Jewish Theatre Research Articles

Representations of Jews in the Musical Theater of the Habsburg Empire (1788-1807). By David J. Buch.

Representations of Jews in the Musical Theater of the Habsburg Empire (1788-1807). By David J. Buch.

The Jewish Kulturbund theatre company in Nazi Berlin

The Jewish Kulturbund theatre company in Nazi Berlin

My Life in Jewish Theatre: A Coming-Out Story

Kayla Gordon looks back at almost 15 years of working in Jewish Theatre. She discusses her involvement with the Governor General’s Award-winning play Tangled Souls, a theatre piece developed with young people from Winnipeg and Norway House. She also reflects on her work as Artistic Director of the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre, Executive Director of the Association for Jewish Theatre, and her more recent role as Artistic Director of Winnipeg Studio Theatre. Along the way, she considers the future of Jewish theatre in Canada and the importance of reaching new audiences.

On Abrams's <em>The New Jew in Film</em>

On Abrams's The New Jew in Film Carolina Rocha The New Jew in Film: Exploring Jewishness and Judaism in Contemporary Cinema. By Nathan Abrams. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2012. 258 pp., ISBN 978-0-8135-5341-2 (pbk). US $25.95. Jewish men and women have been represented by stereotypes in films since the inception of cinema. Heavily influenced by sociopolitical developments in both Europe and the United States, these representations underwent changes throughout the twentieth century. In The New Jew in Film, Nathan Abrams sets out to explore the transformations that Jews have undergone in world cinema since 1990. The book, which is a collection of some previously published articles and book chapters, consists of an introduction and eight chapters. In the introduction Abrams presents a concise background of the portrayal of Jews in American and European films during the twentieth century in order to contextualize his thesis that, since the 1990s, representations of Jews not only have become more prominent in cinema around the world but also have paralleled the assimilation of Jews in different societies as well as their attainment of middle-class status. The author identifies the widespread depiction of Jews in cinema as representing a global trend that has become more noticeable in the last three decades. Abrams also makes the case that this trend is the result of a new generation of actors and actresses, screenwriters, and directors who take pride in their Jewishness. (Here he borrows Daniel Boyarin’s term, “Jewissance,” or [End Page 108] pleasure in being Jewish.) The author argues that many of these new portrayals originate with the Jewish directors, screenwriters, and actors who deploy reverse stereotypes as a way to challenge prevailing perceptions of Jews. This study builds on previous work by Lester Friedman and Patricia Erens, who surveyed Jewish cinematic representations up to the 1980s, and challenges David Desser and Lester Friedman’s assertions from 2004 about the final flowering of American-Jewish cinema (18). Chapter 1 presents a history of the Jew in film, concentrating on two opposing self-images: the tough Jew and the sissy Jew. The latter has been perceived as an image of Jewish passivity, but for Abrams he embodies the new characterizations of Jews in film through the lenses of multiculturalism and pluralism. Furthermore, he argues that new varieties of Jewish masculinities have emerged, including the stoner Jew and the working-class Jew. Such changes are seen, for example, in Woody Allen’s 1990s films, in which the hysterical schlemiel has been replaced by less lovable characters; in David Mamet’s screenplays, which depict sexist and aggressive Jews; and in the Coen brothers’ films. Similarly, European films have also depicted working-class Jews, notably in the work of the French-Jewish director Mathieu Kassovitz. The same images can be found in the comedies of the Jewish-American director Judd Apatow, where Jewish characters assume the roles of badkens (slackers). These new representations of Jews in film have also transformed the penis from a locus of shame to one of comedy, and blatantly critique the values of the dominant Gentile society. The second chapter centers on the depiction of the Jewess in film. Whereas earlier depictions of Jewesses had them relegated to secondary roles as the overbearing Yiddishe momme or the asexual and materialistic Jewish American Princess, Abrams identifies in post-1990s films the “Jewess with attitude,” who evolved from the feminist movement and found expression particularly in the positive Jewish female film roles played by Barbra Streisand. In addition, Jewish female directors presented the feminine Jewish gaze in films such as The Governess (Sandra Goldbacher, 1998). Iconoclastic Jewish female characters also were depicted in Aimée & Jaguar (Max Färberböck, 1999) and Zwartboek (Paul Verhoeven, 2006). The subsequent chapters examine film depictions of Jews in relation to sex, passivity, agency, religion, food, and bathrooms. The fact that Jews and Jewesses are represented as sexual predators, erotic beings, and porn stars is interpreted by Abrams as a sign of a heightened confidence on the part of Jewish and non-Jewish directors to take on these portrayals. The topics of exogamy and endogamy are [End Page 109] also explored, leading...

