A unique collection of plays that brings together stories of Jewish life from playwrights around the world. Curated and edited by an international theatre collective, these five plays showcase the dazzling multiplicity of Jewish narratives across the globe: the haunting, the challenging, the joyful. From a legendary North African warrior queen to queer French avant-garde artists during World War II; from Israel-Palestine tensions made personal to protests in Istanbul amidst intergenerational trauma, this is a genre-spanning collection that probes at the heart of what it means to be Jewish - past, present, and future. Curated by Jewish-Lebanese Brazilian queer theatre maker, the plays were performed at London's Bush Theatre as part of Global Voices Theatre's popular live events. At a sensitive time for Jewish communities in the UK and beyond, the original event Global Jewish Voices aimed to engage the UK Jewish community and make space for nuanced conversations and representation. This collection of selected plays is a legacy of the event and opens up avenues for wider audiences to read and perform the works.

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.

Gotthold Lessing (1729-81), playwright, critic, humanist philosopher and polemicist was a leading figure of the German enlightenment era. From his immense literary output two plays stand out - The Jews and Nathan the Wise - for the passion of the writing and the timeless urgency of the message. Though differing greatly in form and content, both plays are eloquent pleas for human beings to desist from mutual persecution on racial or religious grounds. The relevance of Lessing's thinking in today's world is all too clear. They are published here in new English versions by the award-winning translator, Noel Clark.

(Applause Books). Jewish playwrights and plays of Jewish interest intended for general audiences have been increasingly conspicuous on the American stage since the early 20th century. No wonder. The evolution of Jewish life in America teems with richly dramatic material: immigration, "making it," intergenerational family relationships, the impact of the Great Depression, two World Wars, the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel, and the emergence of feminism and alternative life styles. And pre-eminently and enduringly, the dilemma of identity: how to acculturate without losing one's Jewish identity. A retrospective of the American Jewish repertoire of the last 80 years tells us a good deal about how Jews have perceived themselves and America and how America has perceived Jews. Schiff's collections, Awake and Singing (1995) and Fruitful and Multiplying (1996) were the first ever to represent the magnitude and importance of the American Jewish repertoire. This new edition brings together five plays from those pioneering anthologies: Elmer Rice's Counsellor-at-Law ; Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing! ; Sylvia Regan's Morning Star ; Paddy Chayefsky's The Tenth Man ; and Herb Gardner's Conversations with My Father . They are joined by Broken Glass , Arthur Miller's first play to focus specifically on deeply disturbing American Jewish problems: assimilation, self-hatred and terrified awareness of the Nazi threat to European co-religionists. The introductory essay provides a cultural and historical overview and there are generous headnotes to each play.

Jewish plays in American theatre of the 1980s and 1990s which have their roots in the Jewish American works of the 1920sto the 1960s.

The professional Yiddish theatre started in 1876 in Eastern Europe; with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, masses of Eastern European Jews began moving westward, and New York—Manhattan’s Bowery and Second Avenue—soon became the world’s center of Yiddish theatre. At first the Yiddish repertoire revolved around comedies, operettas, and melodramas, but by the early 1890s America's Yiddish actors were wild about Shakespeare. In Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, Joel Berkowitz knowledgeably and intelligently constructs the history of this unique theatrical culture. The Jewish King Lear of 1892 was a sensation. The year 1893 saw the beginning of a bevy of Yiddish versions of Hamlet; that year also saw the first Yiddish production of Othello. Romeo and Juliet inspired a wide variety of treatments. The Merchant of Venice was the first Shakespeare play published in Yiddish, and Jacob Adler received rave reviews as Shylock on Broadway in both 1903 and 1905. Berkowitz focuses on these five plays in his five chapters. His introduction provides an orientation to the Yiddish theatre district in New York as well as the larger picture of Shakespearean production and the American theatre scene, and his conclusion summarizes the significance of Shakespeare’s plays in Yiddish culture.