Jewish Witches in Performance: Queer Magic and the Yiddish Stage

• In Event: Reading Jews in Drag: (Re)Interpreting Modern and Contemporary Performances of Jewish Gender-Bending

Abstract

Many have celebrated Yiddish productions of playwright Avrom Goldfaden’s THE SORCERESS (DI KISHEFMAKERIN, 1887) for its staging convention of casting a male actor in drag to play the title character, an evil Jewish witch. This casting convention, which began in the late-nineteenth century, has continued throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. On the surface, the tradition of a man playing a woman may seem to challenge expected gender performances. However, as Jewish theatre scholar Alisa Solomon has commented, female impersonation is not inherently subversive; in fact, many historical productions of THE SORCERESS reproduce misogynistic and transphobic stereotypes about Jewishness. Building on Solomon’s insights that Yiddish theatre was not immune to dominant cultural influences, this presentation returns to productions of THE SORCERESS from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to consider how contemporary theatre artists might engage this historical Yiddish play without reinforcing harmful stereotypes. Using queer methods, I theorize how the historical figure of a Jewish witch might allow us to envision a future for queer Jewish performance. I argue that one pathway for queer Jewish futurity lies in adaptation of past narratives from Yiddish culture. In doing so, I urge future scholar-artists and their students to critically adapt, rather than reproduce, THE SORCERESS.

Author

• C. Tova Markenson