A Brief History of Jewish Playwriting

Jewish playwriting is not a distinct category or separate genre, but rather a diverse field of theatrical creation that emerged from the unique encounter between the universal world of theatre and the traditions of Jewish creativity, discourse, and interpretation, as well as the Jewish worldview shaped by the experience of living as a minority. When we speak of Jewish plays in Israel, we usually mean works that engage with Jewish history, the sources of our culture, or the lives of Jewish communities beyond Israel.

In this article, which makes no academic claims whatsoever (my apologies in advance) I will trace the development of Jewish playwriting beyond Israel, from pre-modern Hebrew drama through Yiddish theatre to the surprising story of the Jewish playwrights who helped establish Arabic theatre. I will also explore those who wrote bold and revolutionary political drama in Europe before arriving at the Jewish playwrights who profoundly shaped the theatre we know today on Broadway and in the West End.

Throughout this journey, I will consider the influence of Jewish drama on the development of modern Jewish thought and culture. At the same time, I will ask whether Jewish drama is simply a by-product of global theatre culture or whether it has been one of the most significant forces in shaping modern theatre—not only around the world, but in Israel as well.

Let's Begin with Pre-Modern Hebrew Drama

Jewish playwriting probably began to emerge in the late fifteenth and throughout the sixteenth centuries with the Purim-shpil plays that were performed across Europe. If we momentarily set aside the theories claiming that William Shakespeare was the son of a Portuguese converso family named Shapira, or that his plays were actually written by Emilia Bassano, the daughter of a Venetian converso family (intriguing theories that most serious Shakespeare scholars dismiss out of hand), the first Jewish playwright known to us was also the first playwright to write plays in Hebrew: Judah Sommo (1527–1592) of Mantua- a physician, poet, and theatre practitioner who wrote comedies in Hebrew and Italian, directed performances at the ducal court, and composed the play Tzachut Bedichuta de-Kiddushin ("The Witty Joke of Betrothal"), which was probably the first Hebrew comedy.

About one hundred and seventy years later, Moses Hayim Luzzatto (the Ramchal, 1707–1746) wrote allegorical plays in Hebrew in Padua, including Le-Yesharim Tehillah ("Glory to the Righteous") and Migdal Oz ("Tower of Strength").

Vienna and Berlin: Politics and Theater

Heinrich Heine, regarded as one of the greatest German poets of all time, devoted considerable attention to his Jewish identity, even after converting to Christianity (in order to earn a living as a lawyer, a profession that was closed to Jews in the early nineteenth century). Unlike many German Jews of his time, who saw themselves as Germans of the Jewish faith, Heine regarded Judaism as a nation rather than merely a religion. Some even argue that he was, in fact, the first secular Jew.

In his play Almansor (1821), which tells the story of Muslims in Spain forced to convert to Christianity under Christian rule as an allegory for the situation of the Jews of his own time (and which was never performed publicly during his lifetime), Heine wrote the famous prophetic line: "Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well." In 1933, his works topped the list of books thrown into the bonfires in the streets of Berlin, alongside the writings of several of the playwrights discussed below.

Theodor Herzl also enjoyed a measure of success as a playwright. In 1894, however, he wrote, under a pseudonym and in just seventeen days, his only overtly political play, The New Ghetto. In it, he confronted, for the first time in a direct and dramatic way, the questions of modern antisemitism and Jewish identity, while exposing the failure of Jewish emancipation. The play failed to win over Viennese audiences, but writing it was probably the decisive turning point that later led Herzl to formulate his political vision in The Jewish State.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish playwright Arthur Schnitzler published La Ronde and Professor Bernhardi, plays that exposed the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie and the hidden antisemitism of Viennese society.

The socialist Ernst Toller (1893–1939) was among the leaders of the Munich Uprising of 1919. While imprisoned, he wrote a series of political plays in which he subjected himself to a searching moral and political self-examination.

Carl Sternheim (1878–1942), the son of a Jewish father, wrote the great bourgeois satires of the 1910s that became hallmarks of the Weimar Republic and directly influenced Bertolt Brecht and Friedrich Dürrenmatt.

Lion Feuchtwanger (1884–1958), better known as a novelist, was also a playwright and theatre critic who worked closely with Brecht during their years in exile.

Franz Werfel (1890–1945) and Walter Mehring (1896–1981) helped shape the satirical cabaret that turned Berlin of the 1920s into a laboratory of radical theatrical experimentation.

Jewish Playwrights in the Arabic World

A different, more surprising, and far less familiar story is that of two Jewish playwrights who helped lay the foundations of modern Arabic theatre, yet whose names have largely been erased from the official narratives of their countries of origin.

Abraham Daninos (1797–?) of Algeria wrote, in 1847, the first play ever published in Arabic- a milestone recognized in the history of Algerian theatre as a foundational moment that preceded what is commonly regarded as the birth of modern Arabic theatre by more than two decades.