Between Biblical Tradition and Contemporary Audiences: Jewish Theatre Practice in Toronto

Joel Benabu and Barry Freeman in conversation with four Toronto-based Jewish Canadian theatre playwrights and producers: Esther Arbeid (Theatre/Film Programmer at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre), Hannah Moscovitch (Playwright), Avery Saltzman (Co-Artistic Director of the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company), and Julie Tepperman (Playwright, Actor, and Co-Artistic Director of Convergence Theatre). Topics discussed include Jewish sub-communities in Toronto, audiences to Jewish plays, the challenge of producing politically or artistically provocative work, and the relationship between Jewish ritual and performance traditions. The article is an edited version of a two-hour conversation held at the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre in Toronto, 23 December 2011.

Studio 180’s Political Engagements: Finding the Jewish Soul in Canadian Theatre

Laura Levin and Belarie Zatzman converse with Studio 180’s Artistic Director Joel Greenberg about Jewish theatre as an art of social justice. They discuss Studio 180 Theatre’s political mandate, its aim to provoke public discourse, and previous productions that have served as a form of community engagement. They also explore Studio 180’s staging of plays with intercultural themes, histories of racial conflict, and the oppression of minority groups. Studio 180 productions discussed here include: The Laramie Project, The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, Parade, Our Class, The Normal Heart, and Clybourne Park.

Jewish Theatre in Vancouver Has Chutzpah!

This article illustrates diverse Jewish Canadian theatrical experiences showcased at the Chutzpah! Festival by discussing two cutting edge productions: Kendra Fanconi’s The One That Got Away (2002) and Itai Erdal’s How to Disappear Completely. These productions demonstrate the growth of the Chutzpah! Festival from its 2001 inception to its current place as a leading annual arts festival in Vancouver. There is no distinguishable group that solely presents Jewish theatre in Vancouver, but its vibrant theatre community includes many individuals who create or participate in work that explores Jewish themes and material whether or not they themselves, or their collaborators, are Jewish.

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Teasing Out Clues, Not Kooks

Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison (review)

