“What good actor today is not a Jew?” Friedrich Nietzsche asked in 1882, posing a question that drew on a long tradition of regarding the Jews’ efforts at integration into the modern world as a mode of dissimulation. Guest speaker Jonathan M. Hess will explore the real and symbolic roles that the theatre played in shaping Jewish identity and the relations between Germans and Jews in the centuries before the Holocaust. Learn about the role theatre played in reinforcing anti-Semitic conceptions of Jews while also creating a liberal culture of sympathy with Jewish suffering. Hess is the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose current book project is Playing Jewish: Theatre, Popular Culture, and the Liberal Imagination. Please join us for a reception at 6pm.
