Joel Berkowitz

In These Days of Job: Yiddish Drama After the Holocaust

My book project, “In These Days of Job: Yiddish Drama After the Holocaust,” examines a corpus of some 140 plays that grappled with the enormity of Holocaust and explored how individual Jewish lives and Jewish communities could be rebuilt after the war. They include masterpieces of the “Theatre of the Holocaust” by important Yiddish writers as well as dramas by lesser-known figures. Collectively they represent one facet of a people’s attempt to grapple with one of the greatest cataclysms it ever faced, and to figure out how to move forward.

Joel Berkowitz is Professor of English and Director of the Stahl Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. A historian of the Yiddish theatre, translator of Yiddish drama, and theatre consultant, he has published four books on Yiddish theatre, and is the co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (yiddishstage.org), an international research consortium dedicated to producing public-facing scholarship on Yiddish theatre and drama.