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This paper reviews Grzegorz Niziołek thought-provoking book The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust (London: Methuen Drama Press, 2019), and the key questions and issues it addresses. Focusing on Polish perspectives, theatrical representations and performative reactions to the extermination of the Jews during WWII, the book analyzes six decades of theatrical creation. Within this scheme, the victims and perpetrators are casted in the role of actors, while the Polish people are allotted the role of passive spectators, witnesses to the atrocity. This review sheds light on the ethical and aesthetical implications of Niziołek’s study, by attending to the material aspects of the catastrophe, and its theatrical representations. It seeks to recuperate and integrate the Jewish perspective into the theatrical analysis.

This article examines how S. Ansky's 1918 play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds and its subsequent adaptations on stage and screen appropriate Romeo and Juliet , transforming Shakespeare's tragedy, through Kabbalah and Jewish folklore, into one that ‘repairs’ the story of star-crossed lovers and the material world that they seek to escape. The Dybbuk is a ‘reparative tragedy’, one that intersects multiple levels of restoration, healing and repair. Generically, the play and its later stage and screen adaptations recuperate and refigure Shakespeare's tragedy; materially, it calls for the repair of past and impending trauma, suffering and severed human relationships. These levels, as well as others, culminate in the play's overriding spiritual one: the play follows the ‘reparative’ narrative of Kabbalah itself, with its goal of tikkun olam – to repair the world.

\"Necessary Exorcisms\" reads S. Ansky's The Dybbuk in the context of Ansky's travels during World War I as a relief aid worker with the Jewish Committee to Help War Victims. Ansky's description of the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia—in the fragments of a diary he kept during these years and in a longer memoir published after the war—confronts us with two motifs at the heart of The Dybbuk : a blurring of the threshold between life and death, and the important role that law, litigatory practices, and lawful authorities play as entities to which one could appeal to prevent a wrong from occurring and/or to adjudicate a wrong after it has occurred. To read The Dybbuk alongside Ansky's account of what happened to Jews in Galicia during World War I is to see the play as a dramatic exploration of issues at the heart of what Giorgio Agamben has theorized as a state of exception—the geopolitical space in which there is no law or lawful authority to which to appeal when one's rights as a citizen have been revoked and one has become exposed to arbitrary violence. To read The Dybbuk as a play obliquely linked to the fate of Jews in occupied Galicia is to complicate contemporary readings that see Ansky staging the law's malign power to punish illicit desires so as to uphold patriarchal and classist norms. Reading The Dybbuk as a postwar play, \"Necessary Exorcisms\" discerns in it an apology for the law and its intercessions.

Adriana Altaras’ autobiographical novel Titos Brille productively challenges the category of the “Eastern turn,” first introduced and formulated by Brigid Haines. Unlike other writers from the former Yugoslavia, who mostly focus on the civil wars of the 1990s, Altaras engages readers through the strategy of double deixis in contextual anchoring. The figure of the dybbuk, which alternately appears as her deceased mother and father, addresses readers in the second person as interlocutors and thereby implicates them in the preservation of Yugoslavia’s anti-fascist legacy. In the context of Western European debates about post-national memory, she inscribes the Jewish experience into the founding myth of socialist Yugoslavia. The reconstruction of anti-fascist and post-national memory opens up a path for southern Slavs to participate in European integration and post-war reconciliation.

After a nearly two-thousand-year interlude, and just as Christian Europe was in the throes of the great Witch Hunt and what historians have referred to as \"The Age of the Demoniac,\" accounts of spirit possession began to proliferate in the Jewish world. Concentrated at first in the Near East but spreading rapidly westward, spirit possession, both benevolent and malevolent, emerged as perhaps the most characteristic form of religiosity in early modern Jewish society. Adopting a comparative historical approach, J. H. Chajes uncovers this strain of Jewish belief to which scant attention has been paid. Informed by recent research in historical anthropology, Between Worlds provides fascinating descriptions of the cases of possession as well as analysis of the magical techniques deployed by rabbinic exorcists to expel the ghostly intruders. Seeking to understand the phenomenon of spirit possession in its full complexity, Chajes delves into its ideational framework-chiefly the doctrine of reincarnation-while exploring its relation to contemporary Christian and Islamic analogues. Regarding spirit possession as a form of religious expression open to-and even dominated by-women, Chajes initiates a major reassessment of women in the history of Jewish mysticism. In a concluding section he examines the reception history of the great Hebrew accounts of spirit possession, focusing on the deployment of these \"ghost stories\" in the battle against incipient skepticism in the turbulent Jewish community of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Exploring a phenomenon that bridged learned and ignorant, rich and poor, men and women, Jews and Gentiles, Between Worlds maps for the first time a prominent feature of the early modern Jewish religious landscape, as quotidian as it was portentous: the nexus of the living and the dead.

The article examines how Marcin Wrona’s Demon (2015) reworks the Jewish myth of a dybbuk in order to discuss how and to what extent a spectral haunting may disrupt acts of collective forgetting, which are in turn fueled by repression, repudiation, and ritualized violence. A part of a revisionist trend in Polish cinema, Demon upsets the contours of national affiliations, and in doing so comments on the problematic nature of memory work concerning pre- and postwar Polish–Jewish relations. Because the body possessed by a female dybbuk is foreign and male, the film also underlines gendered aspects of possession, silencing, and story-telling. The article draws on Gothic Studies and horror cinema studies as well as Polish–Jewish studies in order to show how by deploying typical possession horror tropes Wrona is able to reveal the true horror—an effective erasure of the Jewish community, an act that needs to be repeated in order for the state of historical oblivion to be maintained.

Between 1990 and 2001, the Israeli Ministry of Education freely distributed to students countless copies of the books written by Holocaust author Ka-Tzetnik. This educational project has never been researched and, despite its magnitude and uniqueness, it has abruptly disappeared from public awareness as if it had never been carried out. The motivations that stand behind this initiative and the lessons it teaches about Holocaust pedagogy are the focus of this article. The article examines the influence of political and psychological dimensions in Holocaust pedagogy on the choice of a curriculum. It ultimately offers a close analysis of the conduct of the protagonists of this educational affair and it gives rise to a \"dybbuk model\" for Holocaust pedagogy. This model offers new insights into Holocaust memory in general.

This article describes two concepts important for Jewish mysticism – dybbuk and the transmigration of soul, and goes on to present their contemporary usage in the works by Yona Wollach. The concept of the transmigration of souls (in Hebrew: gilgul neshamot) describes a situation whereby the soul of a dead person returns to the this world and occupies a new body. In the case of the dybbuk (in Hebrew: dibuk), on the other hand, the body of a living person, who has his or her own soul, is possessed by the spirit of a dead person. The concepts of reincarnation and dybbuk played an important role not only in religious tradition but also in folklore and popular and high culture. Both became the focus of a number of artworks. The article presents fragments of the poems of the Israeli poet Yona Wollach (1944–1985), in which she describes psychological states similar to transmigration of souls and being captured by a dybbuk. The article aims to show that these poetic images are in close connection with Wollach`s concept of the human psyche.