About the Play:

HARD TO FIND BOOK, only a very limited number of copies are still available.

Nominated for the Governor General's Award for Drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize).

Reading Hebron is a full-length drama by Jason Sherman. A Canadian Jew, while struggling with his own religious and cultural identity, becomes obsessed with the Palestinian cause in the wake of the massacre at the mosque in Hebron. A potent reminder that no issue is simple, or isolated, and truth is always more complex than governments, media, and interest groups will make it.

Reading Hebron begins with a historical fact: On February 1994 Dr. Baruch Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Jewish settler from the West Bank, walked into the Mosque, shot dead 29 Palestinians at prayer in the Tomb of the Patriarchs and wounded 125 others in the occupied town of Hebron. In the play Nathan Abramowitz seeks the truth behind what happened in the Hebron Massacre, and why, and asks himself whether he too, as a non-Israeli Jew, is also in some way implicated in those deaths. With black humour, excerpts from the official inquiry, and culminating in a surreal Passover dinner where the guests include Noam Chomsky and Goldstein himself, Reading Hebron shows the fallacy of interpreting the massacre as the act of a lone gunman.

Reading Hebron premiered in 1996 at Factory Theatre in Toronto and was nominated for both the Governor General's Award and the Chalmers Award. Since then the play has been produced at professional theatres across Canada, and in US and UK.

Cast: 3 women, 3 men

What people say:

"Compelling, challenging, thought provoking, terrifying." — The Toronto Sun

"The latest in his series of provocative and fascinating scripts attempting to come to terms with Middle Eastern politics...what typically make a Sherman play intriguing is how the playwright manages to dramatise the seemingly undramatisable" — Variety

About the Playwright:

Jason Sherman is one of Canada's leading playwrights. After attending York University's Creative Writing Program, he worked as an editor for various literary journals and as a journalist until he began pursuing his own writing full time. He has received the Governor General's Award for Drama (and been nominated four other times) and the Chalmers Canadian Play Award (twice, along with three other nominations). He has also written extensively for radio and television.