Download or read book Landmark Yiddish Plays written by and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2010-03-10 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering snapshots of a pivotal era in which the Jews of Europe made the transition from a traditional to a more modern world, the Yiddish plays translated and collected here wrestle with issues that continue to concern us today: changing gender roles, generational conflict, class divisions, and religious persecution. In their introduction to the volume, Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber place the plays in the context of the development of modern drama and Yiddish drama and examine their treatment of social, political, and religious issues. The many ways in which the plays address these issues make them transcend their own time, exciting a new generation of readers and theatergoers.
Download or read book Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage written by Joel Berkowitz and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collects leading scholars' insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater. While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators' responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performance in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and span a century and a half and three continents, beyond the heyday of a Yiddish stage that was nearly eradicated by the Holocaust, to its post-war life in Western Europe and Israel. Each chapter takes its own distinct approach to its subject and is accompanied by an appendix consisting of primary material, much of it available in English translation for the first time, to enrich readers' appreciation of the issues explored and also to serve as supplementary classroom texts. Chapters explore Yiddish theater across a broad geographical span--from Poland and Russia to France, the United States, Argentina, and Israel and Palestine. Readers will spend time with notable individuals and troupes; meet creators, critics, and audiences; sample different dramatic genres; and learn about issues that preoccupied both artists and audiences. The final section presents an extensive bibliography of book-length works and scholarly articles on Yiddish drama and theater, the most comprehensive resource of its kind. Collectively these essays illuminate the modern Yiddish stage as a phenomenon that was constantly reinventing itself and simultaneously examining and questioning that very process. Scholars of Jewish performance and those interested in theater history will appreciate this wide-ranging volume.
Download or read book The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater written by Alyssa Quint and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish Book Award Finalist: “Turns the fascinating life of Avrom Goldfaden into a multi-dimensional history of the Yiddish theater’s formative years.” —Jeffery Veidinger, author of Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire In this book, Alyssa Quint focuses on the early years of the modern Yiddish theater, from roughly 1876 to 1883, through the works of one of its best-known and most colorful figures, Avrom Goldfaden. Goldfaden (né Goldenfaden, 1840-1908) was one of the first playwrights to stage a commercially viable Yiddish-language theater, first in Romania and then in Russia. Goldfaden’s work was rapidly disseminated in print and his plays were performed frequently for Jewish audiences. Sholem Aleichem considered him as a forger of a new language that “breathed the European spirit into our old jargon.” Quint uses Goldfaden’s theatrical works as a way to understand the social life of Jewish theater in Imperial Russia. Through a study of his libretti, she looks at the experiences of Russian Jewish actors, male and female, to explore connections between culture as artistic production and culture in the sense of broader social structures. Quint explores how Jewish actors who played Goldfaden’s work on stage absorbed the theater into their everyday lives. Goldfaden’s theater gives a rich view into the conduct, ideology, religion, and politics of Jews during an important moment in the history of late Imperial Russia.
Download or read book Modern Jewish Plays written by Jason Sherman and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Six plays, six playwrights, six takes on Israel.
Download or read book Nine Contemporary Jewish Plays written by Ellen Schiff and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2005-11-01 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish theatre—plays about and usually by Jews—enters the twenty-first century with a long and distinguished history. To keep this vibrant tradition alive, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture established the New Play Commissions in Jewish Theatre in 1994. The commissions are awarded in an annual competition. Their goal is to help emerging and established dramatists develop new works in collaboration with a wide variety of theatres. Since its inception, the New Play Commissions has contributed support to more than seventy-five professional productions, staged readings, and workshops. This anthology brings together nine commissioned plays that have gone on to full production. Ellen Schiff and Michael Posnick have selected works that reflect many of the historical and social forces that have shaped contemporary Jewish experience and defined Jewish identity—among them, surviving the Holocaust, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the lives of newcomers in America, Israel, and Argentina. Following a foreword by Theodore Bikel, the editors provide introductory explanations of the New Play Commissions and an overview of Jewish theatre. The playwrights comment on the genesis of their work and its production history.
Download or read book Queering the Text written by Andrew Ramer and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ramer plays and grapples with traditional midrashim, drawing inspiration from the homoerotic love poems of medieval Spain, and envisioning alternate versions of the present. Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, he has crafted stories that anchor LGBT lives in the 3,000-year-old history of the Jewish people.
Download or read book Yiddish Theatre written by Author Joel Berkowitz and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2008-03-06 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays conveys a broad range of fundamental ideas about Yiddish theatre and its importance in Jewish life as a reflection of aesthetic, social, and political trends and concerns. The contributions cover such topics as the Yiddish repertoire, including the purimshpil and the relationship between Yiddish drama and the broader European dramatic tradition; the historiography of the Yiddish theatre; the role of music; censorship, both by governmental authorities and from within the Jewish community; and the politics of Yiddish theatre criticism. Taken as a whole, these essays make a significant contribution to our understanding of Jewish literature and culture in eastern Europe and the United States.
