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.
“You’d have these 17 and 18-year-old girls crossing through Nazi checkpoints with revolvers in their skirts,” says Hershfield. “When I found out about them, I just kind of fell in love with them and their stories. I was blown away that I had never heard about them and I wanted to tell their story as loudly as I could.”
It has an amazing story and some incredible songs but, as many Jewish creatives have found since October 7, getting the play put on is, in Hershfield’s words, “a hard sell”.
It has been performed a few times in America where he is from but is now being workshopped in the UK. A read-through at JW3 with Michaela Stern in the lead role was a huge success. Michaela, who has starred in musicals Oliver! and Priscilla Queen of the Desert, tells me: “I have never felt so fulfilled by a project. So many of the words could have been written about today; about Jewish women and the battles we face. There is a line in the show about how being Jewish is an act of defiance and that, to me, encapsulates us today.”
Hershfield and Stern are working with producers – and they need more – to get the show on the road. There are plans for more workshops and another public performance and then a theatre run. I wish them lots of luck and I can’t wait to see the work being performed.