Reviewed by: Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern by Neil R. Davison Debra Shostak (bio) Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern, by Neil R. Davison. New York and London: Routledge Publishers, 2010. xi + 262 pp. $113.00 cloth. “‘What is a Jew in the first place?’” the protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Counterlife ponders: “the sound ‘Jew’ was not made like a rock in the world—some human voice once said ‘Djoo,’ pointed to somebody, and that was the beginning.”1 Roth’s Joycean “Djoo” suggests the questions that Neil R. Davison raises in his perceptive and stimulating Jewishness and Masculinity from the Modern to the Postmodern. Taking the “Djoo” as the male Jew, Davison asks: who is the Jew as a historically constituted, objectified, and racialized subject making the transition into modernity? How does the hint of mockery in Roth’s phonetic spelling translate into a gendering of the Jew, whose internalized position departs from the hyper-masculine Euro-American ideal? Davison pursues these questions through the confluence of racial, gendered, and religious constructions of Jewish masculinity appearing in the work of male writers, both Jewish and gentile, from the modern to the postmodern eras. Chapters focused on George Du Maurier, Theodor Herzl, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Roth probe how the discourses of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have feminized the male Jew, and, in turn, how this construction of the Jew’s racial and gendered subjectivity affects his encounter with the modern world in each writer’s political and ethical imaginations. Drawing on an impressive array of materials—from cultural history, psychoanalysis, Judaic sources, philosophy, journalism, and letters, and citing such scholars as Sander Gilman, Daniel Boyarin, David Biale, and Emmanuel Lévinas, as well as influential turn-of-the-century work by Sigmund Freud and Otto Weininger—Davison paints a complex portrait of fin de siècle, modern, and postmodern Jewish masculinity.2 To do so, he explores intersecting binaries—Rabbinic/Reform (Halachic/Haskalah) Judaism, as well as “authentic/inauthentic, racial difference/humanity, hyper-male/feminized-male, colonial/postcolonial, and Diaspora/Zionist” oppositions (2). Indeed, each chapter is built around a dense interweaving of sources and conceptions of Jewishness, so that my summaries below can scarcely capture the nuances of Davison’s analyses. On balance, however, he argues that “gentile and Jewish male writers renegotiated masculinity by engaging the feminized Jew in their [End Page 379] works” and finds that the culturally assimilated Jewish writers forged their identities “through a hybrid Jewish masculinity combining the essence of Rabbinic edelkayt [the gentle, bookish, Talmudic masculine ideal] with strains of the politically active, liberal or leftist Western male” (14, 19). Davison’s thesis is illuminating and affords some fascinating stories. Chapter 1 reads George Du Maurier’s bestselling novel of 1894, Trilby, alongside the Dreyfus Affair, which began the same year.3 The cultural anxieties stoked by the rhetoric of race and gender link Trilby’s depiction of the sinister Jew, Svengali, with the threat the French perceived in Captain Alfred Dreyfus, wrongfully convicted of spying for Germany. Davison names a new category for the Jew, the “homme/femme fatale,” who is “malignantly feminine in [his] perverse sexual powers and creative genius for disguise and imitation” (27). He attributes Svengali’s dirty, money-grubbing, sexually ambiguous, predatory depiction, like the Dreyfus Affair, to the developing hysterical belief that “degenerate” Jews were fostering a world conspiracy to feminize European culture. As a complementary narrative of fin de siècle Europe, chapter 2 explores the work of Herzl, who is credited with founding Zionism. Herzl, known largely for his nonliterary writing, enables Davison to stake out the polar terms of male Jewish representation. Although Herzl struggled with an internalized image of his own Jewish racial effeminacy, Davison finds that he also engaged with the role of the Judaic religious tradition in his vision for a re-masculinized Jew and a nationalist cause. Davison argues that Herzl’s messianic vision, derived from the Judaic doctrine guiding Jews to “help other nations toward a spiritual enlightenment” and a “rational reconciliation of humanity,” forecast a Jewish state to “replace racial, gendered, and other...

Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America (review)

