Diaries From Troubled Times
Various | 13.12.2007 00:09 | Palestine | World
My hat's off to Alan Rickman!
The willingness of the Zionist Extremists to spit upon the memory of this murdered activist only reinforces Corrie's message.
The willingness of the Zionist Extremists to spit upon the memory of this murdered activist only reinforces Corrie's message.
Diaries from troubled times
By Natasha Greenblatt
Culture Writer
Dave Pullmer / The McGill Daily
American college student Rachel Corrie was 23 when she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, March 16, 2003.
Some of her emails home, released by Corrie’s parents after her death and serialized in The Guardian newspaper, caught the attention of British actor Alan Rickman. After receiving a large package of previously unreleased journals, emails, and to-do lists from Corrie’s parents, Rickman and journalist Katharine Vinerthey edited them into a play. It opened to sold out houses in London before making the trip to New York.
In March 2006, The New York Theatre Workshop announced it was “postponing indefinitely” its imminent production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Artistic director James Nicola admitted he decided to postpone “after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feeling about the work.” Later, he said that Ariel Sharon’s illness and the Hamas election had created an inappropriate political climate for the play. After a public outcry against censorship, joined by Harold Pinter, Tony Kushner, and Vanessa Redgrave, the play was eventually put on by another company, and was received with little controversy.
Nine months later, the Canadian Stage Company, Toronto’s largest publicly funded theatre, announced they were producing the play, but then abruptly dropped it. Members of its board objected to what they perceived as anti-Jewish content. But that wasn’t what they told the press. Martin Bragg, the Artistic Producer of Canadian Stage, said the play “didn’t seem as powerful on the stage as it did on the page.” But this is a perennial challenge of adapting a diary into theatre – not a reason for turning down My Name is Rachel Corrie. This month, the play will finally open in Montreal, followed by productions in Vancouver and Toronto next year.
Sisters in spirit
I have been thinking about Rachel a lot lately. I recently played Anne in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Montreal to audiences that included Holocaust survivors. I felt compelled to compare the two diarists whose work has performed in the theatre. Although Rachel and Anne exist in very different places and times, they are not as different as they might appear. It seems to me that both contain the same voracious spirit and fundamental belief in justice, which allows the audience to leave the theatre with hope instead of despair. Why then is Rachel such a source of controversy and Anne beyond reproach?
Almost every high school student is familiar with Anne Frank, a young Jewish Dutch girl forced into hiding after Hitler’s 1940 invasion of Holland. After two years, the hideout was raided, and Anne died at 15 at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in her native Germany. Just over sixty years after Anne’s death, Rachel Corrie left her middle class Washington home to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led non-violent organization, in the town of Rafah, Gaza. Most of her activism involved protection: she would escort Palestinians while they retrieved water, counting on her “white person privilege” to act as a deterrent against violence. Or she would stay overnight with families whose houses were under threat of demolition by the Israel Defence Forces.
For these acts, she has been labeled a hero, martyr, pawn, or manipulative propagandist. Even her words were deemed too dangerous for theatre companies supported by pro-Israeli Jewish communities, the very same communities that adore the iconic Anne. The questions that Rachel raised about the actions of the Israeli government challenged deeply entrenched notions.
But Rachel was no ideologue. “It’s important,” she wrote, “to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and the Jewish people.” But this wasn’t enough for Cynthia Ozick, a famous American novelist and essayist, who out-of-hand dismissed Rachel’s sincerity. Ozick’s review of the play described Rachel as a “dedicated believer and a shrewdly practiced marketing advisor,” and the ISM as “Rachel Corrie’s handlers, eager, for propaganda value, to bait bulldozers and tanks with the lives of their young recruits.” The play itself, Ozick concludes, is “a show trial. And there are Jews are on the dock.”
Through the eyes of one person
Why can’t we put down the poison quills and appreciate the fact that a young woman left the safety of her home to protect others? Rachel was driven by her sense of justice for all people. Similarly, Anne was driven to decry the horrors of her time: “We’re always being told that we’re fighting for freedom, truth and justice! The war isn’t even over and already there is dissension [among Dutch supporters] and Jews are regarded as lesser beings.” Anne and Rachel are both young women whose ideas of justice rest at the core of their personalities. Yet it is their humanity, flaws and all, which allows us to connect to them as individuals.
