Global Jewish Plays: Five Works by Jewish Playwrights from Around the World edited by Zhui Ning Chang

A unique collection of plays that brings together stories of Jewish life from playwrights around the world.

Extinct by Philip Arditti; Heartlines by Sarah Waisvisz; The Kahena Berber Queen by Berthe Bénichou-Aboulker; Papa’gina by Hana Vazana Grunwald; A People by L M Feldman

Curated and edited by international theatre collective Global Voices Theatre, these five plays showcase the dazzling multiplicity of Jewish narratives across the globe: the haunting, the challenging, the joyful.

From a legendary North African warrior queen to queer French avant-garde artists during World War II; from Israel-Palestine tensions made personal to protests in Istanbul amidst intergenerational trauma, this is a genre-spanning collection that probes at the heart of what it means to be Jewish - past, present, and future.

Curated by Jewish-Lebanese Brazilian queer theatre maker Victor Esses, the plays were performed at London's Bush Theatre as part of Global Voices Theatre's popular live events. At a sensitive time for Jewish communities in the UK and beyond, the original event Global Jewish Voices aimed to engage the UK Jewish community and make space for nuanced conversations and representation. This collection of selected plays is a legacy of the event and opens up avenues for wider audiences to read and perform the works.