Jewish Theatres and Jewish Languages. Intersections of the Yiddish and the Hebrew Stage

It is commonly understood that the two voices of Jewish national discourse in the early twentieth century, Yiddishism and Hebrew-based Zionism, reflected two separate, distant, and non-communicating worlds. Therefore, their artistic outputs are rarely explored as an interconnected whole. Despite the heated debate and the unbridgeable gap on fundamental issues such as homeland and language, it is nonetheless evident that these two contrasting worlds were intertwined. Besides sharing the same origins in Yiddish-speaking Eastern European communities, most people from both parties had cultural and political experiences in common.
In the artistic turmoil of the 1920s, Yiddish and Hebrew culture expressed similar experiences when two workers’ theatres were established in New York City and in Mandatory Palestine, the Artef and the Ohel, respectively. Both companies were founded in the same year by former members of Habima Theatre from Moscow and were heavily influenced by the Russian revolutionary and artistic experience. As workers’ theatres, they were both formed by non-professional actors who kept their day jobs in the factories or in the fields and were organised as collectives. Sharing an idea of politically committed high culture and art theatre, they offered similar repertoires, staging Western plays on the condition of workers as well as Yiddish folk heritage, which the Ohel translated into Hebrew.
Their parallel experiences are presented here and considered within the framework of Jewish politically committed drama and theatre beyond language and land boundaries.