The art of cultural translation: performing Jewish traditions in modern times

This special section of Modern Jewish Studies aims to facilitate an interdisciplinary discussion of cultural translation. The six articles presented here examine various genres and media, such as theatre, literature, installation art and historiography, focusing on how they display, re-imagine and perform what may belong to the past but still haunts the present. Engaging with Jewish culture, and especially with the lost world of Eastern European Jewish civilization, this special section aims to ask: How are lost or disappearing traditions being staged or re-imagined? What happens when past events and practices return as constructed memories, fantasies or gestures? How do specific art media shape these cultural translations?

The notion of “cultural translation” draws on Judith Butler who conceives of it as a dialectical process in which what she terms the “deauthorized” desires to enter the realm of “the authorized,” and thus constantly pushes the existing social and cultural limits (Butler 1996).¹ For Butler, cultural translation regards political change, achieved through a series of subversive practices, to be a constant movement from exclusion to inclusion. While the idea that tradition is always changing has become widely accepted (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983), Butler emphasizes the significant role of the excluded, the subversive, the “Other,” rather than the interventions brought about by the state, other institutions of power or even the community itself. This is why I find Butler’s notion especially pertinent to the discussion of Jewish culture, which for centuries served as Western culture’s most immediate “Other.” Indeed, the cases discussed in this section generally depict processes of internal translation of various elements within Jewish culture, rather than cross-cultural translation, as in Butler’s model. However, these inter-social processes are, as we shall see, strongly shaped by internalizing the position of the “Other.” Indeed, four of the essays in this special section engage with the “otherness” of Eastern European culture as experienced by modern Jews, and thus by the dichotomy of exclusion/inclusion. Aya Elyada and Zehavit Stern address the challenge of translating the “excluded,” or “unauthorized” Yiddish folklore into German-Jewish scholarship (Elyada), and Hebrew literature (Stern), while Edna Nahshon and Shelly Zer-Zion deal with Yiddish theatre’s desire for respectability, or inclusion in the realm of bourgeois art, be it through the charged icon of the mother (Zer-Zion), or through the playhouse’s grand, fashionable and symbolically charged architecture (Nahshon). Diego Rotman depicts a subversive art practice that aims to bring the temporary, “illegal” house of the Jahalin Bedouins into Israeli public discourse. Finally, examining contemporary practices of hasidic storytelling, Justin Jaron Lewis resists the very notion of translation, and thus offers a different perspective on some of this issue’s basic assumptions.

Still in broad strokes, this special section may be divided into two parts. The first part examines three diverse contexts of translating, reworking and transmitting Jewish oral traditions, including folk- and hasidic storytelling and folk performance. Elyada explores the work of Abraham Tendlau, who collected, translated and edited Yiddish stories (mainly from printed sources) for German (Jewish) audiences from the 1830s onward; Stern examines the Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon’s pseudo-hagiographic novel The Bridal Canopy, published in its complete version in 1931, and Lewis explores the transmission of hasidic stories in the early twenty-first century by means ranging from the traditional tish (hasidic gathering) to printed books and websites. These three articles thus explore Jewish oral traditions as re-imagined, re-enacted or performed in a variety of places (Germany, Pre-Statehood Jewish Palestine and the United States) and different times (nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries), and for different motivations (academic, aesthetic and religious). Yet they address a similar challenge: re-connecting with the heritage of Eastern European Jewish culture, a “lost world” due to assimilation, immigration and the Nazi genocide. It may, therefore, come as no surprise that metaphors of life and death feature in all three articles. Elyada portrays Tendlau’s work as “bridges to a bygone world,” arguing that he endowed Old Yiddish stories with “a second life.” Stern, relying on Agnon’s own powerful parable, describes his work as an attempt to re-connect with “the mollusc,” the living organism typically absent from the beautiful yet lifeless “seashell” of the literary adaptation of hasidic stories; and Lewis depicts hasidic storytelling as a way to overcome death, arguing that “Storytelling about a tzadik connects us with that tzadik in the present moment, truly breaking down any boundaries between death and life, past and present.”

The second part of this special section features no less of a chronological and geographical diversity. Esther-Rokhl Kaminska, on whom Zer-Zion’s article focuses, died in Warsaw in 1925, the very same year the foundation stone was laid for the New York Louis N. Jaffe Art Theatre, the “Temple of Art” discussed by Nahshon. The “Eternal Sukkah” (originally a Bedouin house) analysed in Rotman’s article was reassembled in the Hansen House garden in Jerusalem almost 90 years later. The different contexts notwithstanding, these articles share a common preoccupation with questions of inclusion/exclusion, expressed by means of charged Jewish symbols: the Jewish mother (Zer-Zion), the Synagogue (Nahshon) and the Sukkah (Rotman). Zer-Zion explores Kaminska’s maternal persona, arguing that the renowned Yiddish actress constructed this persona in order to help turn the notoriously lowbrow Yiddish theatre into a legitimate art form. Nahshon portrays the American Yiddish theatre’s struggle for respectability from a different perspective, showing how the neo-Moorish architecture of the Yiddish Art Theatre expressed an affinity between religious sanctuary and theatre. Rotman investigates an artwork that activates the sukkah’s meaning as a symbol of nomadic existence, by juxtaposing Jewish tradition with the contemporary reality of the Jahalin Bedouins, who embody an “unauthorized” position in the most literal sense within the “authorized” space of Israeli sovereignty.² Fusing intra-social and inter-social translation, Rotman’s case demonstrates that there is therefore no essential link between Jewishness and the position of an unauthorized, excluded “Other.”

Finally, this section originated in a conference held at the University of Oxford in January 2015, that brought together scholars and artists from Europe, Israel and the United States, to discuss, perform and experience cultural translations of Jewish tradition. In the course of this two-day event we encountered various works and practices dedicated to exposing some of the complex mechanisms behind the process of cultural translation: collecting and selecting, quoting and misquoting, dis-assembling and re-assembling. Unfortunately, not all the papers could be part of this special section which is, therefore, a somewhat limited cultural translation of the original conference. I would nevertheless like to use this opportunity to express my gratitude to the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford for hosting and generously supporting this interdisciplinary conference, and the conference's original participants, scholars and artists alike. And, last but not least, I am grateful to Glenda Abramson, this journal’s editor, for her strong support of this project and hard work throughout the process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Butler herself is inspired by Homi Bhabha's notion of “cultural translation,” as developed it in The Location of Culture. See Bhabha (1994), esp. 163, 225–229.

2. Refugees of the Negev, The Jahalin Bedouins now live in the West Bank, near Jerusalem, in what Israeli authorities define as “illegal villages.” At the time these words are written the Jahalin's “unrecognized” (or “illegal”) village Khan Alakhmar is under threat of demolition after the Israeli Supreme Court rejected the Bedouins’ petition to remain on their land (February 2017), and after Jewish settlers submitted counter petitions calling for the Israeli military to immediately carry out the standing demolition order against 257 Palestinian structures in the area. The Jahalin community thus embodies Butler's “unauthorized” position in the most literal sense. Does the iconic Jewish Sukkah serve in “The Eternal Sukkah” as the “authorized” realm into which the artists enable them to enter?