Reviewed by: Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America Cynthia Wachtell (bio) Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America. By David S. Reynolds. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011. Pp. 329. Cloth, $27.95; paper, $17.95.) No doubt, most Civil War buffs are familiar with the oft-told anecdote concerning Harriet Beecher Stowe’s encounter with Abraham Lincoln in December 1862. Meeting in the White House in the wake of the bloodbath at Antietam, and within weeks of what would be the Union’s defeat at Fredericksburg, the lanky president is supposed to have said to the diminutive authoress, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” In Mightier than the Sword: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Battle for America, David S. Reynolds makes no effort to either verify or dispute this tale. “Whether [Lincoln] actually said it is moot,” he argues. What matters, according to Reynolds, is that in Lincoln’s era “many claimed that Stowe had brought on the Civil War” (x). Yet to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin simply as the work that ignited the great war, Reynolds contends, is to fail to fully credit the “most influential book ever written by an American” (xiv). Stowe’s work—serialized in the National Era from the summer of 1850 to the spring of 1851 and first published in book form in 1852—was astoundingly powerful in its own day. Northerners, formerly hostile to the cause of abolitionism, were won over by the novel’s antislavery message. Southerners, finding themselves suddenly on the defensive, penned angry anti-Stowe poems and proslavery [End Page 600] novels. But the impact of the novel endured long after the end of slavery. Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be credited, Reynolds claims, with everything from prompting the virulently racist and reactionary film The Birth of a Nation (1915), to fueling the “proletarian spirit behind the Russian Revolution” (174). (The novel, originally considered too incendiary in a land that depended on the labor of 22 million serfs, was banned in Russia until 1857; after the ban was lifted, sixty-seven separate editions were published before the czar abdicated his throne in 1917.) Reynolds is interested in Stowe’s novel both as a text and as a cultural force, and his thoroughly researched exploration of all matters related to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is impressive. He traces the novel’s long publication history both in America and abroad. He examines the mid-nineteenth-century material culture spin-offs (puzzles, chinaware, handkerchiefs, and numerous other “Tomitudes”). He illuminates the complex sequence of the novel’s many adaptations for stage and screen. Many of the details Reynolds uncovers are fascinating: Frederick Douglass requested to pose as Uncle Tom for a ceremony at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. A Yiddish version of Uncle Tom’s Cabin staged in 1900 at a Jewish theater in Chicago had Uncle Tom reading from the Talmud. Judy Garland appeared in blackface as Topsy in Everybody Sing (1938), a year before The Wizard of Oz. To ponder these three facts alone is to begin to realize the far-ranging reach of the novel. Reynolds also explores the cultural, religious, and political influences that inform Stowe’s novel. The cultural phenomena, for example, include “visionary fiction, biblical narratives, pro- and anti-Catholicism, gender issues, temperance, moral reform, [and] minstrelsy” (87–88). Reynolds examines each of these and contends that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was so well received because Stowe expertly weaves together these many popular cultural threads. Reynolds is an unapologetic fan of Stowe’s book. He defends it retroactively against New Critics (many early practitioners, he points out, were misogynist southerners), first-wave feminists (“The novel isn’t nearly as conservative as Ann Douglas suggests in [her 1977 book] The Feminization of American Culture”), and all other detractors (45). In 1949 the African American novelist James Baldwin labeled Uncle Tom’s Cabin “a very bad book.” Not surprisingly, Reynolds rejects Baldwin’s “blinkered critique.” He counters that Stowe “invested blacks with beauty and power to a degree that no other pre...

Jewish girls in British cinema

My intention in writing this article is twofold. First, I aim to consider a small group of representations of British Jewish girlhood, and second, I attempt to expand the discourses through which Jewish girlhood has up until now been theorized, by considering Jewish girls beyond the confines of American spheres of representation. Representations of Jewishness have almost exclusively focused on the United States. This article considers how Jewish girls are represented in another context: that of British cinema.

Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock. Michael Scrivener.

Michael Scrivener, Jewish Representation in British Literature 1780-1840: After Shylock (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) vii + 270 $85. Michael Scrivener's Jewish Representation in British Literature is most encyclopedic study to date depicting Jews and Judaism during Romantic period. Although it was once routine (12) to overlook representations of Jews and works by Jewish writers in literary studies, scholarship on this subject in last twenty years has created a much different critical terrain. Yet, as Scrivener demonstrates, much work remains to be done. The sheer volume of primary texts discussed here that have been little explored, or entirely overlooked, is remarkable. In this way, Jewish Representation in British Literature will be an invaluable sourcebook for further research. Following Freudian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, Scrivener's principle analytic rubric revolves around notion of ambivalence. The loci for this ambivalence in this context are stereotypes about Jews; most influential example of this phenomenon, Shakespeare's Shylock, thus expresses Europe's conflicted views on commerce, banking, trade, usury, and capitalism (3). Accordingly, Scrivener devotes much of his argument to discussions of common Jewish character types, with separate chapters on the Pedlar, the Moneylender, and the Jew's Daughter as these types are explored by writers of both genders across a spectrum of religious and political affiliation. Hoe these figures are deployed and interrogated during Romantic period ultimately reflects British anxieties about fact that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are era of Jewish emancipation (208), a development which in turn necessitates far-reaching changes in understanding of Britishness itself. The focus on stereotypes here looks back to earlier work such as Frank Felsenstein's Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 16601830 (1995) and Michael Ragussis's more recent Theatrical Nation: Jews and Other Outlandish Englishmen in Georgian Britain (2010). Scrivener takes this emphasis in new directions by underscoring inevitably conflicted nature of such representations, whether they are produced by Jewish or non Jewish writers. The dates indicated in title, 1780-1840, are somewhat misleading insofar as, after a summary of recent criticism in first chapter, chapter 2 reviews 17th century debates over readmission of Jews to England during Cromwell's commonwealth. This starting point helpfully allows Scrivener to outline three responses to these debates--support for readmission by a Jewish author and by a Christian one, and open hostility to readmission by another Christian --that set up analytical parameters at work through chapters that follow. The view that Menasseh ben Isreal is the first Anglo-Jewish is, as Scrivener himself observes, debatable, predicated as it is on Menasseh's two-year stay in London and fact that three publications on readmission in English--two of uncertain provenance--bear his name. Menasseh spells out his reasons for seeking English residence in practical as well as spiritual terms; as Scrivener summarizes, writer seeks To worship freely in synagogue; (2) to advance messianic agenda by inserting Jews where there were none; (3) to pursue commerce; (4) to join as biblical Stranger already existing learned and pious community of (31). But even as he counters historic slanders against Jews such as practice of ritual murder, Menasseh ambivalently depends on other aspects of Jewish stereotype in order to argue for readmission. Christian assumptions about predatory Jewish lending are reshaped into a useful knowledge about business; fears of Jewish violence against Christians are recast into a desire for Christian camaraderie. Unfortunately, as Scrivener's analysis demonstrates, this approach did not preclude rhetorical violence in return by anti-readmission pamphleteer William Prynne, whose A Short Demurrer to Jewes Long Discontinued Remitter into England (1655) buttresses virulent Anti-Semitism with meticulous, supposedly historical detail as to specific Jewish crimes. …

