Joshua Sobol interviewed on "Sinners."

In February, The Arts Fuse's Editor, Bill Marx and I sat down for an email interview with Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol while his play, Sinners was being presented as a staged reading by Israeli Stage.

The play is a powerful one dealing with the fate of intellectually and sexually independent women in Islamic-fundamentalist societies. I hope that Guy Ben-Aharon gets to stage this play in the near future.

Sobol's answer to one question was particularly interesting-- since it revealed the degree to which political-correctitude often means an abandonment of humanist values:

AF: What were the obstacles presented in dramatizing a story that had neither an Israeli nor Jewish theme or setting?

Sobol: The main obstacle to overcome was the so-called politically-correct, recently established taboos. As a white, atheist male, I am told it is none of my business to deal with what’s going on in the so-called de-colonized societies enforcing their religious laws on their citizens. But as a human being, I cannot and should not respect that dictum, and as a dramatist, it is exactly my affair and my responsibility to give a voice to the voiceless victims of inhuman savagery. A woman sentenced to death for having loved a man who is not her husband, and thus being buried alive up to her bosom and waiting for a crowd of wild males to stone her to death, is the epitome of the voiceless victim, whose voice should shatter the fundaments of our world. The duty to carry this stifled voice from one end of the world to the other has nothing to do with being Israeli, Jewish, or Christian. It has to do with being human or giving up one’s humanity.