Benjamin Harshav. The Moscow Yiddish Theater: Art on Stage in the Time of Revolution. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. xiii, 199 pp

For theater is first and foremost an art of the body, and the Moscow Yiddish Theater as well as its critics and cultural milieu were acutely aware that their involvement with performance had to do precisely with a renegotiation of the body, its presence and meaning in Jewish culture and revolutionary politics. [...]it is the transmission of this kind of "embodied knowledge," to use Diana Taylor's term, that performance allows for and which is central for the theater's multifaceted dialogic involvement with the Jewish past. 1 The picture that emerges from the pages of Harshav's book is that the Moscow Yiddish Theater reused the stereotypical "Old Jew" body, played with it, and transformed it into a modernist, revolutionary image (this is where Harshav finds one of Chagall's most profound contributions to the theater's artistic-political path). [...]while moving away from the traditional Jewish body, as it was perceived by modern Jews, the theater did not necessarily participate in the celebration of the "New Jew" physical type either. Other recent studies that have covered the GOSET's later days, including Jeffrey Veidlinger's The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, discuss at length plays performed later by the GOSET that surely had more prominent heroic, mythical, and national tones, such as Shmuel Halkin's Bar Kokhba, as well as the theater troupe's involvement with both Zionist and rabbinic figures.2 In contrast, for earlier sources appearing in Harshav's book, Zionism and rabbinic Jewry are both associated mainly with HaBima.3 As Harshav barely refers to other contemporary studies of the GOSET, besides some very general comments (xi), his position vis-à-vis these studies and the stories they tell is left unclear to some degree.