Abstract: This article argues that the Parisian spheres of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music shape distinct Muslim-Jewish encounters for individuals involved in these practices, fostering a coexistence among artists from Muslim and Jewish backgrounds which involves carefully navigating tensions over geopolitical issues. Three key findings emerge from this study. First, respondents of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds shared a common Maghrebi heritage that was reappropriated by engaging in the practices of Middle Eastern dance and Mediterranean music. Second, these artistic encounters were not immune to instances of stigmatization and tensions, particularly relating to geopolitical issues, which reactivated symbolic boundaries between artists of Muslim and Jewish backgrounds. Third, participants employed strategies to avoid conflict, explicitly separating art from politics, and fostered mutual respect for differing perspectives. Nevertheless, some respondents politicized Muslim-Jewish commonalities, notably by reaffirming their shared Maghrebi heritage.
Abstract: This article examines an under-researched artistic practice of Holocaust memorialization, which, emerging in Poland in the early 1990s, combines elements of theater, performance art, and religious ritual and invites a high degree of civic participation. I argue that these artistic practices are similar to traditional practices of lived and embodied transmissions of memory referred to by French historian Pierre Nora as milieux de mémoire. This article will challenge Nora's view that milieux de mémoire have been permanently replaced with lieux de mémoire (sites of memory). To counter this claim, I invoke the memorialization activities of the grassroots and Lublin-based cultural institution the Grodzka Gate – NN Theater Center. Through the series of artistic actions called Mystery of Memory (2000–2011) and Letters to (2005–present), this institution is actively involved in creating and sustaining Polish milieux de mémoire dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust. The ensuing milieux de mémoire have a practical, civic and social function to establish a sense of shared community among younger generations of Poles. Therefore, these actions look toward the future, rather than solely remembering the difficult past, and encourage participants to acknowledge and celebrate difference and multiculturalism, rather than singly confronting unsavory moments of Polish–Jewish relations.
Abstract: In this article, I discuss what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy performance and “Jewfaçade” display in three contemporary contexts with highly divergent historical backgrounds: East-Central Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Jewish Autonomous Republic, a fictitious-sounding but real colony established by Stalin in far eastern Russia near China and still extant today. Jewface encompasses music, dance, theater, and extra-theatrical modes of performance, in which non-Jews dress up and act like “Jews,” as historically imagined; Jewfaçade encompasses museum-type installations, as well as architectural and decorative constructions, depicting imagined “Jewish” life. These “Diaspora Disneys” vary from the education- and tolerance-oriented to the crassly exploitative and commercial to the bizarrely confused. None have much to do with actual Jews, but all convey a tremendous amount regarding dominant “host” cultures’ anxieties over not only their roles in past persecution and genocide but also their own present cultures, politics, and positions in the wider world today. Further, they present a wide array of models of memoriological projection and desire, in what I explicate as spectra of “plethoric” to “voidic” memoriological scenarios and “negotiatory” to “constitutory” memoriological strategies.
Abstract: A “Jew-themed” restaurant provides its patrons with broad-brimmed black hats with foot-long sidecurls to wear, and the menu has no prices; patrons must bargain, or “Jew,” the staff down. A play billed as a tribute to a lost Jewish community ends in a gag: Death throws back his shroud to reveal an open-brain-pate wig, à la the horror flick Nightmare on Elm Street. In a “traditional Jewish wedding dance,” “Jewish wealth” is represented by a local luxury: vacuum-packed juice boxes. In parts of the world where Jews, once populous, have nearly vanished because of oppression, forced exile, and genocide, non-Jews now strive to re-enact what has been lost. In this essay, I will consider three general cases of what I term “Jewface” minstrelsy and
“Jewfaçade” display, in Krakow, Poland; the village of Hervás in western Spain; and Birobidzhan, capital city of Russia’s far-eastern Jewish Autonomous Region, which is known as Birobidzhan as well. Jewface-resembling the “blackface” prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries-is the practice of music, dance, theatre, and/or extra-theatrical types of performance, primarily by non-Jews, intended to convey notions of historical Jewish life and culture. Jewfaçade involves architectural and decorative constructions, again mainly by nonJews, meant to evoke ideas of the Jew in similar ways. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the team of Daniela Flesler and Adrian Pérez Melgosa, and other journalists and scholars have documented what Michael Brenner has called “Jewish culture without Jews” in Poland and Spain, as well as elsewhere in Europe (Brenner 1997: 152). However, no comparative study has been made, and no scholar has approached this topic with regard to Birobidzhan. I will provide brief overviews of Jewface and Jewfaçade activities in Krakow, Hervás, and Birobidzhan. I will then demonstrate the ways in which the notions of the figure of the Jew and of local Jewish history are performed, or acted out in these three comparative geographical contexts. These cases, as, in conclusion, I will argue, represent three very different approaches to public memory and memorialization with regard to the Jew, and perhaps in regard to troubled historical legacies more generally.
Abstract: Los instrumentos y técnicas docentes, tanto en estudios primarios y secundarios como en el ámbito universitario, se adaptan a los nuevos métodos desarrollados por la ciencia de la didáctica para un mejor entendimiento y asimilación. Este hecho encuen-tra también formas en las nuevas tecnologías (TIC) que sirven como refuerzo para el aprendizaje. Sin embargo, herramientas clásicas tales como el uso del teatro aún siguen teniendo resultados destacables. El objetivo de estas páginas es el de ofrecer el modo en que se articula el género dramático en la adquisición de elementos lingüísticos, culturales e histórico-sociales y su practicidad en los estudiantes de grado en la Uni-versidad de Granada a través de dos ejemplos prácticos, el teatro en lengua hebrea y en judeoespañol o sefardí. 1. El género teatral en el contexto pedagógico: técnicas y aprendizaje de idiomas La enseñanza de técnicas teatrales no está programada en las guías docentes ni for-ma parte de ellas como una materia optativa, en nuestro caso, en el grado de Lenguas Modernas y sus Literaturas de la Universidad de Granada. Esta tarea, aunque requiere importante consideración y queda en manos de los responsables del taller, docentes que actúan como los directores del mismo. Las claves que se aplican en esta actividad, destinada a alumnos de idioma y cultura, tienen que ver con las formas de comuni-cación y la construcción de un conocimiento intercultural. El espacio teatral genera un lugar en el cual el alumno/actor puede discutir su personalidad y confrontarla con
