Nocturnal Histories: Nighttime and the Jewish Temporal Imagination in Modern Hebrew Drama

Authors

  • Yair Lipshitz Tel Aviv University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v6i2.294

Abstract

The paper examines the utilization of night as dramatic time in modern Hebrew plays as a device to explore the meaning of Jewish history. A long Jewish religious tradition links nighttime to questions of exile and redemption and constructs it, through texts and ritual performance, as a time to reflect upon time. Modern Hebrew theatre, although often considered a secular enterprise, follows this tradition either through direct allusions or more implicitly, while also critiquing or deconstructing its premises. The plays analyzed here, ranging from the 1930s to the 2010s and varying in political stance, stage nocturnal debates regarding the meaning of time and history, but also participate in broader such debates within Israeli society. Most prominent in these plays is the tension between religiosity and secularity in the understanding of time, as they interrogate the complex relations between Zionism and traditional concepts of redemption. As such, Hebrew and Israeli theatre takes part in shaping the temporal imagination of its surrounding culture and investigating its theological undercurrents and political ramifications. The paper suggests reconsidering Israeli theatre’s relation to Jewish religious performative traditions, as the case-study of nighttime exemplifies.


Keywords: Israeli theatre; theatre and time; theatre and history; theatre and ritual; On This Night; Tashmad; Tikkun khatsot; Night of the Twentieth

Downloads

Published

2020-12-23

Issue

Vol. 6 No. 2 (2020): Jewish Theatres

Section

Monographic Section

License

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).

  1.  The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
  2. The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
  3.  The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.