Only through the eyes of one person can we begin to respond to victims of mass violence, whether it be the genocide of European Jews or the persecution of Palestinians. “One Anne Frank,” Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi once wrote, “excites more emotion than the myriad who suffered as she did, but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
Rachel serves this role in the same way that Anne does. Each was endowed, at a very early age, with an unusual ability to empathize with the suffering of others. Rachel had developed this empathy by 12: “In second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life: ‘Everyone must feel safe.’ Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That’s the best rule I can think of.”
Everyone must feel safe. And alongside that deceptively simple message is a girl who likes boys, loves her dad, and writes poems about her cat, all things she shared with Anne. I believe that Anne would have also shared Rachel’s rule: everyone must feel safe.
“I still believe,” Anne wrote in that oft-quoted line, “in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” But the following passage reveals more complexity: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that will, one day, destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the mean time, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I will be able to realize them!”
A longer story
I can’t resist wondering how Anne’s politics would have evolved. How, if at all, would she have engaged in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Could she have stood for the displacement of Palestinian families, when her family had also been forced from their home before being sent to the death camps? Perhaps, like many other survivors, she would have desperately embraced the need for a homeland, a safe place for Jewish people after Europe failed to protect them.
Rachel’s journey into Gaza was in some ways, I think, a continuation of a longer story of which Anne is a part. I do not believe that you can damn one and sanctify the other. But it is useless to spend too much time wondering what else these young women could have done. As the Jewish Passover song “Dayenu” tells us, “It was sufficient.”
It is sufficient. As Rachel said when she was 12: “nine years is as long as 40 depending on how long you’ve lived.” How fortunate for us that they documented their rich inner thoughts and left us with a window into their worlds.
Teesri Duniya Theatre’s My Name is Rachel Corrie premieres December 6 and runs till December 22 at the Monument National (1182 St. Laurent). For information and tickets, go to teesriduniya.com
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6805
Monday, December 10, 2007 | 2:57 PM ET
CBC News
My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play about the American activist killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has just opened in Montreal with Corrie's parents in attendance.
The controversial play explores Corrie's experiences in Gaza and has been lambasted by some as a naïve, one-sided account of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Craig and Cindy Corrie say people who've never seen the play tend to be critical.
"You'll hear beforehand that it's anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. I think that's absolutely false," said Craig Corrie in an interview with CBC Radio's Q. "It is a valid viewpoint of what Rachel saw and I think it's artfully put together."
Both parents were in Montreal for the play's launch at the Teesri Duniya Theatre, a co-production with Vancouver's neworldtheatre. They also participated in a panel discussion over the weekend after the play. The play had its Canadian premiere in November at Calgary's Sage Theatre.
"Most of the controversy is to either vilify Rachel or put her on a pedestal. If you come see the play, it introduces humour among other things, so it humanizes her," notes Craig Corrie.
In March 2003, Corrie was a 23-year-old human rights activist who was in the southern Gaza town of Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement. She died after standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was destroying a Palestinian home. An Israeli investigation ruled the death accidental.
The play, created by British actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, is based on Corrie's diaries, letters and e-mails.
The Corries say they are satisfied with the play because it got Rachel's message out.
"I love my daughter's words," says Cindy. "Rachel's e-mail had had a tremendous impact on our own family's understanding of the issue between Israel and Palestine … we needed to get her words out."
A New York theatre decided not to do the play back in the spring of 2006 after Jewish groups said it expresses anti-Israeli sentiments. Then last December, Toronto's Canadian Stage Company decided not to stage the play, citing the play's merits and not the controversy that dogs it.
However, the play won acclaim when it was staged in London's West End in 2005 and also when it was put on by New York's Minetta Lane Theatre, an off-Broadway production.
The Corries now run the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, which encourages and supports issues of human rights and understanding between peoples.
My Name is Rachel Corrie runs until Dec. 22 in Montreal and will be re-staged at Vancouver's Havana Theatre from Jan. 24 to Feb. 9.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/12/10/corrie-play-montreal.html
By Natasha Greenblatt
Culture Writer
Dave Pullmer / The McGill Daily
American college student Rachel Corrie was 23 when she was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, March 16, 2003.
