An Anthology Of Israeli Drama For The New Millennium - Hardcover

9780773463073: An Anthology Of Israeli Drama For The New Millennium

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0773463070 ISBN 13: 9780773463073

Publisher: Edwin Mellen Pr, 2004

This book is a collection of Israeli plays translated into English and published for the first time. These new works covers the period of the 1990s, which is where the plays in the author's previous collections left off. These plays have now become classics. They have not only been chosen for their popularity, but for how they touch on burning issues of the day including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religious fanaticism and the post-Zionist ideology of current Israeli society.

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About the Author:

Dr. Michael Taub received his B.A. from Brooklyn College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Romania, he lived in Israel in the 1960s and briefly in the 1980s. He is currently an adjunct professor of Liberal Studies at Purchase College. He has taught at Binghamton University, Vassar College, Cornell University, New York University and Rutgers University. Dr. Taub is the author of Modern Israeli Drama (Heinemann, 1993) and Israeli Holocaust Drama (Syracuse, 1996) as well as the co-author with Joel Shatzky of Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists (Greenwood, 1997) and Contemporary Jewish-American Dramatists and Poets (Greenwood, 1999).

Review:

"Few barometers of the climate of a society are more sensitive than the theater. The stage reflects the prevailing issues and attitudes that define a society's life at a given era, the values that shape and characterize it, and the joys, aspirations and problems of its people. It represents the variety of its population and the reasons people are drawn to live there, or to leave. The stage gives life to their dreams and sings their songs and tells their stories. It speaks their language... It is just here that we monolingual English-speakers who would become acquainted with Israeli drama, and through it, modern Israel, are stymied. Without a command of Hebrew, we are lost even before we get to an auditorium in Acco or Tel Aviv. This is the breach into which Michael Taub has energetically stepped. He has already opened doors for us with his two fine collections of translations, Modern Israeli Drama (1993) and Israeli Holocaust Drama (1996). Now we have his splendid new selection of plays written in the 1990s. These works address burning issues of a fiery fin-de-siecle. They revivify events that foreign media coverage cannot or does not report. They reveal attitudes and conflicts, satisfactions and achievements that escape the radar screens of international attention. Most satisfyingly, the plays in Israeli Drama For the New Millennium join Taub's earlier volumes in enabling us to appreciate the parallels and startling contrasts between the Israeli stage and our own. We owe Michael Taub a debt of gratitude for providing us new understandings and hours of reading pleasure." - Professor (ret.) Ellen Schiff, author of From Stereotype to Metaphor - The Jew in Contemporary Drama and editor of Awake and Singing - 7 Classic Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire, and Fruitful and Multiplying - 9 Contemporary Plays from the American Jewish Repertoire; "Michael Taub again shows his uncommon flair for language and editorial style in his latest selection of plays publishes in the 1990s. With the publication of Israeli Drama for the New Millennium, Taub will make accessible to American reader the dramatic representations of events, which have animated the Israeli scene in the last decades of the past millennium... The six plays featured in this collection,... create a superlative panoramic view of Israel and the pressing issues with, which the Israeli citizens need to contend with every day. Michael Taub shows here fine editorial and translating skills. Taub [also] shows a sturdy and skilled hand on the pulse of the Israeli dramatic arts... Beyond providing us with excellent new reading, Michael Taub opens new vistas for the study of the Israeli drama at the graduate and undergraduate level. His subtle editing makes reading these plays in translation a true pleasure. Most importantly, in the true spirit of Walter Benjamin, Taub engages us and makes us forget that we read mere translations. As a result, he provides the performing arts in the United States with new, interesting plays, which can be successfully staged here." - Dr. Gila Safran Naveh, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati "This will be an extremely useful volume. Like those in his earlier volumes, this selection covers a wide range of topics and styles, giving a very good idea of the varied nature of today's drama in Israel. This book is particularly valuable because not many Israeli plays are translated into English, and Anglophone readers have been denied an insight into what is happening on the Israeli stage." - Glenda Abramson, University of Oxford"

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