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A Personal Welcome to the Holocaust Theater Catalog

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Lifetime Achievement Award

The National Jewish Theater Foundation presented its 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award to Alfred Uhry. The presentation took place as part of the Lincoln Center Library event on January 27th 2025 in commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day on the 80th Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz

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Lifetime Achievement Award

On September 30, 2024, French playwright, Mr. Jean Claude Grumberg received the Lifetime Achievement Award. It was presented by NJTF HTII President, Arnold Mittelman with Dominique Trimbur, PhD-Manager for the History of Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, Teaching of the Holocaust of Fondation Pour La Memoir de la Shoah Project.

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Holocaust Representation: Drama

Mar 8, 2014

by Robert Skloot

(From The Cambridge Dictionary of Judaism and Jewish Culture, edited by Judith R. Baskin
Copyright © 2011 Judith R. Baskin. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.)

Playwrights did not begin to describe and interpret the Holocaust experience until a decade after the end of World War II. The most influential and lasting effort was the 1956 adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl by two Hollywood screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. Otto Frank, Anne’s father, the only survivor of the family, had given them permission to create a universal story from his daughter’s journal. Their play became a kind of American urtext for the Holocaust experience, one that was invisibly Jewish and ultimately optimistic, two reasons for the play’s seemingly inexhaustible popularity. The play, The Diary of Anne Frank, and its 1959 Hollywood film version have influenced all other dramatic representations of the Holocaust in the United States (see HOLOCAUST REPRESENTATION: FILM). In Europe, plays on Holocaust themes departed from the upbeat tone and generally realistic form favored by American playwrights. An early example is the prize-winning one-act play, Korczak and the Children (1957), by Erwin Sylvanus, a German war veteran; it recounts the story of a Holocaust hero, the Polish Jewish doctor-educator Janusz Korczak, through a chronologically disrupted, allegorical metatheatrical form. The impetus to depart from realism stemmed from the challenge of confronting the Holocaust in the countries where its devastation had occurred, together with the recognition that realism could not artistically portray the “concentrationary universe” in which millions of victims had been slaughtered. read more…

Why Bent Now (2014)?

Mar 4, 2014

By Tish Dace

Martin Sherman’s shattering Holocaust play Bent became the most-produced play worldwide written by an American during the 20th century’s last quarter. It receives productions 35+ years after its 1979 premiere at London’s Royal Court Theatre because bigots still slaughter or punish people who’re gay or “other.”

As of May 1, 2011, when the manuscript for my Martin Sherman: Skipping Over Quicksand went to press, 54 countries had seen Bent.

Conspicuously absent from the list which begins my Appendix A were Muslim countries, black Africa (save only South Africa), most of Asia, and dictatorships. Homophobia prevented mountings in the very countries which most would have benefitted from it, those countries where touching hearts might change minds. read more…

Survivors Still Active in Creating Witness Theater

Jan 12, 2014

The following links/articles describe projects taking place in 2014 that involve the participation of living survivors in the ongoing creation of Holocaust related theater. Survivor memories of events that they witnessed and lived are transformed by passionate artists supported by committed students into a unique type of drama.

Holocaust Stories Proves Therapeutic for Witness Theater >>

News From Beit Theresienstadt >>

(Please refer to pages 4-5)

 

Comments from an Israeli Director

Jan 10, 2014

My name is Avivit Shaked and I am an Israeli Theatre Director and group facilitator.

I’m working with groups of young pupils (in the 8th grade) and Holocaust Survivors. The name of the program is “Documentary Theatre for the Commemoration of the Holocaust in Israel”. In this program we are interacting young pupils with Holocaust survivors, so they can hear a firsthand testimony, as long as there are Holocaust Survivors left. These meetings are very touching. They enable a different kind of communication between generations. The meetings give the survivors—some for the first time in their lives—the opportunity to talk about what they have been through. For the pupils it is an experience that enables them to take responsibility and mature.

I got into this project as a 3rd generation of the Holocaust. I find it fascinating to work with older people, to hear testimony from a person that experienced an insane reality and one so difficult to understand or to accept. read more…

The Theatrical Representation of the Holocaust

Nov 18, 2013

by Juan Mayorga, Playwright

The image that many of us have of the Shoah is nurtured less from historians’ books than from artistic representations, some of which are offered by the theatre. This is not a new phenomenon. Many Athenians probably adopted the image of the Greeks’ victory against Xerxes presented by Aeschylus in “The Persians,” and many Spaniards of the 17th century likely accepted the image of the victory of the modern centralist state on the residual feudalist order offered by Lope de Vega in “Fuente Ovejuna.” Because its nature of bringing people together and, having therefore, a political character, theatre has been an especially apt medium to feed collective memories.

The theatre was more than likely the first medium used to record history. Before there was scripture or even speech, people used theatrics to share their experiences. Perhaps, the first man who saw fire mimicked his encounter with it to illustrate it to another man and he, in turn, to a third man, thus, at the same time, inventing theatre and history. In any case, no other medium presents the past in the present with the intensity of the theatre, such that individuals of another time are revived – reincarnated – by people here and now. If, in general, to use the terminology of Ortega y Gasset in his “The Idea of Theatre,” the actor disappears – he becomes transparent – so that the character can gain reality – visibility – such a transformation is basic to historical theatre in that the character created is not a product of the imagination but rather a real character from another time. The actor disappears in order to reveal a man who was and will be again during the play. read more…

Holocaust Theater: Representation or Misrepresentation

Sep 16, 2013

(This is a transcript of a speech given by Arnold Mittelman to Association of Holocaust Organizations on 1/10/12.)