Lorrie Moore Collection“A Little Ethnic Kink Is Always Good to See”: Jewish Performance Anxiety and Anti-passing in the Fiction of Lorrie Moore

This essay explores the ways in which the performance of Jewish identity (in the sense both of representing Jewish characters and of writing about those characters’ conscious and unconscious renditions of their Jewishness) is a particular concern (in both senses of the word) for Lorrie Moore. Tracing Moore's representations of Jewishness over the course of her career, from the early story “The Jewish Hunter” through to her most recent novel, A Gate at the Stairs, I argue that it is characterized by (borrowing a phrase from Moore herself) “performance anxiety,” an anxiety that manifests itself in awkward comedy and that can be read both in biographical terms and as an oblique commentary on, or reworking of, the passing narrative, which I call “anti-passing.” Just as passing narratives complicate conventional ethno-racial definitions so Moore's anti-passing narratives, by representing Jews who represent themselves as other to themselves, as well as to WASP America, destabilize the category of Jewishness and, by implication, deconstruct the very notion of ethnic categorization.

THE “JEWISH QUESTION” IN POSTCOLONIAL MOROCCAN CINEMA

AbstractIn this historically and anthropologically oriented article, we situate the recent wave of Jewish-themed Moroccan films within the context of the liberalizing transformations and associated nationalist narratives promoted by the current Moroccan regime. Reflecting Mohammed VI's commitment to widening the space of civil society, the task of enacting these transformations and producing these narratives devolves increasingly to nonstate agents in the public sphere. Previously monopolized and managed more comprehensively by the state, the “Jewish Question”—that is, contestations over representations of Jews as authentic members of the Moroccan body politic—is now taken up in a range of public media less subject to direct government control. We demonstrate that the role of cinema in this process reflects the shifting relationship between state and civil society in the late postcolonial period. More specifically, we argue that the production, circulation, and reception of Jewish-themed films is diagnostic of the state's ability to open new spaces of public representation and debate that foster precisely those images of the state and nation promoted by the current regime in regional and global contexts.

Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (review)