Some of her emails home, released by Corrie’s parents after her death and serialized in The Guardian newspaper, caught the attention of British actor Alan Rickman. After receiving a large package of previously unreleased journals, emails, and to-do lists from Corrie’s parents, Rickman and journalist Katharine Vinerthey edited them into a play. It opened to sold out houses in London before making the trip to New York.
In March 2006, The New York Theatre Workshop announced it was “postponing indefinitely” its imminent production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Artistic director James Nicola admitted he decided to postpone “after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feeling about the work.” Later, he said that Ariel Sharon’s illness and the Hamas election had created an inappropriate political climate for the play. After a public outcry against censorship, joined by Harold Pinter, Tony Kushner, and Vanessa Redgrave, the play was eventually put on by another company, and was received with little controversy.
Nine months later, the Canadian Stage Company, Toronto’s largest publicly funded theatre, announced they were producing the play, but then abruptly dropped it. Members of its board objected to what they perceived as anti-Jewish content. But that wasn’t what they told the press. Martin Bragg, the Artistic Producer of Canadian Stage, said the play “didn’t seem as powerful on the stage as it did on the page.” But this is a perennial challenge of adapting a diary into theatre – not a reason for turning down My Name is Rachel Corrie. This month, the play will finally open in Montreal, followed by productions in Vancouver and Toronto next year.
Sisters in spirit
I have been thinking about Rachel a lot lately. I recently played Anne in a production of The Diary of Anne Frank in Montreal to audiences that included Holocaust survivors. I felt compelled to compare the two diarists whose work has performed in the theatre. Although Rachel and Anne exist in very different places and times, they are not as different as they might appear. It seems to me that both contain the same voracious spirit and fundamental belief in justice, which allows the audience to leave the theatre with hope instead of despair. Why then is Rachel such a source of controversy and Anne beyond reproach?
Almost every high school student is familiar with Anne Frank, a young Jewish Dutch girl forced into hiding after Hitler’s 1940 invasion of Holland. After two years, the hideout was raided, and Anne died at 15 at the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in her native Germany. Just over sixty years after Anne’s death, Rachel Corrie left her middle class Washington home to work with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led non-violent organization, in the town of Rafah, Gaza. Most of her activism involved protection: she would escort Palestinians while they retrieved water, counting on her “white person privilege” to act as a deterrent against violence. Or she would stay overnight with families whose houses were under threat of demolition by the Israel Defence Forces.
For these acts, she has been labeled a hero, martyr, pawn, or manipulative propagandist. Even her words were deemed too dangerous for theatre companies supported by pro-Israeli Jewish communities, the very same communities that adore the iconic Anne. The questions that Rachel raised about the actions of the Israeli government challenged deeply entrenched notions.
But Rachel was no ideologue. “It’s important,” she wrote, “to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and the Jewish people.” But this wasn’t enough for Cynthia Ozick, a famous American novelist and essayist, who out-of-hand dismissed Rachel’s sincerity. Ozick’s review of the play described Rachel as a “dedicated believer and a shrewdly practiced marketing advisor,” and the ISM as “Rachel Corrie’s handlers, eager, for propaganda value, to bait bulldozers and tanks with the lives of their young recruits.” The play itself, Ozick concludes, is “a show trial. And there are Jews are on the dock.”
Through the eyes of one person
Why can’t we put down the poison quills and appreciate the fact that a young woman left the safety of her home to protect others? Rachel was driven by her sense of justice for all people. Similarly, Anne was driven to decry the horrors of her time: “We’re always being told that we’re fighting for freedom, truth and justice! The war isn’t even over and already there is dissension [among Dutch supporters] and Jews are regarded as lesser beings.” Anne and Rachel are both young women whose ideas of justice rest at the core of their personalities. Yet it is their humanity, flaws and all, which allows us to connect to them as individuals.
Only through the eyes of one person can we begin to respond to victims of mass violence, whether it be the genocide of European Jews or the persecution of Palestinians. “One Anne Frank,” Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi once wrote, “excites more emotion than the myriad who suffered as she did, but whose image has remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is necessary that it be so. If we had to and were able to suffer the sufferings of everyone, we could not live.”
