A stage for the revolution. Yiddish and Hebrew workers' theatres in the interwar period

The two voices of Jewish national discourse in the early 20th century, Yiddishism and Hebrew-based Zionism, are commonly perceived as the expressions of two separate, distant, and mutually exclusive worlds. But the stories of Artef and Ohel, two workers’ theatres founded in the same year (1925) in New York City and Tel Aviv, respectively, the former a Yiddish troupe, the latter a Hebrew-language one, are particularly significant in that their shared experiences reveal how much those two seemingly contrasting worlds were intertwined. Their parallel stories call for a new approach in the study of Jewish arts that explores their expression in Yiddish and Hebrew as an interconnected whole and investigates their connections with two recent yet significant Jewish experiences, namely political activism and drama.