Reviewed by: Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre Rebecca Rovit Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, edited by Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 304 pp. $49.95. Historians and arts scholars have long discussed the rightful place of German-born Jews in German society and the tenuous relationship that they held historically vis-à-vis their non-Jewish-born fellow citizens. The curious paradigm of both belonging to German society and at the same time being apart from it distinguished Jews in Germany for centuries, despite the Enlightenment and subsequent freedoms for Jews within the unified Germany of 1871. During Wilhelmine Germany and in the Weimar Republic, Jews typically gravitated to occupations which reflected this trend. So it is not surprising that a majority of assimilated German Jews entered independent professions related to the arts, especially the theatre. What role did Jewish artists play in shaping modern German theatre during the late nineteenth- and twentieth centuries? What effect did avant-garde theatre trends have on German Jews and their self-identity? Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem's fascinating, edited collection of essays, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre, begins to address such long-neglected questions. With the expert collaboration of twelve scholars, the recent addition to editor Thomas E. Postlewait's prize-winning series, Studies in Theatre History and Culture, offers an unusually varied palette of perspectives on the extent to which German Jews not only contributed to, but co-created modern German theatre. The editors, known for their scholarship in performance history, delimit their study as dating from 1871 to 1933 and encompassing non-traditional forms of theatre, known as "modernist." The book's organization devotes roughly the first half of the book to how theatre constituted Jewish identity in Germany. Many of the authors address the notion of Jewish modernization in terms of a remaking of self, acculturation, and self-transformation when Jewish actors performed their identity. In the book's second chapter, for example, [End Page 198] Steven E. Aschheim posits the theatre as an actual "physical and psychosymbolic site" within which the complexities of Jewish post-Enlightenment identity played out (p. 27). Other scholars like Bernhard Greiner and Peter M. Marx, in Chapters 6 and 7, respectively, reconsider Jewish identity and the theatre through the lens of Jewish philosopher Theodore Lessing and literary critic Arnold Zweig's provocative twentieth-century writings on the Jewish actor's propensity for mimicry and talent for physical expressiveness. The book's thematic focus on Jewish theatre artists within the German theatre resonates in each chapter wherein authors emphasize the shaping force that Jews had on their Gentile theatre colleagues. Among the anthology's strengths, in addition to excellent editing, are the thematic correspondences between the chapters. Many of the assembled essays inform one another from different points of view; and yet the separate essays also provide the reader with an overlay of topics, creating a dialogic discourse between chapters. In this way, Malkin, in her essay about Jewish actors on the German Expressionist Stage (Chapter 9), refers to the modernist director Leopold Jessner's concept of transformation (1922) by which the German Jewish actor "navigated" between being and impersonation, passing between the Jewish and the German identities enfolded within him (p. 168). Anat Feinberg (Chapter 13) offers a biography of Jessner and his influence on modernist German theatre. Feinberg's chapter thus builds on Malkin's analysis of the Jewish actor's capacity for on-stage doubleness as a social strategy to hide his identity as a Jew, while revealing a specific Jewish expressive creativity. Read together, these chapters allow the reader to better assess theatre production by Jews during the 1920s, while understanding something about Jewish identity. So too do several authors provide essays on such theatre innovators and directors as Otto Brahm (born Abrahamsohn) and Max Reinhardt (born Goldmann) and their vital contribution to German theatre. Peter Jelavich (Chapter 3) situates these theatre impresarios and their artistic influence within Imperial Germany, while Lisa Silverman discusses Reinhardt's personal metamorphosis and the impact of Yiddish theatre on his grand...

Yiddish Theatre Actresses and American Jewish Identity

This article traces out Jewish representations of actresses from the heyday of American Yiddish theatre to explore the role of the Yiddish actress in the gendered negotiation of American Jewish identities in the early twentieth century. I argue that Yiddish actresses functioned as role models and symbols of the ideal balance between modern America and "traditional" Jewishness for the American Jewish immigrant community. The negative stereotypes of Yiddish actresses that did emerge reveal the immigrant community's anxieties about not achieving this balance either by being unable to acculturate, or by losing one's connection to Jewishness.

Jewish identity and Palestinian rights: diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel

Diaspora Jews are increasingly likely to criticise Israel and support Palestinian rights. In the USA, Europe and elsewhere, Jewish organisations have sprung up to oppose Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, facing harsh criticism from fellow Jews for their actions. Why and how has this movement come about? What does it mean for Palestinians and for diaspora Jews? Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights is a groundbreaking study of this vital and growing worldwide social movement, examining in depth how it challenges traditional diasporic Jewish representations of itself. It looks at why people join this movement and how they relate to the Palestinians and their struggle, asking searching questions about transnational solidarity movements.

