The New Belle Juive Onstage: Ethiopian Actresses in Israel

La belle juive (“the beautiful Jewess”) is an archetype of nineteenth-century European Romantic literature, painting and theater. Intriguingly, a similar pattern is discernible in present-day Israeli theater with regard to actresses of Ethiopian Jewish origin. The mainstream theater is embracing these young women, offering them leading, passionate roles. However, their case calls for a careful double check of beauty as human capital. I would like to explore how the nineteenth-century European archetype operates in ways that stereotype these women in twenty-first century Israel as figures of alterity and exoticism. Their beauty operates in both cases as gender-oriented otherness and as the location of difference.