The Sounds of Sephardic Identity

Shirley here.

Last Sunday we hosted the fabulous musician and musicologist Ramón Tasat for a Post Show Panel Discussion titled: Sephardic Identity–An Encounter through Music. Stephen Stern, Theater J Council Member, led the conversation. We’ve posted some highlights (including several incredible musical excerpts) on Vimeo.

Sephardic Identity – An Encounter Through Music from Theater J on Vimeo.

And speaking of Vimeo, I’ll take this opportunity to point folks towards some of the discussions we recorded and posted earlier this season, during the run of OUR CLASS. The first was a pre-show talk that Jan Gross gave (author of the book Neighbors–which inspired the play); the second is a panel co-sponsored by the Polish embassy with esteemed guests:
• Tadeusz Słobodzianek, playwright of OUR CLASS
• Mr. Krzysztof Persak, Ph.D, Director of the Institute of National Remembrance President’s Office
• Derek Goldman, Director of OUR CLASS
• Allen Kuharski, Chair of the Department of Theater at Swarthmore College and an authority on Polish theater and drama

We love continuing the conversation beyond the stage, and this play gave us much to discuss. Follow us here on the blog and on Vimeo to keep up with the latest discussions!

Our Class Pre Show Discussion with Jan Gross at Theater J from Theater J on Vimeo.

THE WHIPPING MAN Field Trip to Richmond

As THE WHIPPING MAN finished its first week of rehearsal, director Jennifer Nelson and stage manager Karen Currie scheduled for a cast field trip to Richmond, Virginia–where the Civil War drama takes place.

The trip included a drive along Monument Avenue–where the city honors its Confederate heroes;  a tour of downtown Richmond, past the current Capitol Building; and of course, a visit to Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy.

Actor Mark Hairston reads about the build-up to the Civil War

Staging Dialogue at Theater J (Part 3) – The Community Conversation About Israel Outside the Cultural Sphere

from Staging Dialogue at Theater J: Negotiating Israeli Politics in Jewish Communal Encounters  by Elliot Leffler, University of Minnesota

(the essay starts here, and continues with part 3 below)

The Current Conversation (Or Lack Thereof)

In a 2010 article in The New York Review of Books, Peter Beinart argues that the major institutions that shape public opinion in the American Jewish community have actively discouraged an open conversation about Israeli politics.  By “defending virtually anything any Israeli government does” and publicly discrediting the human rights group that critique government policy, organizations like American-Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Anti-Defamation League set a tone for Jewish-American rhetoric that elides critical thought and nuanced conversation.  They have created a dogma for the Jewish community of what it means to be pro-Israel – a dogma which allows for little dissent (Beinart np).

Inside the primary local institutions of Jewish life in the US – synagogues – Jewish communities often speak the tropes that are modeled by the national organizations, or elide the conversation entirely.   In part, this is because we think of the synagogue primarily as a space for prayer.  When we pray, we speak in unison, move in unison, and refer to ourselves in the first-person plural, nurturing a sense of one-ness or communitas.[1]

([1] “Communitas,” according to anthropologist Victor Turner, is a sense of invigorating, inspiring unity catalyzed by community ritual (Turner 1982 47-48).)

As we do so, we inherently discourage dissent.  (The same resistance happens at other ritual gatherings, in which the ritual event also promotes a sense of communitas: Shabbat dinners, Passover Seders, family reunions, etc.)  Moreover, the pro-Israel symbolism within synagogues (flags in the sanctuary, Israeli art in the lobby, prayers for the State of Israel, etc) enables us to avoid an explicit conversation of how we differ in our feelings about Israel.  These symbols preserve a sense of peace and cohesion in the congregation, as they allow members of a wide variety of ideological stances (left-wing Zionists and right-wing Zionists, for example) to adopt the same symbolism.  We foreground that which we have in common, and privately, we nuance those similarities in very different ways (Cohen 18).

