Zwischen allen Bühnen. Die Jeckes und das hebräische Theater 1933–1948 by Thomas Lewy, and: The German Jews and the Hebrew Theatre: A Clash between Western and Eastern Europe by Tom Lewy (review)

Hebrew theater is one of the most secular, liberal, and also most critical of all modern Jewish cultural achievements. Initially, it played an important role in the promotion of the New-Hebrew language (Ivrit) in the context of the Zionist national movement. For example, the Habimah Theater was transformed from an experimental stage in Moscow (under the Stanislavski student Yevgeny Vakhtangov) into that of the Jewish National Theatre with support by the German Jewish cultural and economic elite in Berlin during the years 1926–1931. Following its subsequent establishment in Tel Aviv, the Habimah and its Eastern European Jewish actors adhering to Russian theater traditions henceforth dominated the cultural production on the stages of the Jewish settlements in British Mandate Palestine (Yishuv). Consequently, Jewish artists and intellectuals involved in theater, who had managed to flee after 1933 from Germany to the Yishuv, were—paradoxically—discriminated against by their Eastern European artistic brethren. Despite this "boycott" (16), these artists of German-speaking origin managed to establish over ten often very short-lived theaters prior to the foundation of Israel. Their approximately sixty artistic biographies and institutional histories are accounted for comprehensively for the first time in Thomas Lewy's extensive and original historiographic research, which concludes with the establishment of the Kameri Theater in 1945—the only theater in Israel still in operation that was founded by German Jewish immigrants in Palestine, during the time of the German Final Solution.

Among the better known of these artists were Max Brod, who served over twenty years as dramaturgic advisor to Habimah, and Sammy Gronemann, the author of King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler—"the most successful Hebrew drama of all times" (143), originally written in German (Der Weise und der Narr, 1942). Their biographies illustrate their marginalized position and limited influence, which stood in stark contrast to their outstanding artistic talent, longed for so desperately during the creation phase of modern Hebrew culture in the Yishuv. Lewy explains this contradiction through his thesis of an ideological "clash" or "Kultur-Kampf" (16) between German and Eastern European Jews in Palestine/Israel, and between German and Russian theater traditions, respectively. In this regard, Lewy's book allows for insights into a specific continuation and inversion of this relationship, which Steven Ashheim described in Germany and Eastern Europe between 1800–1923, in his pivotal study Brothers and Strangers (1982). Additionally, Lewy's book is part of an ongoing discourse that has developed in the last two decades, which is exemplified by recent critical publications on the Hebrew theater, such as Lea Gilula's monograph on the Kameri (2014) and Shelly Zer-Zion's work on the Habimah (2015).

The scholarly merit of Lewy's study on German Jewish artists in Hebrew theater lies primarily in his diligent, meticulous, and enduring archival research. Beginning in 2004, Lewy began unearthing and studying a vast number of hitherto unknown primary sources from all major and minor archives in Israel and Germany: diaries, autobiographies, newspapers, journals, letters, protocols, manuscripts, and scripts, including translations. Since 2010, Lewy has published his findings in a series of over thirty articles for the lay public of the Yakinton, the bilingual Hebrew-German magazine of the Association of Israelis of Central European Origin (founded in 1932, formerly Mitteilungsblatt). Himself a member of this association, Lewy was born in 1935 in Berlin and arrived with his parents in Tel Aviv in 1938. There, they became part of the sociocultural milieu of the so-called "Yekkes," who consciously preserved their Jewish-German acculturation in spite of Zionist...