Jacob Gordin's Mirele Efros in Habima on the Eve of WWII

[In July 1939, as the winds of war were blowing, Habima theater put on Jacob Gordin's Mirele Efros in Hebrew. The production gained overwhelming success in the Yishuv, despite the fact that the play was perceived as the kind of Jewish exilic culture that ought to be left behind. I would like to show that this theatrical event functioned as a site-boundary work, in which the Eretz-Israeli Zionist culture of the Yishuv was interwoven with the original Eastern European Jewish culture of the majority of the Yishuv's population. This boundary work enabled the audience to conduct a bi-directional cultural move: to absorb and legitimize Eastern European Jewish culture on the one hand, and to enable its adaptation to the Zionist ethos, on the other.]