Art and Sermons: Dominicans and the Jews in Florence’s Santa Maria Novella

This paper analyzes perceptions of the Jews by the Dominican friars in latemedieval Florence and focuses on the encounter between the Christian and Jewish worlds as manifested in Santa Maria Novella church in the oral and visual traditions. The intention is to examine the representations of Jews in a particular context, that of an Italian urban society in the late fourteenth century, especially in the context of mendicant activity, by studying both preaching and art in that context.The article shows the similarities and differences between the visual and the verbal in relation to the different media discussed, and analyzes the complexity of the Dominican perception of the Jews.

Tender males: Jewish figures as affective archive in East German DEFA film

ABSTRACTIn recent years, scholars have shown that the Holocaust was not absent in East German post-war film. Despite these efforts, the argument appears to persist that Jewish victims (and thus modes of empathy and grief) did not exist within DEFA's historical imaginary. In this article, I take the concept of the emotionalized Jewish male as a new lens through which to reexamine the relationship between the Holocaust and anti-fascist memory politics in East German film. Tracing representations of Jews from the 1940s to the 1970s, I demonstrate how DEFA films produced the ‘face’ of Jewish protagonists as an affective and ethical site where the spectator engages with the past in an anti-fascist post-Holocaust public sphere.

Performing Jewishness In and Out of the Classroom

As performance studies scholars and feminist teachers, we have long used embodied learning to help students apply the concepts we address in class. But in the Identity and Performance in the U.S. undergraduate seminar we taught together at Princeton in fall 2010, asking students to perform and embody the plays, theory, and history we read took on new resonances, as much of what they performed was, in fact, Jewish identity. Watching students who occupied a range of identity locations around Jewishness grapple with the implications of performing Jewishness--embodying both stereotypes and their deconstruction--gave us a new appreciation for how acutely and incisively performance can cut to the quick of political and theatrical quandaries about identity politics. Our goals in this essay are to clarify how performance circulated as both content and method in our course and to demonstrate how performance might be useful as a pedagogical mode for Jewish studies in general. Neither of us had formally taught a course in Jewish studies and performance before, although the field has been adjacent to our scholarship for years. In Stacy's examination of American musicals, the influence and prominence of Jewish men as lyricists, composers, librettists, producers, directors, and choreographers--for example, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, and Jerome Robbins--has been a notable part of the field's history and current practice. In Jill's work on feminist and lesbian theater in the US since 1960, the predominance of Jewish women such as Roberta Sklar, Sondra Segal, Clare Coss of the foundational Women's Experimental Theatre, and Deb Margolin of the historic Split Britches theater troupe, alongside playwrights such as Lisa Kron and performers such as new vaudevillian Sara Felder, has been significant and yet never purposefully investigated from a scholarly perspective. These lacunae in our own work and a small seed grant we received from Princeton's Center for the Study of Religion prompted us to develop our seminar, which culminated in a day-long public event, Good for the Jews? A Symposium of Scholars and Artists on Jewish Identity in American Theatre and Performance. As we began to select texts from the canon of contemporary Jewish theater and performance, we soon confronted the limits of our more-feminist-than-Jewish academic backgrounds with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949). Before teaching this seminar, we knew Miller was Jewish, and we had frequently taught Salesman, but simply as an American drama. Jill had written about the text from a feminist perspective to deconstruct notions of the unmarked and universal. Reading the extensive literature on Miller and the play's Jewishness opened a new slant on the play's particularity in its themes of integration, ambition, and success. (1) Thus we parsed the questions What is a Jewish play? and How do you know? with each text we assigned. The question Who is a Jew? haunted our class in fluid, flexible, and ever-changing ways, and identity was never simple or self-evident in our conversations. With a mixed group of students who identified as Jewish, half-Jewish, or not-Jewish, and some as religious, cultural, or ethnic Jews, every day we were surprised by the students' affiliations and associations, by how certain experiences did or did not accrue authenticity, and by what kinds of knowledge and experiences different students possessed. One student from Hawai'i, for example, who had not met a Jewish person before arriving at Princeton, bristled at the casual use of the term JAP among the Jewish students; for her, the epithet was offensive not as an acronym for Jewish American Princess, but because she could only hear it as a derogatory name for Japanese Americans. Moreover, with anthropology and religious studies majors in the room as well as a small cohort of serious theater students, book and theater performance knowledge productively supplemented experiential knowledge. …