The Postvernacular Condition: Soundscapes of Jewish Languages in Israeli Theatre

Abstract

In the twenty-first century more and more Israelis are joining the preservation and revival of Jewish tongues and dialects onstage, looking for their diasporic roots. Across the country, one can attend shows in practically every Jewish language (Ladino, Yiddish, Maghrebi, Juhuri, Judeo-Aramaic, Bukharan, Judeo-Iraqi, and others). This trend cannot be separated from a quest for identity which includes a rejection of the essentialist attitude that the Hebrew language is a sine qua non for Israeli theatre (apart from Arabic). As a postvernacular cultural practice, these languages, no longer in use as a vernacular, gain in symbolic value what they have lost in communicative functions: generating vanished soundscapes, performing vocal dimensions of familiarity and estrangement. Indeed, this is a peculiarity of postvernacularity: rather than the language functioning as the vehicle of performance, its utterance is the performance itself.