Between Jewish Futurity and Anti-Jewish Violence

Touching on performances from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in Poland, this talk will explore the changing approaches to Jewishness vis-à-vis Holocaust representation in Yiddish and Polish theatre during the first postwar decades. Each play highlights the range of considerations toward postwar Jewish possibility - what Rachel Merrill Moss calls Jewish futurity - and attempts to come to terms with anti-Jewish violence, which persisted in Poland beyond the end of WWII, most famously in the Kielce pogrom in 1946. Written and performed by both Jewish and non-Jewish creators for mixed audiences, these plays vividly depict how Jewish and non-Jewish Poles explored the recent past to confront the still-turbulent present.

Merrill Moss, assistant professor of theatre history at the University of Texas at Austin, researches performances of Jewishness in Poland at the intersection of culture and politics across the 20th century.

This talk, "Between Jewish Futurity and Anti-Jewish Violence: Postwar Representations of Jewishness on Polish Stages," is sponsored by The Lois and Frank Lautenberg Jewish Lecture Fund with support from the Film & Media Studies Program.

Light finger foods provided by Hamilton Whole Foods.