Download or read book Making Americans written by Andrea Most and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1925 to 1951--three chaotic decades of depression, war, and social upheaval--Jewish writers brought to the musical stage a powerfully appealing vision of America fashioned through song and dance. It was an optimistic, meritocratic, selectively inclusive America in which Jews could at once lose and find themselves--assimilation enacted onstage and off, as Andrea Most shows. This book examines two interwoven narratives crucial to an understanding of twentieth-century American culture: the stories of Jewish acculturation and of the development of the American musical. Here we delve into the work of the most influential artists of the genre during the years surrounding World War II--Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Dorothy and Herbert Fields, George and Ira Gershwin, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz Hart, and Richard Rodgers--and encounter new interpretations of classics such as The Jazz Singer, Whoopee, Girl Crazy, Babes in Arms, Oklahoma!, Annie Get Your Gun, South Pacific, and The King and I. Most's analysis reveals how these brilliant composers, librettists, and performers transformed the experience of New York Jews into the grand, even sacred acts of being American. Read in the context of memoirs, correspondence, production designs, photographs, and newspaper clippings, the Broadway musical clearly emerges as a form by which Jewish artists negotiated their entrance into secular American society. In this book we see how the communities these musicals invented and the anthems they popularized constructed a vision of America that fostered self-understanding as the nation became a global power.
Download or read book Theatre and Judaism written by Yair Lipshitz and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-03-16 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new title in the Theatre & series explores the intersections between theatre and Judaism, offering a uniquely nuanced approach as a counterpart to the more common discourse surrounding Jewish theatre. Arguing that theatre allows for a subtle engagement with religious heritage that does not easily fall into a religious/secular dichotomy, it examines the ways in which Jewish tradition lends itself to theatrical performance. With rigorous scholarship and a fresh perspective, Theatre and Judaism promotes a transnational and comparative approach, considering Judaism as a religious-cultural tradition rather than focusing on a particular national context. Exciting and thought-provoking, this is the perfect companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students of theatre or religious studies.
Download or read book Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context written by Edna Nahshon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-04-03 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jewish theater practitioners, playwrights, critics, financiers and audiences have played an enormous role in the development of the European and American theater. Jews and Theater in an Intercultural Context, a collection of essays by an international cadre of theater scholars, addresses this subject. Focusing on the role of Jews and Jewishness in the theatrical field it discusses the representation of Jews on the American, European, and South American stage, with a strong emphasis on twentieth century theater and the contemporary theatrical scene.
Download or read book Jewish Theatre A Global View written by Edna Nahshon and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-07-30 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a frequently used term, Jewish Theatre has become a contested concept that defies precise definition. Is it theatre by Jews? For Jews? About Jews? Though there are no easy answers for these questions, Jewish Theatre: A Global View, contributes greatly to the conversation by offering an impressive collection of original essays written by an international cadre of noted scholars from Europe, the United States, and Israel. The essays discuss historical and current texts and performance practices, covering a wide gamut of genres and traditions.
Download or read book New York s Yiddish Theater written by Edna Nahshon and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women's rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York's Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country's cultural and artistic development.
Download or read book Theatrical Liberalism written by Andrea Most and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Makes new sense of aspects of popular culture we have all grown up with and thought we knew only too well. Most bridges religious studies and theater, political theory and American studies, high criticism and middlebrow performance. Her book will help us see better how Jews and their Jewishness did not merely ‘enter’ American popular culture, but did so much to invent it.”—Jonathan Boyarin Leonard and Tobee Kaplan Distinguished Professor of Modern Jewish Thought, University of North Carolina For centuries, Jews were one of the few European cultures without any official public theatrical tradition. Yet in the modern era, Jews were among the most important creators of popular theater and film–especially in America. Why? In Theatrical Liberalism, Andrea Most illustrates how American Jews used the theatre and other media to navigate their encounters with modern culture, politics, religion, and identity, negotiating a position for themselves within and alongside Protestant American liberalism by reimagining key aspects of traditional Judaism as theatrical. Discussing works as diverse as the Hebrew Bible, The Jazz Singer, and Death of a Salesman—among many others—Most situates American popular culture in the multiple religious traditions that informed the worldviews of its practitioners. Offering a comprehensive history of the role of Judaism in the creation of American entertainment, Theatrical Liberalism re-examines the distinction between the secular and the religious in both Jewish and American contexts, providing a new way of understanding Jewish liberalism and its place in a pluralist society. With extensive scholarship and compelling evidence, Theatrical Liberalism shows how the Jewish worldview that permeates American culture has reached far beyond the Jews who created it.
