Holocaust and Jewish Solidarity in the Hebrew Theatre of the 1940s

David Bergelson's play I Shall Not Die but Live takes place during the Nazi invasion of the USSR in a collective settlement adjacent to an agricultural experimentation farm in Ukraine. The world premiere of the play took place in Habima in May 1944. It was the first theatre production performed in an Eretz-Israeli theatre that engaged with the extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. This lecture will explore how the play imported into the Yishuv a symbolic conceptualization of the Holocaust, the Jewish struggle against Nazism, and a deep sense of Jewish solidarity. The lecture points to the centrality of the transnational Jewish cultural mechanism in shaping a national and Eretz-Israeli Jewish identity in the Hebrew speaking theatre.

Dr. Shelly Zer-Zion is a theatre historian and Chair of the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Haifa. Her research focuses on the history of modern Hebrew theatre, and its role as a Jewish transnational vehicle. She published numerous articles in journals such as the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jewish Social Studies, Israel Studies, and New Theatre Quarterly. She is the author of the book Habima: Eine hebräische Bühne in der Weimarer Republik (Fink Verlag, 2016. A Hebrew version was published in Magness in 2015). She was also a co-editor of the volume Habima: New Studies on National Theatre (Resling, 2017, Hebrew).

Veranstaltungsort: LMU, Hauptgebäude, Raum M 109

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