Anthony Cohen suggests that this ability of community to contain discordance is its “great triumph.”  This allows community members to establish a commonality that need not amount to a uniformity (20).  But, if there is no opportunity for community members to discuss, challenge, and refine their ideas, then Zygmunt Bauman argues that community becomes an oppressive place, in which we sacrifice freedom (to think independently) on the altar of communal security (4-5). As I argued in the previous section of this paper, the individuals who comprise the American Jewish community feel an increasing need to discuss and to question Israeli policy.  The emergence of more and more explicitly political plays about Israel throughout the past three decades attests to that need.  But rather than developing this dialogue in institutions that might accommodate a range of opinions, the Jewish community has largely splintered into opposing publics: a right-wing public that circulates its ideas through AIPAC, the ADL, the magazine Commentary, and other institutions, and a left-wing counter-public that circulates its ideas through the NIF, Americans for Peace Now, J Street, and the magazine Tikkun. This bifurcation into separate public spheres has impoverished the Jewish communal dialogue, creating a dual set of dogmas rather than establishing a dynamic space of open conversation and questioning.[2]

([2] A public, according to Michael Warner, is a space of discourse that organizes itself around an uptake of texts and a circulation of responses to those texts.  For instance, the right-wing Jewish magazine Commentary has a readership that engages with each other, through Commentary (and perhaps also through press releases from the ADL, AIPAC, and other Jewish organizations).  This readership constitutes a public.  I’m suggesting that left-wing Jewish organizations and publications, such as Tikkun, have created a counter-public – a public with a subordinate power status that organizes itself in opposition to a dominant public (Warner 2002).  Thus, the discourse largely takes place in two separate spheres. )

Theater J’s programming suggests that perhaps theatre can succeed where other institutions have failed. Plays that express a political opinion – or a number of conflicting opinions – engage audiences in a version of the dialogue that generally seems elusive within the American Jewish community.  Daniele Klapproth argues, after Deborah Tannen, that the process of watching a play is cognitively an active process of narrative involvement: as audience members make sense out of the images and sounds that originate on stage, they participate in a joint interactional achievement with the performers.  They engage in a silent conversation on issues they have been unable to discuss at their synagogues or their other Jewish gatherings.  In producing plays like Pangs of the Messiah and Return to Haifa, and staging readings like Seven Jewish Children, Theater J stimulates this nonverbal “conversation” with its audiences.

Yet Theater J also goes a step further than this silent conversation.  It has structured its programming to include extensive post-show discussions after every production of controversial plays like Return to Haifa and every staged reading of plays like Seven Jewish Children.  The theatre then supplements these conversations, which often last an hour or longer, with periodic “Peace Café” programs in which patrons gather with drinks and snacks to discuss the issues further.  Afterwards, the interactive Theater J blog is available for a continued conversation.  Thus, audience members can extend the conversation – a conversation which began as a tacit but active cognitive interaction with the performers – into a verbal and written engagement with other members of the Washington, DC Jewish community. 

WHY I SUPPORT THEATER J

Dear Ari,

This email is in response to the “Citizens Opposed to Propaganda Masquerading as Art” (COPMA) letter attacking Theater J. The reaction of some in our community to Obama’s Middle East speech suggests that we need Theater J now more than ever.

It saddened me to see the COPMA letter. It is yet another example of the closed-minded fear to which our community is vulnerable. I write as as someone who was mentioned in the letter along with all the other panelists who participated in post-show discussions after the play, “Return to Haifa,” and as someone who has always been proud of my Jewish heritage. An active member of my synagogue, I have long been involved in the greater Jewish community, working as far back as the early 1980s for the Jewish Agency, the Joint Distribution Committee, and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry. I am also raising my children to be proud that they are Jewish and over the past several years our family has celebrated both our sons becoming bar mitzvah.

Those who wrote the letter think they are helping Israel and the Jewish people. The opposite is true. They are hurting the prospects for a peaceful, 2-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict and trampling on the values that define us as a people.

Theater J, with you as its courageous and creative artistic director, advances prospects for peace and understanding through the Voices from a Changing Middle East series of performances and after-show discussions. Is it anti-Israel to bring to a U.S. Jewish community stage the work of an Israeli artist, like the playwright who adapted, with some significant modifications from the Palestinian novella, “Return to Haifa” ? Is it anti-Israel and anti-Semitic to be open and honest? This play explores difficult issues for both Israelis and Palestinians. Some Israelis and American Jews may not want to hear that Israel has faults and that there were Jewish actions in 1948 that terrorized Palestinians and forced many of them to flee. And some Palestinians may not want to hear that Jews, like the holocaust survivors portrayed in the play, are unwilling to abandon the dream of a Jewish state.

