inherent in the process of cultural modernization, and the search of new nations for cultural identity.

Bertolt Brecht in the Israeli Theatre

Bertolt Brecht in the Israeli Theatre

Playwriting in Israel

The past two seasons in Israel have seen an outcropping of local plays which both in quantity and quality exceed everything the Israeli theatre had experienced until then. All, or almost all, of it is due to the efforts of one company, the Haifa Municipal Theatre which started, about five years ago, on a systematic policy of developing playwriting talent, when Oded Kotler, a brilliant young actor and director took over the company’s artistic direction. The results triumphantly proved right those who had for years been arguing that theatrical companies — not prizes — produce playwrights.