One of my favorite things to do at Davidson is to go to all of the great talks that Davidson offers (usually with equally great free food). Think about it: when are you going to have the time and opportunity to listen to such talented academics give passionate and eye-opening lectures about topics they know forwards and backwards? Unless you plan on entering academia as a career path, then your four years in college may just be your only chance.
With that being said, I want to share my experience about a recent symposium I attended called Gender and Jewishness. As most of you should know, these past two weeks Fiddler on the Roof has been on the main stage (if you didn’t catch it, you sorely missed out. Also… check out the cast interview article!). In correlation with the play, Davidson brought in a variety of Jewish scholars to give lectures that gave context to Fiddler.
Two enthusiastic professors specializing in theater, gender, and Jewishness came to visit from Princeton. Jill Dolan, Ph.D. and Stacy Wolf, Ph.D. came to talk to Davidson students, faculty, and local members of the Jewish community. Together, Drs. Dolan and Wolf discussed the ways in which Fiddler reflects gender views at it time of Broadway debut in 1964 and how one can “perform” Jewishness. It all started out with a Jewish brunch buffet. If you’ve never had Jewish brunch foods, you haven’t lived right.
Not to go into a feminist history lesson, but the second wave of feminism, a.k.a. the women’s liberation movement, was largely started in 1963 by Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. In this seminal book, Friedan identified the “problem with no name,” which was the overwhelming restlessness and emptiness felt by American, suburban, housewives. Wolf proposed that by the time of Fiddler‘s debut – only 19 months after Friedan’s book – Friedan’s feminist concepts had taken the country by storm and could clearly be seen in the play. For instance, most plays at this time ended with a marriage, meaning the audience never saw what happened to the wives afterwards. Did they end up happy? Fiddler on the Roof answers this question. Throughout the play, the audience gets to witness severial marriages at various stages. Fiddler certainly pushed back at convential theatrical plots of time and gave women more options and agency than they had seen in prior fictionalized play-worlds.
Dolan’s talk was on performing Jewishness. She briefly talked about blackface, yellowface, and the controversy of cis-gendered heterosexuals playing LGBTQ on stage. It is interesting, however, that when there are Jewish characters, they are mostly played by non-Jewish actors. Because of this reason, there are many cases of actors “perfoming Jewishness.” Much of the original cast of Fiddler was non-Jewish. In fact, many production agencies rejected the play at first, as it was deemed “too Jewish.” The 60’s was a time when many of the common Jewish stereotypes we have today were being formulated, and these are often the very notions that actors use to convey a character’s Jewishness to an audience. While perfoming Jewishness is not a bad thing, Dolan believes, it does take a certain level of cultural sensitivity. I don’t want to go too much into these topics, as I am the least succinct person. Unlike I could, these brilliant women gave wonderfully informative and concise lectures and facilitated stimulating dialogue afterwards.
I hope to see more of your beautiful faces at the innumerable lectures that Davidson hosts. They are a valuable source of knowledge, an excellent strategy for getting yummy snacks, an appropriate means of procrastinating, and a great way of getting the most out of your Davidson experiance.