2022 →Performing Blackouts

An online multivocal and multilingual collective reading, Yiddishland Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 2022

The reading reanimated censored texts through the work of translation and transformations of language. The choice of reading materials was provoked by different occasions in history when Yiddish theater was censored or banned by the authorities - from plays performed in in Berlin-Scheunenviertel in the early 20th century to Yiddish theater in the early days of Israel. 

The online multilingual session gathered professional Yiddish performers and translators for a public reading of a collage of censored materials translated especially for the event from Hebrew and Arabic into Yiddish or English and vice versa. The selection of texts covers a variety of instances in which the Israeli government in the past, and also different theaters and publishing houses in the present impeded political criticism from being voiced through various instruments of censorship. The reading seeks to see in the Yiddish language a safe haven for the unspeakable and evoke questions regarding the apparatus of censorship and how to undermine it by means of translation. Can Yiddish voice political resistance? What kind of connections occur with the transition of contemporary heated and controversial topics to a non-national language?

Texts by Hanoch Levin, Sigal Naor Perelman, Samich El Qasim, Jacob Gordin, Yael Tal, Anat Dreamer, Naama Redler and Amos Kenan. Read and/or translated by: Irad Ben Isaak, Shiri Shapira, Ethel Niborski, Jake Krakovsky, Eliana Jacobs, Elena Hoffenberg and Jake Schneider.