Yaqub Sanu (1839–1912) known in Arabic as يعقوب صنوع and also by the pen name Abu Naddara was born in Cairo to an Italian Jewish father and an Egyptian Jewish mother. In 1870, he founded Egypt's first Arabic theatre company under the patronage of Khedive Ismail Pasha, who hailed him as "the Molière of Egypt." Writing in colloquial Arabic, Sanu was the first to present actresses (all of them Jewish women) on a public Egyptian stage, and he pioneered new forms of social and political satire. After the Khedive closed his theatre in response to a play that mocked him, Sanu went into exile in Paris, where he spent the rest of his life.

Yiddish as a Theatrical Laboratory

Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908), widely regarded as the father of modern professional Yiddish theatre, founded in Romania in 1876 the world's first professional theatre company to perform in Yiddish. He wrote plays that spoke directly to ordinary people in their own language, blending music, comedy, and pathos to create a theatrical tradition that would profoundly influence the development of American theatre three decades later.

New York's Second Avenue became the centre of Yiddish theatre and culture from the 1890s until the World War II.

Jacob Gordin, who brought adapted versions of works by Maxim Gorky and William Shakespeare to the popular Yiddish stage, laid the professional foundations that enabled the next generation of performers and playwrights to cross the language barrier and succeed on the English-speaking stage.

At the end of 1911, a small travelling Yiddish theatre troupe arrived in Prague. Franz Kafka, who had long rejected the version of Judaism to which he had been exposed as a child, attended the troupe's performances and wrote about them at length in his diaries. He developed personal relationships with the actors and formed a particularly close bond with the troupe's director, Yitzhak Löwy. His encounter with the troupe in 1911 became a defining moment in his search for what he regarded as a more "authentic" Judaism. Inspired by the experience, Kafka immersed himself in the study of Yiddish and Hebrew, read Zionist newspapers, and became involved in Jewish nationalist circles. Themes, plots, and characters from the Yiddish plays he saw found their way into his own writing. Although Kafka himself never wrote for the stage, many of his stories were adapted into plays in the decades following his death.

Eastern Europe: Between Yiddish Culture and the Wider World 

The early twentieth century in Eastern Europe marked a golden age of Jewish theatre. Jewish playwrights worked along two parallel paths: those who chose to write in Yiddish, at the heart of traditional Jewish culture, and those who wrote in Russian and became part of the revolutionary avant-garde of the Soviet Union.

The first tradition, which is better known to Israeli audiences, flourished in Yiddish theatre.

Sholem Aleichem also wrote plays, but he is remembered above all for his literary characters, especially Tevye the Dairyman, who years later became the inspiration for the quintessential Jewish musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

Itzik Manger wove together biblical stories, Jewish folklore, and Yiddish humour in his dramatic works.

S. Ansky (Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) wrote The Dybbuk (originally titled Between Two Worlds) following an ethnographic expedition to document Jewish folklore in Eastern Europe. First performed in 1920, the play quickly transcended the boundaries of Yiddish theatre and inspired the iconic Hebrew production by Habima Theatre, directed by Yevgeny Vakhtangov. That production laid the foundations for what would eventually become Israeli theatre.

During the same period, a generation of Jewish writers and playwrights emerged in Russia who chose to write in Russian. Writing in Russian enabled them to reach a much wider audience, but it also required them to conceal their Jewish identity and adapt to the expectations of the Soviet establishment and the constraints of Communist censorship.

Isaac Babel, for example, was one of the greatest Jewish-Russian writers of his generation. In his acclaimed play Sunset (1928), he brought to the stage the colourful, violent underworld of Jewish Odessa before being executed during Stalinist purges.

By contrast, the playwright Yevgeny Schwartz chose a more subtle path of political escapism, using children's fairy tales to craft brilliant and incisive political satire.

Broadway and American Drama: From the Margins to Centre Stage

The development of Jewish drama in the United States mirrors the integration of the Jewish community into American society, from struggles for survival and social acceptance, through moral critique, to urban comedy and the complex politics of identity.

In the 1930s, Lillian Hellman broke new ground with realist plays such as The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939), exposing corruption and prejudice in American society. During the same decade, Clifford Odets brought the Jewish American working class to the stage with plays such as Waiting for Lefty (1935), turning theatre into a platform for social and political protest.

He was followed by Arthur Miller, whose plays Death of a Salesman (1949), All My Sons (1947), and The Crucible (1953) became timeless classics exploring the moral cost of the American Dream while expressing deeply Jewish ideas about guilt, responsibility, and justice.

During the 1960s and 1970s came the writers who redefined American humour. Neil Simon created sophisticated comedies rooted in the Jewish American experience, such as The Odd Couple (1965). Woody Allen, through plays like Play It Again, Sam (1969) and, of course, through his films changed the way popular culture talks about anxiety, neurosis, sex, and intellectual life.

