New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University
New Performance of The Dybbuk at Tel Aviv University
The Tel Aviv University Theatre performed the famous S. An-sky’s play The Dybbuk from January 7 to January 14, 2026. The perfomance, played in Hebrew, has been translated from the original Yiddish by Dr. Ruthie Abeliovich, an associate of our project, Dr. Oren Cohen Roman and Dr. Miriam Trinh.
Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport (1863 – 1920), known by his pen name S. An-sky, was a Jewish author, playwright, researcher of Jewish folklore, polemicist, and cultural and political activist. He is best known for his play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worlds, written in 1914. In 1912-1914, he led the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition, which visited approximately 60–70 shtetls to the Pale of Settlement. The expedition collected thousands of invaluable artifacts and made over 500 recordings of Jewish folk music using a phonograph.
The Dybbuk was first staged in Warsaw by Joseph Lateiner (1853–1935) on 1920, one month after An-sky’s death. Since then it has been translated into over a dozen languages and performed thousands of times all over the world. It remains a Hasidic Gothic Yiddish story turned also into a film by Michał Waszyński in 1937.
The Jewish publishing house Knizhniki in Moscow published a bilingual volume of original contemporary Yiddish poetry with Russian translations titled I Return (“איך קער זיך אום”.“Я возвращаюсь”). Realized under the auspices of the private publisher Boris Zaitschick, the book has been composed and edited by Yoel Matveyev, the editor-in-chief of our website.
The Yiddish literature has its own famous detective: Max Spitzkopf, the “Yiddish Sherlock Holmes”. For the first time his adventures, written by Jonas Kreppel (1874-1940), were published in English, translated by Mikhl Yashinsky, mainly known as an actor and theater researcher who recently has also published another important book, the English translation of the memoirs of the pioneering Yiddish actress Ester-Rokhl Kaminska.
Several presentations in Moscow were dedicated to the unique bilingual Yiddish-Russian poetry book “Продолжит петь его строка” (His Poem’s Line Will Continue to Sing), which contains poems of 23 Yiddish poets who died as Red Army soldiers fighting the Nazis during WWII.