Staging Hasidism: the ‘Yossele Schumacher Affair’ in a Hasidic Yiddish Play "Vi iz Yossele"

• In Event: Intersectionality, Performance, and American Jewishness

Abstract

The “Yossele Schumacher affair”, which broke up in the early 1960s, shook the young State of Israel. The family conflict and subsequent disappearance of an 8-year-old boy escalated into a two years’ stand-off between various Haredi factions and the state apparatus. Despite over 50 years since Yossele’s return home, the affair is still very much present in the collective memory of the Haredi community. As of today, multiple articles, stories, memoirs, as well as at least one play and a feature film dedicated to the affair have been produced by Haredi authors.
The paper examines Vi iz Yosele, a 2009 Hasidic stage adaptation of the Yossele Schumacher affair, as an example of harnessing performing arts for education purposes in a contemporary Hasidic community. By analysing the plot, language, cast, and scenography, the paper reconstructs the contemporary Hasidic narrative of the Yossele Schumacher affair, and determine what are the values that American Hasidic artists and educators intend to convey through it to their young audience. Finally, the paper uses the play as a case study of the ways in which American Hasidic communities negotiate their programmatic insularity with their de facto participation in the surrounding cultures. By venturing into virtually unresearched topic of Hasidic performing arts, this paper makes an intervention in the research of contemporary Hasidic and Haredi cultures, contemporary Yiddish and Jewish theatre.

Author

• Wojciech Tworek, University of Wroclaw