Double Exposure: A Jewish-Palestinian Anthology That Bridges

Cultural Divides

Shira Schwartz Greenberg

Canadian Theatre Review, Volume 175, Summer 2018, pp. 77-79 (Article)

Published by University of Toronto Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/699079

[ Access provided at 6 Oct 2020 21:54 GMT from Binghamton University ]

 Double Exposure: A Jewish–Palestinian Anthology That Bridges Cultural Divides | VIEWS AND REVIEWS

Double Exposure:
A Jewish–Palestinian
Anthology That Bridges
Cultural Divides
by Shira Schwartz Greenberg

Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and Palestinian Diasporas

is an anthology published by Playwrights Canada Press about the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. With works by diaspora playwrights,
it is the first English-language anthology worldwide in any genre
of drama, prose, or poetry by writers of Jewish and Palestinian de-
scent. Featuring compelling interviews with each playwright and
introductions by acclaimed dramatists Karen Hartman and Betty
Shamieh, this volume of seven plays tackles a major thematic ta-
boo for many theatres in the Western world. The anthology—
which recently won the Patrick O’Neill Award from the Canadian
Association of Theatre Research for the best edited collection—
includes three plays by Jewish playwrights, three by Palestinian
playwrights, and one collaboration between Jewish and Palestin-
ian playwrights. Co-editors Stephen Orlov and Samah Sabawi be-
gan as strangers living on opposite sides of the world when they
embarked on this project. The following is an edited and abridged
transcript of my conversation with Samah and Stephen about
their process and the collection.
Shira: How do the writings outside the conflict zone offer a dis-
tinct viewpoint? What can these voices achieve, and how might
they contribute to conversations around the Israeli–Palestinian
conflict that so often become insular?
Stephen: I’ll speak from my personal Jewish perspective. I think
two major elements distinguish the diaspora voice. One is that
we live in privileged societies away from the heat of battle. And
the second is that many of us live in multicultural societies.
That helps us view the conflict through a more diverse cultural
prism that could offer more objectivity. At the same time, our
journey from the page to the stage is marked by the footprints
of our ancestors, and the affiliation many of us have with fam-
ily and friends living in Israel and Palestine.
Samah: When speaking about Palestinian writers, it is important
Cover image of Double Exposure: Plays of the Jewish and
to acknowledge how extremely difficult it is for them to exist Palestinian Diasporas, edited by Stephen Orlov and Samah Sabawi.
free of … challenges—whether be it the destruction that Gaza Image by Christine Mangosing. Image courtesy of Playwrights
faces or the lack of funds available for the arts. The arts are Canada Press

