While antisemitism obviously does well among critics and the box office – see the Oscars success for post-Holocaust drama The Brutalist, while Giant, the play about Roald Dahl’s Jew-hatred, won big at the Olivier awards – Jewish creatives have been pondering how to tell more uplifting stories.
Because we are not just about antisemitism.
Even though the subject of the new rock musical Rise, by Joshua Daniel Hershfield, is the Holocaust, it is first and foremost about Jewish defiance and rebellion. It is also a much-needed story about female warriors.
It tells the story of the real-life heroines who made up the Kashariyot or courier department of the Jewish resistance in Nazi-occupied Poland. Because they could pass as non-Jews, they were able to get to the outside and pass messages from ghetto to ghetto and helped smuggle medicine, food and books. When it became clear this was going to be a fight to the death, they also smuggled in weapons.
