Drama and Ideology in Modern Israel (review)

In her new book Glenda Abramson (who also wrote Modern Hebrew Drama [1979]) maps out the development of Israeli drama from its first years of ideological “reinforcement” which lasted until the late 1960s, after the Six-Day War, to the drama expressing a gradual disintegration of the unified, “official” values witnessed in the wake of that war and the occupation which gradually led to further dissent and an impasse with the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Abramson, who ends her narrative around 1993 and mentions the trauma of Rabin’s death only in passing (119), examines how the politics in the country, as well as the understandings of the Holocaust and the growing tensions among the secularists, different religious, and nationalist groups have been depicted by Israeli playwrights including Nissim Aloni, Motti Lerner, Hanoch Levin, and Yehoshua Sobol.

Abramson sets out to show how the social and political circumstances of the Zionist movement, which in 1948 led to the establishment of the state of Israel, as well as the subsequent external and internal strife of the country, have fostered a dramatic tradition which serves “less as examples of theatrical art than as statements that converge on current political discourse” (13); and that “Israeli tend on the whole to avoid issues which fall beyond the peculiarly Israeli definition of ‘political’—that is, which pertain to Zionism” (55). In spite of the fact that it is hard to think of any drama as not “converg[ing] on political discourse,” the Israeli theatre, as Abramson (in line with most previous research) argues, is no doubt much more sensitive to ideological issues than many other contemporary national theatre traditions. But even if these issues may seem overwhelming they do not, however, rule out the aesthetic commitments of the Israeli theatre, as Abramson seems to imply.

Abramson has neutralized aesthetic issues primarily by analyzing the ideological content of the play-scripts and different journalistic responses, rather than confronting the theatre in its complex totality. She argues that Israeli dramas are in fact “political,” “perceived as documents by audience and critics alike” (13), and giving rise to public controversies, post-performance discussions, polemics and censorship. Censorship, she adds, is “almost always performed on the text, not the enacted play” (13). In the Israeli context, however, this was only partly true. Since the censorship board realized that the performances are also able to carry “subversive” messages it stipulated that in certain cases, even though the board considered the text to be “problematic,” the final censorship verdict was only given after the dress rehearsal.

Abramson has consciously chosen a methodology, however, “concerned more [with] what the playwrights are saying than their manner of saying it” (12), thereby isolating the ideas in the dramatic text from the performance. She claims that the spectators watching a performance have been “guided by the director who manipulates it [the text], and the actors who are also permitted a certain flexibility” (13). Even if I understand why a scholar believes herself forced into this strategy because she has apparently not seen most of the performances of the plays on which she writes, I do not think it can be defended. The Israeli theatre’s productions have been effective agents for political ideas, a significant factor in the ideological debates of the country. As a result, some of the more controversial productions have triggered polemic journalism. The dramatic texts can thus only serve as partial evidence of the impact of Israeli theatre.

I also find some of the value judgements with which the book abounds problematic. Abramson states that “[i]t is possible that Sobol’s plays represent a deeply rooted Israeli malaise which could, hesitantly, be called Israeli anti-Semitism” (95), and adds that when his A Jewish Soul (based on the life and work of Otto Weininger) was shown at the Edinburgh festival the non-Jewish members of the audience “disclosed a sense of guilt at observing Weininger’s psychological convulsions, seeing their own anti-Semitism reflected in...