The aim of the seminar is to rethink the legacy of Yiddish theatre as vital, rich and challenging one even for those living in Israel at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Professional Yiddish theatre emerged at a transitional period in which Jewish society was undergoing drastic changes: secularization, modernization, urbanization, immigration and political revolutions all left their mark on theatrical activity in Yiddish. The extraordinarily quick evolution of Yiddish theatre at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, and the large audiences it drew, turned it into a space of communal gathering, in which the main conflicts and fault-lines of culture were performed. In the seminar we will follow those fault-lines – between religion and secularism; between tradition and modernity; between Socialism and Capitalism; between Jewishness and cosmopolitanism – and examine how these were enacted onstage in body, space, and time. We will also trace the reverberations of Yiddish theatre's legacy in subsequent theatrical cultures in Israel and abroad.

The seminar will include a practical aspect, through which we will examine how one may perform the heritage of Yiddish theatre in contemporary culture.