Joel Berkowitz
UW System Fellow (2023-2024)
Professor of English, UW-Milwaukee
In These Days of Job: Yiddish Drama After the Holocaust
This presentation provides an overview of my current book project, “In These Days of Job,” which explores a substantial but largely unknown body of Yiddish plays written from the mid-1940s onward that grapple with the Holocaust and its aftermath.
The stories told in these plays trace a historical arc from the early 1930s to the postwar era. They explore such subject matter as the ascent of fascism in the 1930s; life and death in Nazi ghettos and camps; Jewish victimhood and resistance; efforts at physical and spiritual survival; theological implications of the Shoah; Jewish-Christian relations before, during, and after the war; and the attempt to rebuild individual lives and communities after the Holocaust, including the establishment of the State of Israel.
“In These Days of Job” examines a corpus of dramatic literature that serves as a window into how Jews wrestled with the devastation of the Shoah in its immediate aftermath, and the ongoing implications of the murder of six million Jews and the annihilation of Jewish communities across Europe. The dozens of Yiddish playwrights who created these works leave behind a legacy that deserves to be studied, performed, and valued.
Joel Berkowitz is Professor of English and Director of the Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A historian of the Yiddish theatre, translator of Yiddish drama, and dramaturg, he is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, and co-editor of Landmark Yiddish Plays and Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage. He is the co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project, an international consortium that has been producing public-facing research on Yiddish theatre and drama since 2014.
*Events currently open only to 2023-24 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*