The only way forward is to understand that the people on the other side are human beings who want the same things we do – a good life for themselves and their children. Demonizing them as a monolithic force bent on our destruction gets us nowhere. When we label another group as the cause of all that is wrong, we box ourselves into a corner by creating a circular argument and a self-fulfilling prophesy. If, for example, we say we don’t have a partner for peace because Palestinians and other Arabs are by definition our enemies, then we will, indeed, never have a partner for peace because we will never be able to see them any other way, no matter what they do. Such intransigence breeds more of the same in those we characterize as incapable of change. Hardened hearts mirror each other and create a vicious cycle. This is the COPMA approach.

It ignores a more nunaced reality that offers opportunities for peace. I personally know many Palestinians, both Muslim and Christian, who advocate nonviolence and are working with others here and in the region for a negotiated, sustainable resolution to the conflict for both peoples. Their Israeli counterparts include former heads of the Shin Bet and the Mossad, former military leaders and diplomats, and the son and daughter of slain prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Only when both sides open up can they move out of conflict. Theater J’s plays and post-show discussions – and I have been to many – facilitate this desparately needed openness by creating a safe space for listening, learning, and growing. It is not just Jews who listen and grow, but the Palestinian participants, too. They are challenged by a range of perspectives, including seeing Zionism through Jewish eyes. They see how emotionally connected many Jews are to Israel, how torn many of us feel over what is happening there, and how honestly we are willing to examine it and ourselves. Such candor encourages them to explore their own preconceptions.

This is not bashing Israel. This is asking questions and wrestling with it. This is what Jews do.

Whether at the seder table or the kitchen table on all other nights of the year, my grandfather, may he rest in peace, always taught me to ask questions, to try and see all sides of an argument, and to seek justice and pursue it. And he taught me never to see others as less than ourselves, for we, too, were once, and for many centuries have been, outcasts in a foreign land. This, he would tell me in his slight Yiddish accent, as he sat in his Bronx apartment under a painting of rabbis davening in their tallis and tfellin, is our heritage. These are the values that have sustained our people. Your work, Ari, and Theater J epitomize them.

Yasher koach,

–Kay Halpern
Silver Spring

Theater J Plays the FDIC

Last Wednesday, May 12, Theater J actor Alexander Strain and I went out to Arlington, VA and presented a program before 400 at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation main offices, on a video simulcast that went to hundreds of branch offices throughout the country. The program, sponsored by the FDIC’s Office of Diversity and Engagement was to observe Jewish American Heritage Month, signed into law only recently. President Obama’s proclamation, “calling upon all Americans to observe this month with appropriate programs, activities, and ceremonies to celebrate the heritage and contributions of Jewish Americans” appears below, as does the cover of their very handsome program. Below that, notes from my talk (one day we’ll turn it into something more formal).

I modified the title of my talk to create more of a link with the work done by the fine folks at the FDIC, and so presented a talk on “Stress Tests” — How drama forges revelation by putting ideas, institutions, and individuals to a dramatic test, heightening tensions to reveal character… in the same ways that the FDIC puts banks through stress tests to assess whether large U.S. banks can survive a protracted slump.

Stress Testing and The Idea Made Flesh – Transforming the Philosophical into Action at Theater J

I am honored to speak here today at the FDIC as part of Jewish American Heritage Month observances. You’ve invited the Artistic Director of a Jewish Theater to help you Appreciate What This Particular Heritage Means. What do we as Americans appreciate about being Jewish? What do we value most in our culture? For me, it’s our heritage of inquiry.

Of reading carefully and questioning our inheritance; putting our biblical and mishnaic narratives under a microscope. From this rabbinic tradition, taught in our houses of learning and worship, a discourse of jurisprudence emerged (and that’s why Jews, of course, have made good lawyers; practice). As it applies to Jewish law, we call this forum for hypothesizing, parsing and explication the Talmud.

As it applies to Jewish behavior, identity, and the way we live our lives—WHAT KIND OF PEOPLE WE ARE and how we record that, and analyze that–we call that Literature; the scrutinized unfolding of our lives.  Taking those words off the page, and bringing them to life in five dimensions: we call this is the act of Drama.

What type of drama do we do at Theater J?

Dramas that show us who we are; not merely by holding up a mirror and recording our debates; our dilemmas – but in putting those dilemmas to a test. Our Dramatists conduct stress tests on a little depository of ideas called the family; the community; we put a community to a test.

We are a community full of teeming diversity – a many splendored, divergently opinionated people.