From the late 1970s onwards, Jewish playwriting took on a more political, raw, and intimate tone. David Mamet, with plays such as American Buffalo (1977) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), transformed American dialogue through its fragmented, aggressive, and distinctly masculine style, while never concealing the influence of his Jewish identity on his writing.

Towards the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, Donald Margulies wrote sharp, insightful dramas such as Dinner with Friends, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. During the same period, Tony Kushner wrote his epic masterpiece Angels in America (1991–1993), weaving together an apocalyptic vision, the AIDS crisis, homosexuality, American politics, and Jewish mysticism into a theatrical epic that placed those on the margins at the very centre of the human experience.

The female voice in twenty-first-century Jewish drama continues to be shaped by remarkable playwrights such as Paula Vogel, a Pulitzer Prize winner whose play Indecent (2015) revisits the controversial history of Yiddish theatre and God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch.

The British Stage: From Kitchen Sink Drama to the Theatre of the Absurd

Arnold Wesker (1932–2016) brought the lives of the Jewish working class in London's East End to the forefront of British theatre. As one of the leading voices of the "Angry Young Men" generation of the 1950s and 1960s, and of the kitchen sink drama movement, Wesker combined the experiences of immigrant life with socialist ideals and questions of identity.

By contrast, Harold Pinter (1930–2008) took drama in an entirely different direction, earning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005. He developed a distinctive dramatic language that came to be known as "Pinteresque." In his plays, silence, pauses, and unspoken menace are every bit as important as dialogue itself. Works such as The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and Betrayal have been performed countless times in Israel and around the world, redefining the Theatre of the Absurd.

Peter Shaffer (1926–2016) wrote grand, larger-than-life dramas that explored questions of religion, faith, and morality in plays such as Equus (1973), which has been revived repeatedly in Israel, and Amadeus (1979).

Tom Stoppard (1937–2025), born in Czechoslovakia and raised in Britain, discovered his Jewish heritage only as an adult. His work is celebrated for its intellectual wit and sophisticated dialogue. In Leopoldstadt (2020), he turned to his own Jewish roots, telling the story of several generations of a Jewish family in the first half of the twentieth century, most of whom perished in the Holocaust.

France: Identity, Belonging, and the Stage

Jean-Claude Grumberg (b. 1939), the recipient of seven Molière Awards and the Grand Prix of the Académie française, has described himself as "the voice of post-Holocaust French Jewish theatre."

Yasmina Reza (b. 1959), the daughter of Jewish parents- an Iranian father and a Hungarian mother- has written some of the most successful French plays of the modern era. Art (1994) and God of Carnage (2006) won Tony Awards, Laurence Olivier Awards, and Molière Awards, and have been translated into dozens of languages. Her satirical portraits of the European bourgeoisie, revealing what lies beneath the surface of politeness and harmony, combine the French theatrical tradition with the critical perspective of someone who grew up between two worlds.

And What About the Musical?

It is no exaggeration to say that the Broadway musical and indeed the modern musical comedy is, in many ways, a Jewish invention, with roots stretching back to nineteenth-century Europe. One of its early pioneers was the French Jewish playwright Ludovic Halévy (1834–1908), who wrote the libretto for Carmen and for many of the operettas of Jacques Offenbach, bringing sharp social satire wrapped in wit to the stages of Paris.

When this European tradition reached the United States and encountered Abraham Goldfaden's Yiddish theatre, the modern musical was born. Many of the giants of the genre including Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim were of Jewish descent. Masterpieces such as West Side Story (1957), written by Arthur Laurents with music by Leonard Bernstein, transformed the seemingly light-hearted musical into a profound exploration of race, love, and violence.

Final Thoughts

First, it is impossible to ignore the extraordinary concentration of plays written by Jewish playwrights and their immense influence on the development of modern theatre. Explaining this phenomenon, however, is far more difficult. We can only speculate, but to my mind, three factors stand out.

• The Jewish tradition of interpretation - A culture in which every text is open to debate and endless reinterpretation prepares writers to grapple with questions rather than settle for easy answers.

• Life on the margins - The experience of displacement from place, language, or a sense of belonging, may foster a particular sensitivity to questions of identity and an ability to see the world through other people's eyes.

• Outsiderhood as perspective - Communities that lived as minorities, observing society from the outside, developed a sharp awareness of social subtext and of the gap between what is said and what is left unsaid.

  
  

As for today's debates about the nature of Jewish identity, this remarkable body of work, which does not even begin to include the rich tradition of Israeli drama or the profound Jewish contribution to Hollywood and world cinema, suggests that theatre is far from being at odds with the Jewish worldview. On the contrary, it has been one of the ways in which modern Jewish identity has been expressed, explored, and shaped. At the same time, Jewish playwrights have played a central role in shaping modern drama itself.

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