Jewish Theatre

Today, I visited a website "All About Jewish Theatre". As I usually do with a website of any group, organization, or business I am unfamiliar with, I first looked under the "About Us" tab to get a flavor of this organization. it seems their overall goal is to provide a commonplace for discovery and communication about Jewish culture in terms of the stage. While the site doesn't explicitly say, I infer that they do not affiliate with any particular sect of Judaism, and therefore am not surprised they have no classification for who their material is intended for(including non-jews). When browsing the general content of the site, needless to say, I was impressed with the depth of the content concerning plays, musicals and shows revolving around Judasim. More specifically, under the recourses tab, they have a library of all types of cultural productions for all things Jewish.

While browsing the Play and Film sections, I decided to search for anything Purim, and found a lot less than I had expected based on the topic. Much of Jewish history is taught orally, and the traditional way to tell the story of Purim is through a play. When thinking further on this, I came to realize that many productions of this story are on a small scale, whether it be at local Synagogues or JCCs(Jewish Community Centers).

I began to think about what we were discussing in class how there is a comical aspect portraying Jew's influence in Hollywood and Broadway, and realized there are many productions that have one awards and accolades with Judaism involved. In particular, I was looking at the lists of films, and noticed "Brighton Beach Memoirs" by Neil Simon. In this instance, it is a show about a Polish Jew teenager living in Brooklyn and his coming-of-age tale.