We are a theater that celebrates its heritage and also lives by the highest standard of its art. And so we take the notion of “Jewish peoplehood” and put that to the test; into the smythie of a dramatic crucible to examine the fractures and fissures, and to argue for a strengthened and more unified/fused amalgam to emerge.

We take an idea–like responsibility to our parents–and put that to the test. We take a question, a proposition, and infuse it with it tension, contentiousness, high stakes. This pertains to comedy as well as drama; to musicals as well as to straight plays. The theater is ABOUT Heightened Stakes.

Theater J often subjects OUR OWN LOCAL COMMUNITY TO A STRESS TEST. Sometimes this yields controversy. More hopefully, it sheds light; it clarifies internal conflict simmering beneath the surface. It reveals something of our nature, in how we respond.

Theater J is also SUBJECTED to stress tests itself. For example today, as we receive a less than enthusiastic review in our paper of record for a show we believe in and that audiences are embracing. This ”ding” tests our mettle; how will we–and our show persevere when external affirmation is less than forthcoming? Is that why we produced the play in the first place? For a good grade in the paper? Where do we find the internal affirmation to keep driving forward?

Stress tests, therefore, can often result in a stronger constitution, even if they’re initially painful to experience.

Let’s explore some case examples:

Sean Dugan (David) and Bill Hamlin (Richard Resnick) in Spring Forward, Fall Back

SPRING FORWARD/FALL BACK — in which case the subject is the family: and the stress test is Time and the inexorable force of cultural assimilation

“It’s powerful to realize that you are not alone”

Shirley here, with some reflections on the past week.

As you’ve been reading in Ari’s entries—we spent Monday and Tuesday of this week downtown at the Grand Hyatt, attending the first J Street Conference. And by “we” I mean—Ari, me, several of our Theater J Council members, handfuls of other Theater J friends and subscribers, and about 1,450 other folks who fit somewhere along the “Pro-Peace, Pro-Israel” spectrum. How was it? Exciting. Enlightening. Exhausting.

There was a shortage of chairs. They expected 1,000 people to attend, but something along the lines of 1,500 showed up. So no matter where you went, or what session you were attending, there were usually too few chairs. So people hunkered down on knees, sat cross-legged in corners, and leaned against walls. The most important thing, it seemed, was to BE THERE, to LISTEN.

When you work at a theater and something like this comes up, a conference or an event out of town, something that takes you away from your DESK, from your WORK, there is always a voice in the back of your mind wondering “Should I be here? Am I falling behind in all of the IMPORTANT STUFF I have to do at my desk? Was this WORTH IT?” my feeling after two days at the conference and now one day back at the office is that, it would have been negligent NOT to have been there. With the amount of programming we do around Israel and the middle east it seems absolutely necessary that we check in and put our collective Theater J finger on the pulse of that world. What are people thinking about? What are they advocating for? What bothers them? What excites them?

Did you miss Theater J on TV?

WETA is broadcasting a six-hour documentary, “The Jewish Americans,” in three parts. Following each the segment, a companion piece will focus on the Washington area’s Jewish community.  Last night’s segmant featured Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth and focused on The Jewish Influence on Theater.

But don’t worry, you can still watch it over the internet! Click here to access the online video.

Click here for more information on the series.

Latest Talk (plus a visual rendering of the salient themes!)

Talk for the Kehila Chadasha Havura in Bethesda, MD
(edited to avoid some repetitions from earlier postings)
Given Sunday morning, November 14
rendering by Diane H Cline

I.

It’s been in the air and on our blog and newsletter and soon to be broadcast over national TV in the 3-part PBS Special Called “The Jewish Americans” — Some bigger questions about what we’re doing in the Jewish arts – why we’re doing it – and who are we doing it for.

How Jewish should a Jewish Theater aspire to be? Ours in particular.
And of course: What does it mean to be a Jewish theater?

Does it mean the writer has to be Jewish? What about when he or she is not (like Kathleen Tolan, or Akbar Ahmed, or David Hare) What’s the quotient: Do there need to be more than 4 Jewish references for it to be sufficiently inflected? What if there are only 3, like in our current SPEED-THE-PLOW with the references to Afikomen, Shtup, and the Bal Shem Tov?

Most pointedly for me: why bother being a Jewish theater when the demands and range of the art form force one into an engagement with the entirety of artistic expression? Why limit one’s viewfinder to explore only certain parameters in a world full of Chekhov and Ibsen and Shakespeare – are we only allowed to flex Shakespearean muscles when we’re dealing with the dreary figure of Shylock?

