Through an examination of children's and youth plays and performances about the Holocaust from Germany, Israel, and the United States, this book offers an entirely new way of looking at the vital role of youth performance in coping with the legacy of historical tragedy. As the first book-length critical examination of this subject, Holocaust Memory and Youth Performance considers plays that are produced by major theatre companies alongside performances written by young authors and pieces taken from the diaries and memoirs of those who experienced the Holocaust as children or adolescents. While youth-focused plays about the Holocaust have been in the repertories of top professional companies throughout the world for decades and continue to be performed in theatres, schools, and community centers, they are often neglected in concentrated and comparative studies of Holocaust theatre. Erika Hughes fills this gap by examining plays (including The Diary of Anne Frank and Ab heure heißt Du Sara), musicals, performances, scripts, a rock concert, a performance on Instagram, and pedagogically-focused works of applied theatre – a diverse collection of performances for young audiences that tell the stories of young people who experienced the Holocaust. Adopting Hannah Arendt's notion of natality as a powerful framework, this study examines the ways in which youth-theatre performances make a vital contribution to intergenerational witnessing and the collective memory of the Holocaust.

Israeli youth voyages to Poland are one of the most popular and influential forms of transmission of Holocaust memory in Israeli society. Through intensive participant observation, group discussions, student diaries, and questionnaires, the author demonstrates how the State shapes Poland into a living deathscape of Diaspora Jewry. In the course of the voyage, students undergo a rite de passage, in which they are transformed into victims, victorious survivors, and finally witnesses of the witnesses. By viewing, touching, and smelling Holocaust-period ruins and remains, by accompanying the survivors on the sites of their suffering and survival, crying together and performing commemorative ceremonies at the death sites, students from a wide variety of family backgrounds become carriers of Shoah memory. They come to see the State and its defense as the romanticized answer to the Shoah. These voyages are a bureaucratic response to uncertainty and fluidity of identity in an increasingly globalized and fragmented society. This study adds a measured and compassionate ethical voice to ideological debates surrounding educational and cultural forms of encountering the past in contemporary Israel, and raises further questions about the representation of the Holocaust after the demise of the last living witnesses.

Key Concepts in Theatre Drama Education provides the first comprehensive survey of contemporary research trends in theatre/drama education. It is an intriguing rainbow of thought, celebrating a journey across three fields of scholarship: theatre, education and modes of knowing. Hitherto no other collection of key concepts has been published in theatre /drama education. Fifty seven entries, written by sixty scholars from across the world aim to convey the zeitgeist of the field. The book’s key innovation lies in its method of writing, through collaborative networking, an open peer-review process, and meaning-making involving all contributors. Within the framework of key-concept entries, readers will find valuable judgments and the viewpoints of researchers from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, New Zealand and Australia. The volume clearly shows that drama/theatre educators and researchers have created a language, with its own grammar and lucid syntax. The concepts outlined convey the current knowledge of scholars, highlighting what they consider significant. Entries cover interdependent topics on teaching and learning, aesthetics and ethics, curricula and history, culture and community, various populations and their needs, theatre for young people, digital technology, narrative and pedagogy, research methods, Shakespeare and Brecht, other various modes of theatre and the education of theatre teachers. It aims to serve as the standard reference book for theatre/drama education researchers, policymakers, practitioners and students around the world. A basic companion for researchers, students, and teachers, this sourcebook outlines the key concepts that make the field prominent in the sphere of Arts Education.

This book charts the performative dimension of the Holocaust memorialization culture through a selection of representative artistic, educational, and memorial projects. Performative practice refers to the participatory and performance-like aspects of the Holocaust memorial culture, the transformative potential of such practice, and its impact upon visitors. At its core, performative practice seeks to transform individuals from passive spectators into socially and morally responsible agents. This edited volume explores how performative practices came into being, what impact they exert upon audiences, and how researchers can conceptualise and understand their relevance. In doing so, the contributors to this volume innovatively draw upon existing philosophical considerations of performativity, understandings of performance in relation to performativity, and upon critical insights emerging from visual and participatory arts. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History.

Talking about the Holocaust has provided an international language for ethics, victimization, political claims, and constructions of collective identity. As part of a worldwide vocabulary, that language helps set the tenor of the era of globalization. This volume addresses manifestations of Holocaust-engendered global discourse by critically examining their function and inherent dilemmas, and the ways in which Holocaust-related matters still instigate public debate and academic deliberation. It contends that the contradiction between the totalizing logic of globalization and the assumed uniqueness of the Holocaust generates continued intellectual and practical discontent.

Argues for and enacts a reading of representative "Shoah" texts found in contemporary "haggadot" from liberal Judaisms in the U.S. based on a hermeneutic of trauma. The ongoing ritualizing of the "Shoah" in Passover "haggadot" requires special attention to the problematics raised by placing a non-redemptive event into a redemptive narrative. The hermeneutic of trauma developed in this study attends to the history, ideology and construction of memory surrounding "Shoah" texts and the implications of these for ethical readings that allow mourning and prevent forgetting. After reviewing academic discussion of memory and representation of the Holocaust and setting out the critique of redemptive memory, analyzes how the creators of the Reform "haggadah" created a text of both continuity and contrast with their Reform legacy and their rabbinic heritage. Places this text, along with its Conservative counterpart, within an American discourse of Holocaust-redemption and argues against this as the basis for a viable American Jewish identity. Examines ritualizations that draw on Holocaust icons and presents non-redemptive readings of these memory texts. Investigation of the non-rational and embodied aspects of the ritual leads to the argument that the Holocaust, as an event at the limits, cannot be embodied in its full extremity. Argues that these ritual memory texts - and by extension ritual theory itself - should be read to privilege the tension created by the contrast between Exodus and Auschwitz. This move, which acknowledges these commemorations as traumatic text, breaks open the redemptive frame of the "haggadah" and presents a limited, yet real, possibility for hope.