Download or read book The Last Seder written by Jennifer Maisel and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Price family gathers together for one last Passover together, where the seder rituals allow them to find a way to say goodbye to their father and husband Marvin, who has been lost to Alzheimer's, and move on with their lives.
Download or read book Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity written by Mitchell Bryan Hart and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the emergence and development of an organized, institutionalized Jewish social science, and explores the increasing importance of statistics and other modes of analysis for Jewish elites throughout Europe and the United States. The Zionist movement provided the initial impetus as it looked to the social sciences to provide the knowledge of contemporary Jewish life deemed necessary for nationalist revival. The social sciences offered empirical evidence of the ambiguous condition of the Jewish diaspora, and also charted emancipation and assimilation, viewed as dissolutions of and threats to Jewish identity. Liberal, assimilationist scholars also utilized social science data to demonstrate the continuing viability of Jewish life in the diaspora. Jewish social science grew out of a sustained effort to understand and explain the effects of modernization on Jewry. Above all, Jewish scholars sought to give the enormous transformations undergone by Jewry in the nineteenth century a larger meaning and significance
Download or read book The Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Nazi Berlin written by Rebecca Rovit and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2012-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Revealing the complex interplay between history and human lives under conditions of duress, Rebecca Rovit focuses on the eight-year odyssey of Berlin's Jewish Kulturbund Theatre. By examining why and how an all-Jewish repertory theatre could coexist with the Nazi regime. Rovit raises broader questions about the nature of art in an environment of coercion and isolation, artistic integrity and adaptability, and community and identity."--BACK COVER.
Download or read book Six Plays of the Yiddish Theatre written by David Pinski and published by . This book was released on 1916 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CONTENTS.- D. Pinski: Abigail, Forgotten souls.- S.J. Rabinowitsch: She must marry a doctor.- S. Ash: Winter, The sinner.- P. Hirschbein: In the dark.
Download or read book The Invention of the Land of Israel written by Shlomo Sand and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-11-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is a homeland and when does it become a national territory? Why have so many people been willing to die for such places throughout the twentieth century? What is the essence of the Promised Land? Following the acclaimed and controversial The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand examines the mysterious sacred land that has become the site of the longest-running national struggle of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The Invention of the Land of Israel deconstructs the age-old legends surrounding the Holy Land and the prejudices that continue to suffocate it. Sand’s account dissects the concept of “historical right” and tracks the creation of the modern concept of the “Land of Israel” by nineteenth-century Evangelical Protestants and Jewish Zionists. This invention, he argues, not only facilitated the colonization of the Middle East and the establishment of the State of Israel; it is also threatening the existence of the Jewish state today.
Download or read book Jewish Primitivism written by Samuel J. Spinner and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the beginning of the twentieth century, Jewish writers and artists across Europe began depicting fellow Jews as savages or "primitive" tribesmen. Primitivism—the European appreciation of and fascination with so-called "primitive," non-Western peoples who were also subjugated and denigrated—was a powerful artistic critique of the modern world and was adopted by Jewish writers and artists to explore the urgent questions surrounding their own identity and status in Europe as insiders and outsiders. Jewish primitivism found expression in a variety of forms in Yiddish, Hebrew, and German literature, photography, and graphic art, including in the work of figures such as Franz Kafka, Y.L. Peretz, S. An-sky, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Moï Ver. In Jewish Primitivism, Samuel J. Spinner argues that these and other Jewish modernists developed a distinct primitivist aesthetic that, by locating the savage present within Europe, challenged the idea of the threatening savage other from outside Europe on which much primitivism relied: in Jewish primitivism, the savage is already there. This book offers a new assessment of modern Jewish art and literature and shows how Jewish primitivism troubles the boundary between observer and observed, cultured and "primitive," colonizer and colonized.
Download or read book Jewish Salonica written by Devin Naar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.
Download or read book The Jewish Decadence written by Jonathan Freedman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2021-04-26 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Freedman's final book is a tour de force that examines the history of Jewish involvement in the decadent art movement. While decadent art's most notorious practitioner was Oscar Wilde, as a movement it spread through western Europe and even included a few adherents in Russia. Jewish writers and artists such as Catulle Mèndes, Gustav Kahn, and Simeon Solomon would portray non-stereotyped characters and produce highly influential works. After decadent art's peak, Walter Benjamin, Marcel Proust, and Sigmund Freud would take up the idiom of decadence and carry it with them during the cultural transition to modernism. Freedman expertly and elegantly takes readers through this transition and beyond, showing the lineage of Jewish decadence all the way through to the end of the twentieth century"--
Download or read book Capturing the Moon written by and published by Behrman House Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirty-six classic and modern Jewish folk tales.
Download or read book The Last Kings of Shanghai written by Jonathan Kaufman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In vivid detail... examines the little-known history of two extraordinary dynasties."--The Boston Globe "Not just a brilliant, well-researched, and highly readable book about China's past, it also reveals the contingencies and ironic twists of fate in China's modern history."--LA Review of Books An epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist The Sassoons and the Kadoories stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than one hundred seventy-five years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and nearly losing everything as the Communists swept into power. Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families ignited an economic boom and opened China to the world, but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil on their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival.