Why is this all in the air now?

Well, it’s the 10 year anniversary of my coming to Theater J, for starters. We’re writing an on line history – IN THESE FERVID YEARS – an homage to THE FERVENT YEARS – and going back to important, original questions. There’s also a Strategic Planning Committee discussing basic fundamentals too.

And most recently, we’ve been fielding reactions to a body of work that has undulated from secular world premieres to 3 Jewish titles in a row with perhaps too nakedly a Jewish ta’am, or taste. It makes some people uneasy.

Getting beyond the mere allergy of being “too Jewish” — I want to explore two components here – firstly, what undergirds this uneasiness of work that’s too narrowly focused? (in that I share this uneasiness, as you’ll soon see.)

But I also have a craving for the meat – the brisket – the substance at the heart of this enterprise of marrying our Jewishness and our Art. Where’s the paydirt?

II.

We come to this question from two distinct points of origin:
- Our love of art and aspiration to make art
- Our home in our tradition, around the dinner table, in the synagogue, the summer camp – our religion.

Most days I show up for work aware that what I want to be is a great artist – not a great Jew. I wake up and go to my lap top wondering how can I push the art forward. How can I fund the art better. The art is more important than the Judaism.

But the Judaism is the bloodtype. It’s the fingerprint. It’s what identifies who I am, racially, biologically, fundamentally. But also, only up to a point. My Judaism is, like a bloodtype, fingerprint, or habitual behavior, something that classifies and distinguishes me. But really, those aspects are only filigree; grace notes; subtle differences when the overall corpus of that which is me quite obviously announces that I Am Human. I am a body made up of water, protein, bones, and occasionally toe fungus.

We do theater first, and the Jewish context and characteristics are sometimes – or perhaps always there – to be found in the bloodstream, finger prints, or the toe fungus; the filligree – but the overwhelming aspect of our work is that we put human beings on stage in motion, in conflict, in pursuit of holy grails and big ideas which are readily recognizable and identifiable to all.

Our identity undulates between the overwhelmingly universal, humanistic aspect of our art and the particular history, behavioral traits, tics and habits that mark us as Jews.

III.

“Why Be Jewish?” “How does Judaism Add to Your Life?”

“Zelda’s Children”

It took 75 minutes for the WETA film crew to set up their lights and 15-20 minutes to conduct the interview. A nice gang of guys to spend time with. Our focus: Jewish theater-makers of Washington over the past century, culminating with the work we do at Theater J. I wound up singing just as volubly the song of the Washington theater scene at large. That DC’s stature as skyrocketing theater town lay not so much in the commercial bastions of burlesque and landmark movie houses (about which they’d just conducted a charming interview, they said, with the 95 year old founder of the Warner Theatre), but in the mission driven not-for-profit theaters of integrity powered by visionaries like Zelda Fichandler, founder of the flagship prototype, Arena Stage, with the gospel spread around town by newer institutional leaders like Joy Zinomin, Michael Kahn, Howard Shalwitz, Michael Kaiser; all Jews.

“We are all Zelda’s Children.” That was the money quote. Let them cut everything else.

The series airs in January, 2008. Details to come. Should be good.

Airing in January on PBS: “The Jewish Americans” with DC Installments from WETA

I’ve just gotten through screening an excerpt reel of a 3-part mini series to be aired on Public Television stations in January about the Jewish American experience and its impact on American life. Night 2 is devoted to Culture. It’s a fascinating series and fills one with respect, pride and appreciation for our sojourn and contributions here in America as Jews. There are great appearances by cartoonist/playwright Jules Feiffer talking about the invention of “Superman” by two Cleveland Jewish boys (and I’m sure they’ll be working in Michael Chabon’s novelistic ode to that same class of Jewish cartoonists), playwright Tony Kushner riffing on identity (he alternates between describing himself as a “Gay-Jewish-American-Diasporic-Socialist” and a “Jewish-Socialist-Gay-Diasporic-American); Mandy Patinkin demonstrating Irving Berlin’s genius with its shtetl motifs embedded into American stardards, culminating, of course, in the holiday perennial “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas” which, the composer Jack Gordon points out, “took the Christianity out of Christmas,” as a rash of other Jewish composers moved to create other Christmas standards (like “Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer”) while Aaron Bisman of J-Dubb Records (who appeared on the same panel with me at the “Schmooze” conference in New York last month) talks about the Matisyahu phenomenon.