“You had buried me, and I’ve come back!”: Manipulation, Lies, and the Archives of the Cinematic Dybbuk
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Yiddish Civilization Lecture Series
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
Zehavit Stern | Delivered in English.
This talk explores how stories are told—and sometimes fabricated—through film. Our starting point is the 1937 Yiddish film The Dybbuk, based on S. An-sky’s celebrated play (1914–17), a cornerstone of both Yiddish and Hebrew theater. This classic film is juxtaposed with the 2017 German-Polish documentary The Prince and the Dybbuk, which traces the enigmatic life of the art film’s director, Michał Waszyński. As archival traces blur into cinematic invention, the documentary raises deeper questions about memory, identity, and loss. The talk thus reflects on the haunting legacy of a lost Eastern European Jewish world and on how film can preserve, possess, or lay claim to possession—revealing as much about our present desires as about the past it seeks to recover.
About the Speaker
Zehavit Stern is a scholar of Yiddish theater, film, literature and folklore, and of Hebrew literature. She holds an MA in Yiddish culture from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005) and a PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Graduate Theological Union (2011). She has taught at the University of Oxford (2011-2015), Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University and is currently the Academic Dean, head of Honors Program and assistant professor of theater studies, at Emuna Academic College of Arts and Education. She has published and lectured extensively on Eastern European Jewish culture. Among her publications are “The Maternal Drag: Motherhood as Performance in Yiddish Film Melodrama,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, and “On Dubbing the Dead: The Dybbuk 1937-1917,” in TDR/The Drama Review (vol. 63:2, 2019). Her forthcoming book, titled The Birth of Theatre from the Spirit of Folk Performance: Eastern European Jewish Culture and the Invention of a National Dramatic Heritage examines the emergence of the narrative that views the Purim-shpil and other formerly rejected folkish expressions as the origins of Jewish theater.