doi:10.3138/ctr.175.014 ctr 175 summer 2018 77

VIEWS AND REVIEWS | Double Exposure: A Jewish–Palestinian Anthology That Bridges Cultural Divides
seen as a privilege; they are a luxury for people living under
occupation. Productions require a lot of resources to actual-
ly be staged. And then there is the issue that funding often
comes with strings—international donors who are happy to
fund the arts but only if they push a particular purpose. So we
end up with performances of Shakespeare etc., which are great,
but they’re not homegrown, reflecting the lives of people in
the West Bank. And you have theatres that really struggle, like
Alrowwad Theatre and Ashtar Theatre. Ashtar put out a fund-
raising call recently and is facing the real possibility of closing
down if they don’t get enough funds…. And we do have priv-
ilege being on the outside. So what do we offer? We can offer a
window into the lives of people in Palestine.
Stephen: From my experience, I’d say there’s somewhat more
acceptance of Israeli playwrights writing and staging plays crit-
ical of the occupation than there is of Jewish diasporic play-
wrights. The unspoken message is loud and clear: Don’t pin our
dirty laundry in public. Many factors interplay in creating this
dichotomy, but it’s partly a reflection of the attitude that some
Israelis have toward the diaspora—that we don’t have the right,
reason, or ability to address the occupation because we’re not
in the heat of battle. Both Samah and I categorically reject this
claim. Americans didn’t have to fight in the jungles of Vietnam
to know that war was morally and politically wrong. We be-
lieve the issues at the heart of this conflict are not merely spe-
cific to Jews and Palestinians. These are issues of peace, social
justice, and human rights for all of humanity.
Shira: In the editor’s preface, you mention that one of the most
significant editorial challenges you faced with this anthology
was a lack of produced plays to choose from, due to a “silent
de facto boycott” fuelled for decades by prejudice, ignorance,
and timidity. Most of your anthology plays have at times been
labelled treif, i.e. “not kosher” for the stage. Is it merely the
subject matter that intimidates mainstream theatre companies,
or are there particular dialogues and themes that characterize
these plays as “not kosher”?
Samah: The subject matter itself is one with which we have been
forbidden to engage in the mainstream. When you say Gaza,
you have to think of Hamas and rockets; you can’t think of two
people in love and unable to be together because the border is
shut [a scene from Sabawi’s Tales of a City by the Sea]. That is
not the kind of narrative you’re allowed to have when it comes
to Gaza. In my work, I present the human story that we are
missing out on.
Stephen: Most of our anthology plays have faced similar challeng-
es before they were finally produced. One was commissioned
by a major American theatre, which then chose to pass on pro-
ducing it, admitting it was for reasons of political content. We
should distinguish between this de facto boycott of plays that
many large, established theatres consider thematically unpalat-
able for some of their subscribers or donors and the censor-
ship campaigns of produced plays that Samah has described.
We’re addressing the most inflammatory ongoing regional
conflict of the past seventy years. Yet most major Western the-
atres, especially Jewish theatres, overwhelmingly remain in a
thematic state of denial onstage. Their silence is deafening. But
78 ctr 175 summer 2018
our anthology reflects changing times. Some smaller independ-
ent theatre companies have boldly tackled the conflict, and
more—even a few larger regional theatres like Lincoln Centre
and England’s National Theatre—are beginning to stage such
plays. There’s a fair amount of self-censorship by Jewish play-
wrights as well—the subject is either too angst-ridden or too
polemical—but far too often it’s avoided for career or partisan
reasons. The theatre that premiered [my play] Sperm Count
in London as the war in Afghanistan began shortly after 9/11
received two anonymous bomb threats demanding that it be
cancelled. The cast and crew decided to open, and, fortunately,
there was no incident. And I’ve had my share of dogmatic criti-
cism from the left, some charging that Sperm Count was not
violent enough. My response is that the play is set in the dias-
poras of North America, not on the battlefields of the Middle
East—this is the world that I know. [In November 2018 Mon-
treal’s Teesri Duniya Theatre will stage the world premiere of
Birthmark, the sequel to Sperm Count.]
Shira: In your play, Tales of a City by the Sea, Samah, Ali says
to Rami, “Brother, you have to be honest with yourself.… It
seems to me that you are one foot in this soil and the other
in some foreign land. Don’t spend your whole life lost in be-
tween.” Is this not precisely the contemporary diasporic con-
cern? And in your play, Sperm Count, Stephen, David lives a
kind of lost space between realities—he performs the role of
the liberal progressive, and yet we see at the end of the play that
deep down he shares many of the same racist prejudices as his
father. Racial stereotypes are so deeply ingrained in David that
they only surface when he fears his genetic lineage is threat-
ened. I’m wondering if, in your research for these plays, you
noticed this as a theme among Israelis or Palestinians living in
the diaspora? I know from my own personal experience, as an
Orthodox Jew living in Toronto, I was raised with a particular
rhetoric about Israel with which I am in ongoing conversation.
This leads me to question what it means to be lost in between.
Can you speak to some of these tensions either from your per-
sonal experiences or from your research?
Samah: Who more appropriately can be described as lost in be-
tween than the Jewish people? Edward Said once said that Pal-
estinians feel that they have been turned into exile by the pro-
verbial people of exile, the Jewish people. My current research
raises the question of identity formation for Palestinians in ex-
ile. I started off with Said’s theory that the Palestinian identity
is nourished in the diaspora. And I went from there to think,
what do we mean by Palestinian identity? Is it a cause? Can
national identity be reduced to a cause? Or is it the cultural
stuff, the way we dress, talk, eat? How Palestinian are my chil-
dren? They are born in Canada and in Australia. What is get-
ting passed on? There is something that gets passed on, some-
