A stage for resilience: Israel Festival expands beyond Jerusalem this summer

Now in its 64th year, the festival stretches its arms toward the Western Negev, the Upper Galilee, and the northern Golan Heights, weaving performances into communities that have carried more than their share of loss and hope. The festival’s artistic directors, Michal Vaknin and Itay Mautner, say it best: “Perhaps it’s still too soon to speak of recovery... but amidst all this, life asks us to infuse it with meaning.”

The festival opens with Music People, a night that turns the stage into a meeting ground for young voices from the North and seasoned musical anchors like Leah Shabat, Amir Lev, Jane Bordeaux, and Daniella Spector.

From there, the festival’s musical heartbeat grows bolder with From Ashes to Gold, an ambitious new work by celebrated trumpeter Avishai Cohen. Inspired by Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with gold, Cohen’s album is a testament to loss and the quiet, stubborn will to remake what’s shattered.

Sometimes, survival demands new language, or old words reimagined. In Speeches Against Despair, comedian Guri Alfi and writer Eli Haviv invite a lineup of beloved performers, among them Noa Koler, Norman Issa, Noga Erez, and others, to reinterpret historic speeches that once moved nations.

Between earnest delivery and tongue-in-cheek jabs, they build a fragile bridge from past to present, daring us to believe in better days. For an evening, the big stage of the Jerusalem Theatre becomes a podium for defiance and consolation all at once.

And then there’s Spurs, a roving literary takeover of Jerusalem’s Hansen House to mark the 25th anniversary of the Sapir Prize for Literature. Etgar Keret, Arkadi Duchin, Shimon Adaf, and other Sapir laureates will mingle words with music, conversation, and unexpected encounters. Visitors drift from room to garden to hidden courtyard as stories spill out and blend with sounds under the summer sky, an enchanted testament to the written word’s stubborn power to anchor us when reality spins apart.

Beyond Jerusalem, performances dig deep into the land’s wounds and its stubborn heartbeat. In Majdal Shams, Al-Malab (“The Pitch”) transforms a scarred football field into an open-air memorial and a stage for resilience.

While the local youth team trains, the audience, listening through headphones, hears fragments of memory, the voices of children who are no longer here. It’s not a conventional play but a living tribute that blurs the line between everyday life and collective remembrance.

Coming Home, a performative Talmud lesson led by Chaya Gilboa, asks the question so many still whisper to themselves: how do you come home after so much has shifted? Together with cellist Maya Belsitzman, singer Orit Tshuma, and puppeteer Daniel Engel, Gilboa weaves ancient legends, modern laments, and quiet hope into a circle of study that’s equal parts ritual, conversation, and gentle defiance.

Memory threads through VHS Blast from the Past too, an inventive piece that pulls old family tapes from the ’80s and ’90s off dusty shelves and splices them into a living, breathing theater. Renana Raz, Tom Avni, Yossi Zabari, and others rummage through birthdays, class parties, and first heartbreaks, moments that flicker back to life onstage, testing what happens when we truly look back at who we were and what’s been lost along the way.

Some works go inward, drawing strength from the deeply personal. Her Father’s Daughter, created and performed by Netta Shpigelman, is more than a solo show; it’s an attempt to summon the spirit of her father, Elisha Shpigelman, a revered journalist and champion of social justice.

On a set that echoes an old TV studio, Netta sifts through family photos, yellowed clippings, and private emails, trying to explain to her young daughter who Grandpa was, and who she became in his shadow.

In Fusion, dancer Gal Gorfung moves through the shifting landscape of a body fighting a rare cancer. Singing, dancing, drag, and trembling gestures merge in a raw, kinetic plea for wholeness. It’s a piece that doesn’t flinch from what’s broken; it dances with it.

In the south, on the lawn of Kibbutz Tze’elim, Brothers finds its own way to speak the unspeakable. Musician Tuval Haim launches an album named for his brother Yotam, who was kidnapped and killed in the war. The performance, joined by Echo, Tomer Yosef, and a tight circle of friends, feels more like a gathering than a concert, a night of music that insists grief and love can stand side by side.

Before the lights dim, teenagers from the North take their turn at the microphone in Bright Future, asking the questions we may not yet know how to answer. Guided by Alit Kreiz and Ayelet Golan, their questions hover in the air long after the show ends, reminders that sometimes, questions themselves are the seeds of recovery.

As the festival’s CEO, Eyal Sher, puts it: “We believe in artistic creation as a unique tool for strengthening the fabric of shared life in Israel.”