Israel’s Dramatic Voice
Web Master Joshua Sobol is Israel’s greatest playwright, and yet his hit play Shooting Magda, which ran for 3 years in the 1980s, would be met with violent opposition if it were produced in Israel today.
Sobol came to the Washington University campus this week to view the Performing Arts Department’s production of Shooting Magda, and to speak in the assembly series about his plays and the historical and political tensions that are impossible to detach from his work. And as is appropriate for one of Israel’s cultural ambassadors, Sobol has found himself at the center of many of these tensions.
Over the last 60 years, Sobol has perceived life with the “ears of a playwright”, keeping an open and attentive mind despite the controversies surrounding him. Born in Tel Aviv in 1939, Sobol has lived through many of the most significant events on the packed timeline of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict-Israel’s independence in 1948, Israel’s 1967 invasion of the Sinai Peninsula and their mandated withdrawal, bouts with Lebanon in 1978, treaties, declarations, and of course the recently escalating rash of suicide bombing and retaliation.
Sobol has had left-wing views of Israeli/Palestinian relations for most of his life. He remembers that when he was 9 years old, the Arabs in the villages neighboring his came to say goodbye to his family just before the war in 1948: “My mother asked them, ‘Why are you leaving?’” Sobol remembered, “And they said, ‘We got an order from the [Arab] supreme headquarters.’ They were friends of the family… They never returned because they lost the war and the village they came from was erased. The war changed their whole world.”
Because of Sobol’s respect for both the Israelis and Palestinians, his plays have been hotly debated. In 1988, his play The Jerusalem Syndrome led to so many protests nationwide that he was forced to resign his position as the Artistic Director of the Municipal Theater in Haifa. Shooting Magda, which the Performing Arts Department is playing to sold-out crowds this weekend, also met with resistance from rightwing Israelis who objected to a mixed cast of Arabs and Jews.
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