Download or read book Transposing Broadway written by S. Hecht and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last hundred years, musical theatre artists - from Berlin to Rodgers and Hammerstein to Sondheim - have developed a form that corresponds directly to the Americanization of the increasingly Jewish New York audience; and that audience's aspirations and concerns have played out in the shows themselves. Musicals thus became a paradigm which instructed newcomers in how to assimilate while correspondingly envisioning "American Dream" America as democratic and inclusive. Broadway musicals still continue to function today as "cultural Ellis Islands" for fringe populations seeking acceptance into the nation's mainstream - including women, blacks, Latinos, and gays - all essentially modeled upon the Jewish example. Stuart J. Hecht offers a fascinatingexamination of the relationship between Jews, assimilation, and the changing face of the American musical.
Download or read book The Judaic Nature of Israeli Theatre written by Dan Urian and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-19 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theatre has, since the time of the Jewish Enlightenment, served the secular community in its conflict with the religious. This book surveys the secular-religious rift and then describes the enhanced concern of the secular community in Israel for its own Jewishness and its expression in the theatre - especially following the 1967 War. It then moves on to a specific study of the play Bruira and finally reviews the phenomenon of the return to Orthodox Judaism by secular individuals.
Download or read book Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre written by Jeanette R. Malkin and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2010-04-15 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While it is common knowledge that Jews were prominent in literature, music, cinema, and science in pre-1933 Germany, the fascinating story of Jewish co-creation of modern German theatre is less often discussed. Yet for a brief time, during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, Jewish artists and intellectuals moved away from a segregated Jewish theatre to work within canonic German theatre and performance venues, claiming the right to be part of the very fabric of German culture. Their involvement, especially in the theatre capital of Berlin, was of a major magnitude both numerically and in terms of power and influence. The essays in this stimulating collection etch onto the conventional view of modern German theatre the history and conflicts of its Jewish participants in the last third of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries and illuminate the influence of Jewish ethnicity in the creation of the modernist German theatre. The nontraditional forms and themes known as modernism date roughly from German unification in 1871 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. This is also the period when Jews acquired full legal and trade equality, which enabled their ownership and directorship of theatre and performance venues. The extraordinary artistic innovations that Germans and Jews co-created during the relatively short period of this era of creativity reached across the old assumptions, traditions, and prejudices that had separated people as the modern arts sought to reformulate human relations from the foundations to the pinnacles of society. The essayists, writing from a variety of perspectives, carve out historical overviews of the role of theatre in the constitution of Jewish identity in Germany, the position of Jewish theatre artists in the cultural vortex of imperial Berlin, the role played by theatre in German Jewish cultural education, and the impact of Yiddish theatre on German and Austrian Jews and on German theatre. They view German Jewish theatre activity through Jewish philosophical and critical perspectives and examine two important genres within which Jewish artists were particularly prominent: the Cabaret and Expressionist theatre. Finally, they provide close-ups of the Jewish artists Alexander Granach, Shimon Finkel, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner. By probing the interplay between “Jewish” and “German” cultural and cognitive identities based in the field of theatre and performance and querying the effect of theatre on Jewish self-understanding, they add to the richness of intercultural understanding as well as to the complex history of theatre and performance in Germany.
