Historical Context
At the end of World War II there were hundreds of thousands of Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons camps in Europe. The Jewish communities they came from had been destroyed by the Nazis; in most cases where their former homes and businesses survived, they were occupied by non-Jews, and across Poland and Ukraine, when survivors returned home they were being murdered in the anti-Jewish violence in Poland, 1944-1946 and parallel events in Ukraine.
The few countries that were willing to accept refugees had immigration restrictions and long waits for visas. The great majority of Displaced Persons wished to immigrate to the Land of Israel, but the British Mandatory government of Palestine was refusing to admit more than a tiny number of Jews.
The ALFP was entirely open about its motivations for producing this play; its publicity materials read: "'A Flag is Born' is not ordinary theatre. It was not written to amuse or beguile. 'A Flag is Born' was written to make money--to make money to provide ships to get Hebrews to Palestine ... and arouse American public opinion to support the fight for freedom and independence now being waged by the resistance in Palestine."
Read more about this topic: A Flag Is Born
Famous quotes containing the words historical and/or context:
“This seems a long while ago, and yet it happened since Milton wrote his Paradise Lost. But its antiquity is not the less great for that, for we do not regulate our historical time by the English standard, nor did the English by the Roman, nor the Roman by the Greek.... From this September afternoon, and from between these now cultivated shores, those times seemed more remote than the dark ages.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)