Edna Nahshon's edited collection presents a broad range of articles that, as the title states, in different ways deal with Jews and the theatre. This is a methodologically, thematically, geographically, and historically extremely heterogeneous field. But as opposed to Nahshon's earlier edited collection Jewish Theatre: A Global View (Brill, 2009), which contained several articles exploring the Hebrew/Israeli and the Yiddish theatre traditions (one of them by the author of this review), these aspects or forms of Jewish theatre are conspicuously absent in the present volume, perhaps because they are not considered inherently intercultural. The only essay in Jews and Theater that deals with a text written in Hebrew is the one that opens the volume: Shimon Levy's performative reading of the biblical story of Balaam (in the Book of Numbers).

The new book, as the editor states in her introduction, is “devoted mostly to the narrower subject of the performance of Jewishness in non-Jewish languages and societies” (xiii). It is of course impossible to say what the perspectives presented by the ensemble of the mostly very interesting contributions included in this volume would have gained if theatre and performance in the “Jewish languages” had also been examined within an intercultural context. The issue is certainly worth considering after the almost total extinction of Yiddish as a result of the Shoah and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken and literary language. In fact, the book provides a few examples of Yiddish as a performance language when it deals with contemporary performances in Eastern Europe, albeit by non-Jewish performers who do not understand what they say in Yiddish.

Nahshon's collection consists of five parts. In the first, “Religion and Origins,” Sarit Cofman-Simhon's contribution (which follows Levy's article) examines another ancient text, the Hellenistic play Exagoge. The two additional articles in this section explore the representation of Jews in Passion plays: Tamara Y. Kohn on the representation of Jews in an Argentine Passion play and Edna Nahshon herself with a forty-two-page essay on Jews and Passion plays in the United States during 1879–1929. The Passion play is no doubt an important genre, which as Nahshon shows has also directly involved Jewish theatre makers. The second part, “Plays and Playwrights,” is more clearly defined, with Matthias Naumann writing about Jewish characters in Heinar Kipphardt's plays, David U. Garfinkle about Ernst Toller's drama Transfiguration, and Seth L. Wolitz about the dramatist Jean-Claude Grumberg.

The third part, simply called “Holocaust,” includes an article by Lisa Peschel in which she presents her exciting discoveries of and findings on plays written in the Terezin ghetto. I have not yet seen her recently published anthology Performing Captivity, Performing Escape: Cabarets and Plays from the Terezín/Theresienstadt Ghetto (Seagull Books, 2012), but after reading her short presentation of this complex topic in the volume reviewed here, I look forward to learning more about these plays, their performance and “survival.” This part also includes a programmatic essay by Carol Martin on the expressions of Jewishness in American performances based on her notion of the “theater of the real” (165), and it ends with Michael Bachmann's in-depth discussion of the complex and contradictory reception by German audiences of the German-Jewish actor Fritz Kortner following his return to his “home” country after the Second World War.

The fourth part, “Interpretations and Reinterpretations” opens with a thought-provoking essay by Laurence Senelick about two productions at the Moscow Art Theatre, before the First World War, which through their depiction of Jewish culture prepared the way for the extraordinary positive reception of the famous Habimah production of The Dybbuk in 1922. I would have liked to learn more about the changes of the stage Jew as a result of the Bolshevik Revolution. The article by Hans-Peter Bayerdörfer on the productions of Halévy's opera La Juive and Melia Bensussen's contribution on the audience reactions to recent productions of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice both basically focus on post-Holocaust theatre and could just as well have been included in the previous part or in the next one, “The Contemporary Scene,” which includes five articles. The first of these, by Anat Feinberg, focuses (like Bachmann's article on Kortner) on the return of theatre makers to the German-speaking world after the Second World War. Aniko Szucs's contribution focuses on Hungarian productions of Shakespeare's Merchant and Tabori's Mein Kampf. It is followed by two somewhat anthropologically oriented, performance-studies articles by Brigitte Sion and S. I. Salamensky. They both discuss Jewish performances and the performance of Jewishness in those parts of Eastern Europe where there are in effect no longer any Jews, but where the mostly non-Jewish performers frequently speak Yiddish or perform Jewish rituals. The book closes with an article by Carol Zemel on queer Jewish performance art in the United States and a translation by Wolitz of the Grumberg play examined in his article.

Regardless of its omissions, this is a very valuable volume that presents a broad research spectrum in a field that obviously cannot be exhausted within the covers of a single book. The core issues dealt with are anti-Semitism and the Shoah, and mostly the Jewish reactions to these phenomena. It is sometimes difficult to navigate between the book's various topics and artists as they reoccur in different constellations and contexts (and the index is not always helpful for such cross referencing). However, I learned a great deal from reading the book. Because of its price, it will most likely only be purchased by libraries, and I recommend that they do so.