In 2006, I moved to Budapest. A secular stranger in a city with a rich Jewish history, but few Jews, I was fascinated by the city’s historic Jewish quarter, the 7th District.
Like the Lower East Side, the 7th is a diverse area that lives in the local imagination as The Old Neighborhood, home of a once vibrant, now vanished Jewish community. And like the LES, Budapest’s 7th is being gentrified by people who fetishize the neighborhood’s past, even as they erase its last traces.
As a playwright I am obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. Many of my plays ask how living where we do makes us who we are. Since 2008, I have been exploring this question through 7th: a series of seven plays, installations, and site specific performances examining the past and present of Budapest’s 7th District through an outsider’s eyes. Together, these pieces ask how local ideas about Jewishness have evolved as the neighborhood has transformed.
7th plays are Seder, Klauzál Square, The Place We Built, Five Mothers, Anniversary, and Shocking but Not Surprising. The full 7th project also includes a site-specific sound art piece.
Like the Lower East Side, the 7th is a diverse area that lives in the local imagination as The Old Neighborhood, home of a once vibrant, now vanished Jewish community. And like the LES, Budapest’s 7th is being gentrified by people who fetishize the neighborhood’s past, even as they erase its last traces.
As a playwright I am obsessed with questions of how history shapes us. Many of my plays ask how living where we do makes us who we are. Since 2008, I have been exploring this question through 7th: a series of seven plays, installations, and site specific performances examining the past and present of Budapest’s 7th District through an outsider’s eyes. Together, these pieces ask how local ideas about Jewishness have evolved as the neighborhood has transformed.
7th plays are Seder, Klauzál Square, The Place We Built, Five Mothers, Anniversary, and Shocking but Not Surprising. The full 7th project also includes a site-specific sound art piece.