Yentl poses fresh questions in the age of gender fluidity

YENTL, THE YESHIVA BOY, has come a long way since she first appeared in an Isaac Bashevis Singer story in 1962.

To the great Yiddish writer, the girl who disguised herself as a yeshiva boy in order to pursue Talmudic studies, was a tragic figure caught between two realities: a woman’s body and a man’s world.

Twenty years later, in the hands of Barbra Streisand, Yentl was transformed into a sentimental feminist hero, adored by cinema audiences and dismissed by Singer.

The production created in Melbourne is for a world that has changed in ways Singer – and probably even Streisand – could never have imagined.

This Yentl comes to us in an age of transgender and non-binary identities when it is increasingly understood that one can be born in a body which doesn’t match one’s gender identity. It makes exchanges like this one between Yentl and her father peculiarly resonant.

“Yentl, you have the soul of a man.”
“So why was I born a woman?”
“Even Heaven makes mistakes.”

This Yentl is produced by Kadimah Yiddish Theatre and created by Australians Gary Abrahams, Elise Hearst, Galit Klas and Evelyn Krape . It premiered in 2022 at Arts Centre Melbourne, won four major performing arts awards and was revived last year. Now it is coming to the Sydney Opera House.

Yentl traces the story of the eponymous young woman as she joins the yeshiva disguised as a boy named Anshel and becomes drawn into a hopeless love triangle with her study partner Avigdor and his fiancée Hadass.