thing that is hard to put your finger on. Identities are clarified
when they are under attack; by virtue of our exclusion from
something, we learn something about ourselves. The strange
thing is, I started with Edward Said’s theory, and it took me
to Marianne Hirsch’s theory on postmemory. She writes about
how the Jewish holocaust becomes part of a collective memory
that gets passed on for people who have never lived through
doi:10.3138/ctr.175.014
 Double Exposure: A Jewish–Palestinian Anthology That Bridges Cultural Divides
the experience of it. And I just found that the two themes real-
ly went well together: identities being formed … through the
power of cultural memory.
Stephen: I grew up in a predominantly Irish-Italian Catho-
lic town near Boston, but my sense of being a Jew was very
strong, and I never felt lost. I was the only Jew on the football
team. Support for Israel was a given. I remember, in Hebrew
school, I was ashamed that my parents couldn’t afford to give
me enough coins to fill the ten leaves of a cardboard tree that
would cover the cost of planting a sapling in Israel. That immi-
grant working-class upbringing, the stories at Hebrew school
of our ancestors’ struggles against oppression, my nightmares
of the Holocaust, they were ingrained in my psyche, and that
all had a formative impact on my evolving Jewish identity. So
in all three of my Jewish–Palestinian diaspora plays, I also ad-
dress the Holocaust by varying degrees, not to make a compari-
son of relative suffering between Jews and Palestinians, but to
give expression to the impact of that horrific chapter of hist-
ory on how Jews onstage—and in real life—view the world.
And you’re right, David—the self-professed liberal supporter
of Palestine—he reveals his latent racism compared to the more
blatant racism of his elderly immigrant father, Jacob. But it is
Jacob, a Holocaust survivor, whose humanity tempers his ra-
cism as he emotionally embraces Said, the Palestinian doctor,
for saving David’s wife and their unborn child.
Shira: Jomana says to Rami that there is no “our people” but rath-
er “your people” and “my people,” to which Rami responds,
“[S]o you get to decide if I’m Palestinian or not?” This kind
of essentialism that forms from within a group is obviously a
reaction to oppression and yet also operates as a kind of litmus
test among group members. How true, authentic, devoted—
essentially Palestinian/Jewish—are you? Or to what extent do
you defend or sacrifice for the cause? I wonder if either of you
have ever experienced these kinds of intra-cultural accusations
against your immersion in the arts and secular culture, and, if
so, how you responded to them.
Samah: It’s not as explicit as someone saying to me, “You don’t
live here; you don’t get to speak for Palestinians.” It’s that I’m
constantly away and therefore cannot speak for everything
that’s going on there. There was a time when I used to write
on Facebook things like, “I miss Gaza,” “I miss my family,”
“I wish I was there.” After 2014, I don’t dare make a post like
that because the people there are so eager to get out. I’ve seen
it with others who have said romantic things about Gaza. The
idea being, “Of course you want to come here, but you won’t
survive being here for a day.” The resentment is growing, and,
of course, it’s natural.
Stephen: Ultimately, the most complex identity issue I must grap-
ple with is, what does it mean to be a progressive Jew in the
context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict? I believe that’s the
central identity issue at the heart of Jewish angst across most of
doi:10.3138/ctr.175.014
| VIEWS AND REVIEWS
our global diaspora, secular and religious. The charge of “self-
hating Jews” often levelled against those of us who dare pub-
licly criticize the occupation is becoming an outdated cliché in
the face of daily reality reported on social media.
Shira: You mentioned, Samah, that you were initially hesitant to
collaborate with Stephen because you assumed this would be a
classic “normalization project.” Can you explain what excludes
this anthology from being yet another normalization project that
would perhaps merely seek to present voices in parallel format?
Samah For me, a normalization project would be one that brings
together two sides and they talk, have coffee, play a football
game, put on a theatrical production, etc., and then return to
their lives having achieved exactly nothing—one that does not
make a statement that acknowledges the structural and on-
going systematic discrimination against the Palestinian people.
That is normalization: when a project normalizes the status
quo. What makes this project different is that we began from
the position that this anthology is going to further the cause of
justice. We both see that there is an ongoing occupation that
must come to an end. We agreed on this premise that there was
no balance between the two sides. We didn’t even speak about
it; we just read each other’s plays, and it was clear that we were
both of the same mind.
Shira: And what would you say is the primary intervention that
you hope this anthology makes?
Stephen: First, to champion the incredible plays penned by our
outstanding playwrights. The artistic quality of their works
has drawn critical acclaim. Hopefully this anthology will of-
fer another forum promoting future productions. And the
fact that such accomplished Jewish and Palestinian diaspora
writers living on five continents have come together to help
bridge our cultural divide delivers a compelling message.
The … audiences drawn to our panels at international writers’
festivals and other events seem as interested in how and why
two strangers—a Boston-born Jew in Canada and a Gaza-born
Palestinian in Australia—began this groundbreaking journey
with other playwrights as they are in the plays themselves. We
hope this anthology can offer some lessons for others to draw
on about the importance and potential of Jews and Palestinians
coming together to tell stories that shed a light on what blinds
us with fear and help contribute, however modestly, toward
making this a more just and peaceful world for our children
and our grandchildren.
About the Author
Shira Schwartz Greenberg is a sessional instructor at the University of
Waterloo in the Department of Drama and Speech Communication. She
is currently completing her doctoral dissertation at York University in the
area of performing Jewishness and sexuality, entitled, Between Letter and
Spirit: The Ontology of Jewish Performance.
ctr 175 summer 2018 79