Main Campus - Gladfelter Hall
Room: 10th floor

In 1953, Habima—Israel’s national theatre—staged a Hebrew-speaking production of Lost in the
Stars, the musical drama by Anderson and Weill (1949) based on Alan Paton’s best-selling novel
Cry, the Beloved Country (1948). For many, the exceptional success of the production (performed
more than 220 times) reflected Israel’s staunch moral stand against Apartheid in the 1950s.
Nevertheless, the straightforward identification with the oppressed South-African blacks was
negated by the actors’ blackface - an intriguing Israeli version of the Jewish-American blackface
tradition (associated so memorably with The Jazz Singer). This ambivalence was mirrored, in turn,
in political debates triggered by the production and the growing suspicion that Apartheid was not
all that foreign to Israeli society: in these oppositional readings, Paton’s plot became a poignant
allegory for oppression, injustice and racial/ethnic strife within Israel itself. Examining Lost in the
Stars against other, contemporary Israeli productions, my paper explores how representations of Blackness were employed on the Israeli stage—allegorically but also explicitly—to articulate
Zionist fantasies and anxieties.