I wish to thank Bill Shulman, President of the Association of Holocaust Organizations, and member of the National Jewish Theater Foundation/Holocaust Theater Archive Advisory Board, for inviting me to make this presentation to you, his constituents, at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Facts are not the enemy of art, and art is not the enemy of facts. However, humankind often sees everything subjectively, even as we aspire to see the world objectively. Everything we see, touch, and feel is subject to individual interpretation. The late great Italian author Luigi Pirandello’s plays often examine how it is impossible to look at something truly objectively, since we are always looking at things subjectively through our own experience and understanding. And to a great extent, that is the power of theater: it has the ability to be seen individually and understood personally, defying all our collective attempts to view it objectively.

The aesthetic experience of the theatrical audience is to relate, not just to the live performance onstage, but to the reality and sense of each other’s presence. And therefore, although we are seeing the same performance together, we are never actually seeing the same collective performance because we all see the world differently. No wonder one person’s sense that a play is an accurate representation can be thought by another person to be a total misrepresentation. Such is Theater.
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What the Survivor and Historian Know: Detente Between Those Who Lived the Shoah and Study It

Aug 20, 2013

by Dr. Michael Berenbaum, Director American Jewish University

Jeff Cohen’s The Soap Myth, as produced by the National Jewish Theater Foundation and directed by Arnold Mittleman, has brought to life on the New York stage the inherent tensions between Holocaust historians and Holocaust survivors over facts and interpretation of facts. Time and again, survivors speak of the Nazis’ making human fat into soap, while Holocaust historians say that, at best, there is insufficient evidence to support that claim.

When, during its creation, I was project director at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I rejected the display of a cake of soap. So, too, did my colleagues at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and at Auschwitz and Majdanek in Poland. Rather than go into the minutiae of detail regarding the soap, however, it is worthwhile to consider the relationship between survivor testimony and historical fact.

Elie Wiesel, the preeminent survivor, set the bar impossibly high: “Only those who were there will ever know, and those who were there can never tell.” Survivors’ testimony was privileged. They alone could know. Nothing could be said by my generation, born after the war; what could we know?

Yet, over time, we have come to understand each other better and perhaps to listen to one another more respectfully.
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All About Jewish Theatre

May 24, 2013

The NJTF Holocaust Theater International Initiative wishes to recognize the Israel based website ALL ABOUT JEWISH THEATRE, Moti Sandak editor, for the development of their Holocaust Theatre On Line Collection. This publicly accessible compilation of articles, reviews and theatre works can be found at: All About Jewish Theatre

The Aftermath of War: Second Generation Performance Art

Dec 16, 2012

Dr. Susan Jacobowitz
Queensborough Community College
The City University of New York

A rock drops into the center of a pond. Ripples spread. Make that a flaming comet crashing into a boiling tar pit. A tidal wave ensues. Consider the Holocaust as that first event. Call the pit “Europe.” (“In the Beginning Was Auschwitz” B7)

– Melvyn Julies Bukiet

Performance art is a particular subset of second generation creative work that is still emerging from the tidal wave. It combines or fuses the project of depicting and understanding the Holocaust experience with bringing second generation experience into perspective. Like other second generation work, it involves research, imagination, re-creation and often an actual pilgrimage back to sites of memory or significance in Europe. For performance artists such as Deb Filler, Naava Piatka and Lisa Kron, it means depicting or actually embodying the parent whose story is being told. The work can be revealing and confrontational. Since Kron and Filler are comediennes, their pieces are often quite humorous as well. These are works that utilize multiple media: text, song, photography, comedy, performance. There is a strong experiential component for both the creator and the audience. These one-person plays and shows advance our understanding of the consequences and complexities of genocide.

Sonia Pilcer, whose The Holocaust Kid has been adapted into a one-woman show, writes of her parents, “I was their first seed of life after so much death. A living monument to their survival, a shrine to their murdered mothers. But I am not a Holocaust survivor. All that I survived was my childhood and my parents’ fierce, anxious love” (4). Melvyn Jules Bukiet uses his father’s concentration camp tattoo as identification for his bank account and as his signature—he inscribes a copy of his book for Helmut Kohl using the number 108016. Bukiet writes:

It would be disingenuous for me to claim that those six digits were the first I knew. Presumably I could count, but the artless aniline blue of 108016 tattooed on my father’s forearm was an abiding sign of the past in our present. It was his alone and then, as much as such a thing can ever be, it became mine, and now it’s yours; we can share (B10).

Second generation performance art participates in this project of sharing. read more…

Play and Author Index

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
Author Index

HTC Insights

Views, reference and research of interest.

Many Questions and a Few Answers

by Robert Skloot 2022 NJTF HTII Lifetime Achievement Award AHO Winter Conference, Miami, FL I’d like to begin my remarks by asking the question that all of us have been asked often: “Why do you do the work you do?” There are, of course, many answers, but I’d imagine...

Honoring Elie and Marion Wiesel for Their Plays

Elie Wiesel’s Plays as Kaddish: The Sacred Duty to Remember and Resist By Prof. Lori R. Weintrob Director, Wagner College Holocaust Center This article is an expanded version of remarks presented by author in conjunction with the National Jewish Theater Foundation...