Unruly difference: the politics of stigma and the space of the sacred

Abstract

This essay looks at three contemporary Jewish American playwrights: Tony Kushner, Martin Sherman and Deb Margolin, whose plays ask fundamental questions about Jewish identity in its political, cultural and spiritual dimensions. Breaking from the concerns of their theatrical predecessors, most of whom ignored or disguised their Jewish roots, these playwrights draw on profoundly Jewish concepts to reconfigure narratives of redemption, obligation, ethical community, and Messianic utopianism. Their plays are characterized by a sensibility of “unruly difference.” Attracted by the politics of marginality; these writers re-imagine otherness in plays that celebrate a different understanding of faith and conjure the sublime. By carving out a more capacious definition of Judaism that embraces contradiction and contention, faith and doubt, progressive social vision and deepened spiritual commitment, they sit aslant the mainstream. They are drawn to their understanding of the spiritual power and cultural grandeur of the Jewish heritage, but question the politics of accommodation and the limitations of tradition and law. The ambivalence these writers express about Judaism adds to the complexity of their writing and to its value as a cultural indicator. Working in new idioms, they refute traditional discourses and dominant paradigms of conformity and coalescence that characterize modern Jewish-American life.