Download or read book Jews on Broadway written by Stewart F. Lane and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-04-26 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fanny Brice, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Barbra Streisand, Alan Menken, Stephen Sondheim--Jewish performers, composers, lyricists, directors, choreographers and producers have made an indelible mark on Broadway for more than a century. Award-winning producer Stewart F. Lane chronicles the emergence of Jewish American theater, from immigrants producing Yiddish plays in the ghettos of New York's Lower East Side to legendary performers staging massive shows on Broadway. In its expanded second edition, this historical survey includes new information and photographs, along with insights and anecdotes from a life in the theater.
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 The Jewish Theatre written by and published by . This book was released on 1970 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rainbow Jews written by Jonathan C. Friedman and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2007 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rainbow Jews deals with the intersection of gay and Jewish identity in American and Israeli film and theater, from the 1960s to the present. Its main area of interest is the extent to which Jewish creative voices in the performing arts have constructed multidimensional images of, and a welcoming public space for, the gay, lesbian, and transgendered community as a whole. Through a close reading of the texts of numerous American and Israeli plays and films (some famous, but mostly lesser known), the author evaluates some of the key conventions and tropes that have been employed to construct, critique, and reflect the social reality of the connection between Jewishness and gay identity in the United States and Israel. Secondarily, the author explores ways in which gay-Jewish playwrights and filmmakers have assisted the re-evaluation of sexual norms within Judaism over the past three decades, inspiring and reinforcing measures across the spectrum of belief geared towards integrating Jewish members of the GLBT community into the overall Jewish historical narrative.
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 Israeli Theatre written by Naphtaly Shem-Tov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book conceptualizes Mizrahi (Middle Eastern Jewish) theatre, unfolding its performances in the field of Israeli theatre with a critical gaze. It covers the conceptualization and typology, not along a chronological axis, but rather through seven theatrical forms. The author suggests a defi nition of Mizrahi theatre that has fl uid boundaries and it can encompass various possibilities for self-representation onstage. Although Mizrahi theatre began to develop in the 1970s, the years since the turn of the millennium have seen an intense flowering of theatrical works by second- and third-generation artists dealing with issues of identity and narrative in a diverse array of forms. Mizrahi theatre is a cultural locus of self-representation, generally created by Mizrahi artists who deal with content, social experiences, cultural, religious, and traditional foundations, and artistic languages derived from the history and social reality of Mizrahi Jews in both Israel and their Middle Eastern countries of origin. Critically surveying Mizrahi theatre in Israel, the book is a key resource for students and academics interested in theatre and performance studies, and Jewish and Israeli studies.
Download or read book New Jewish Voices written by Edward M. Cohen and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New Jewish Voices presents the first anthology of modern Jewish-American drama. These highly acclaimed plays, previously produced by New York City's nationally-renowned Jewish Repertory Theatre, offer an enjoyable and eye-opening introduction to the unique and modern voice of five young writers. The insights and visions of these playwrights will help redefine Jewish theater. While offering college students and amateur dramatic groups exciting new material, these five plays will entertain and delight every reader. An introduction by Edward M. Cohen, associate director of Jewish Repertory Theatre, outlines the history of Jewish theatre in America, the origins and development of the Jewish Repertory Theatre, the methods and programs of play development used at the theatre, and an analysis of current trends in modern Jewish playwriting. The anthology also includes production photos, a list of all plays produced by the theatre, and original scripts.
Download or read book Nostalgia in Jewish American Theatre and Film 1979 2004 written by Ben Furnish and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2005 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nostalgia, a bittersweet yearning for the past, is an important element in Jewish-American performances of the late twentieth century. Numerous plays and films of this time use nostalgia to engage Jewish, including Yiddish, cultural themes and images. Nostalgia offers audiences a window through which to examine past and current social changes. These include American Jews' departure from Europe to America, the city for the suburbs, Yiddish for English, as well as the civil rights, women's, peace, and gay and lesbian movements, and other transformations. These performances illustrate how theatre and film transmit culture from generation to generation and between one ethnic community and the wider American scene.