Rachel serves this role in the same way that Anne does. Each was endowed, at a very early age, with an unusual ability to empathize with the suffering of others. Rachel had developed this empathy by 12: “In second grade there were classroom rules hanging from the ceiling. The only one I can remember now seems like it would be a good rule for life: ‘Everyone must feel safe.’ Safe to be themselves, physically safe, safe to say what they think, just safe. That’s the best rule I can think of.”
Everyone must feel safe. And alongside that deceptively simple message is a girl who likes boys, loves her dad, and writes poems about her cat, all things she shared with Anne. I believe that Anne would have also shared Rachel’s rule: everyone must feel safe.
“I still believe,” Anne wrote in that oft-quoted line, “in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.” But the following passage reveals more complexity: “I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness, I hear the approaching thunder that will, one day, destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too will end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the mean time, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I will be able to realize them!”
A longer story
I can’t resist wondering how Anne’s politics would have evolved. How, if at all, would she have engaged in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict? Could she have stood for the displacement of Palestinian families, when her family had also been forced from their home before being sent to the death camps? Perhaps, like many other survivors, she would have desperately embraced the need for a homeland, a safe place for Jewish people after Europe failed to protect them.
Rachel’s journey into Gaza was in some ways, I think, a continuation of a longer story of which Anne is a part. I do not believe that you can damn one and sanctify the other. But it is useless to spend too much time wondering what else these young women could have done. As the Jewish Passover song “Dayenu” tells us, “It was sufficient.”
It is sufficient. As Rachel said when she was 12: “nine years is as long as 40 depending on how long you’ve lived.” How fortunate for us that they documented their rich inner thoughts and left us with a window into their worlds.
Teesri Duniya Theatre’s My Name is Rachel Corrie premieres December 6 and runs till December 22 at the Monument National (1182 St. Laurent). For information and tickets, go to teesriduniya.com
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6805 Monday, December 10, 2007 | 2:57 PM ET
CBC News
My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play about the American activist killed by an Israeli army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, has just opened in Montreal with Corrie's parents in attendance.
The controversial play explores Corrie's experiences in Gaza and has been lambasted by some as a naïve, one-sided account of the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
Craig and Cindy Corrie say people who've never seen the play tend to be critical.
"You'll hear beforehand that it's anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. I think that's absolutely false," said Craig Corrie in an interview with CBC Radio's Q. "It is a valid viewpoint of what Rachel saw and I think it's artfully put together."
Both parents were in Montreal for the play's launch at the Teesri Duniya Theatre, a co-production with Vancouver's neworldtheatre. They also participated in a panel discussion over the weekend after the play. The play had its Canadian premiere in November at Calgary's Sage Theatre.
"Most of the controversy is to either vilify Rachel or put her on a pedestal. If you come see the play, it introduces humour among other things, so it humanizes her," notes Craig Corrie.
In March 2003, Corrie was a 23-year-old human rights activist who was in the southern Gaza town of Rafah with the International Solidarity Movement. She died after standing in front of an Israeli bulldozer that was destroying a Palestinian home. An Israeli investigation ruled the death accidental.
The play, created by British actor Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, is based on Corrie's diaries, letters and e-mails.
The Corries say they are satisfied with the play because it got Rachel's message out.
"I love my daughter's words," says Cindy. "Rachel's e-mail had had a tremendous impact on our own family's understanding of the issue between Israel and Palestine … we needed to get her words out."
A New York theatre decided not to do the play back in the spring of 2006 after Jewish groups said it expresses anti-Israeli sentiments. Then last December, Toronto's Canadian Stage Company decided not to stage the play, citing the play's merits and not the controversy that dogs it.
However, the play won acclaim when it was staged in London's West End in 2005 and also when it was put on by New York's Minetta Lane Theatre, an off-Broadway production.
The Corries now run the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice, which encourages and supports issues of human rights and understanding between peoples.
My Name is Rachel Corrie runs until Dec. 22 in Montreal and will be re-staged at Vancouver's Havana Theatre from Jan. 24 to Feb. 9.
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2007/12/10/corrie-play-montreal.html
Various
