New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway

Hasia Diner

It was one of these letters from America, in fact, which put the notion of emigrating to the New World definitely in my mind. An illiterate woman brought it to the synagogue to have it read to her, and I happened to be the one to whom she addressed her request. The concrete details of that letter gave New York tangible form in my imagination. It haunted me ever after.

The United States lured me not merely as a land of milk and honey, but also, and perhaps chiefly, as one of mystery, of fantastic experiences, of marvelous transformations. To leave my native place and to seek my fortune in that distant, weird world seemed to be just the kind of sensational adventure my heart was hankering for.

When I unburdened myself of my project to Reb Sender he was thunderstruck.

“To America!” he said. “Lord of the World! But one becomes a Gentile there.”

“Not at all,” I sought to reassure him. “There are lots of good Jews there, and they don’t neglect their Talmud, either.”

Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)1

Jews from Europe began to flock to New York City in the 1870s. The single most significant piece of New York real estate for the immigrant Jews could be found below Houston Street and north of Division, bounded on the east by the East River and on the west by Allen Street. Variously referred to as “the East Side,” “the Hebrew Quarter,” or “the ghetto,” the Lower East Side, in fact a multiethnic neighborhood, served as the epicenter of Jewish immigrant life, persisting in importance well into the 1920s. Between 1880 and 1890, three quarters of all New York Jews lived there. Their number reached about 60,000 when reformer Jacob Riis, author of the 1890 exposé How the Other Half Lives, declared the neighborhood the most densely inhabited spot on earth, more heavily populated than Calcutta or Bombay.

In the following decades, the number of Jewish immigrants in the city grew exponentially, and by 1910 it was home to about 1.2 million Jews, who constituted fully one–quarter of the city’s total population. This number reached 1,649,000 by 1930, nearly 30% of the population, and in 1940, nearly two million. Despite the post–World War II suburbanization movement that pulled Jews out of the city and into New Jersey, to other adjacent counties of New York State, and to faraway places like Los Angeles and Miami, the words “New York” and “Jewish” had become almost synonymous.

Thalia Theatre, c. 1904.

In many ways, the Jewish newcomers resembled their Irish, Italian, Slavic, and German co–immigrants in the years of the great Jewish migration, a period that lasted until the passage of the National Origins Act in 1924, which imposed an immigration quota system. Newcomers usually lived in crammed tenement dwellings on the Lower East Side and over time moved out to somewhat better, less–crowded neighborhoods. With the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, linking the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn, the overall population of the Lower East Side and the number of Jews who lived there began to decline, as new neighborhoods cropped up in Brooklyn. By the next decade, Jews had mostly left the Lower East Side—or new immigrants merely sidestepped it—instead opting for Harlem and emerging sections of the Bronx. But immigrant Jews and their children kept coming back to the Lower East Side neighborhood for meetings, shopping, and leisure activities. It retained its Jewish aura well into the postwar era despite the paucity of Jews still living there.

In the heyday of the Lower East Side, the mostly Yiddish–speaking immigrants built a phalanx of social, cultural, political, and religious institutions that reflected their shared values and often reflected the hometowns and regions from which they hailed. They formed landsmanshaftn, local societies established for the purposes of mutual benefit, health care, and, just as importantly, socializing with friends and family from back home. Like all immigrants, they sought to maintain connections with those places and participated in transnational networks that linked both sides of the Atlantic.

Jewish immigrants, like those from other lands, wanted to keep alive elements of their culture, be it language, religion, foodways, or art forms, though articulated in increasingly American tones and terms. They invested in schools that taught Hebrew to enculturate their sons into the dictates of Judaism. By the early 20^th century, as Eastern Europe receded further and further into the background, they created schools like the Sholem Aleichem Folk Shules and those operated by the Arbeiter Ring (the Workmen’s Circle) to teach the Yiddish language and foster a connection to the world of their parents and grandparents.

Immigrants at Ellis Island, postcard by Detroit Publishing Co., 1908.

Ellis Island was America’s busiest immigrant inspection station from 1892 until 1954. During its first year, almost 450,000 immigrants were processed there; that number reached one million at its peak in 1907. Overall, more than 12 million people entered the country through Ellis Island.

Chicken market at 55 Hester Street, between Ludlow and Essex Streets.

Photograph by Berenice Abbott, 1937.

The sign, written in Yiddish characters, reads, “Strictly kosher chicken market.” This is a direct transliteration from English.

Pretzel woman, Hester Street.

Photo by Alta Ruth Hahn., n.d.

New York’s Eastern European Jewish immigrants consumed Yiddish newspapers on a daily basis, and one of them in particular: the socialist–leaning Forverts, founded in 1897, known in English as the Jewish Daily Forward. By 1916, it sold more copies than any other foreign–language daily in the United States. In 1914, the combined circulation of the four Yiddish dailies—the Forward, the Warheit, the Morgn Journal, and the Yiddishe Tageblatt—exceeded 455,000.2 The communist daily Freiheit, established in 1922, reported a circulation of 64,500 in 1930, about a third of that of its archenemy, the Forward (at 175,000). In addition to promoting their respective political and social ideologies, these newspapers were instrumental in shaping cultural tastes and functioned as an important platform for practically all the major Yiddish writers, whose work they printed and often serialized well before they appeared in book form. The city was also home to scores of Yiddish weeklies and monthlies devoted to politics, literature, theater, drama, music, and humor. The world of Yiddish culture in New York extended to book publishing, which included Yiddish–to–English dictionaries and manuals, encyclopedias, popular literature, poetry, and major literary works—both originals and translations. It was a bustling cultural scene: newspapers, bookstores, publishing houses, cafés, restaurants, and theaters provided news, ideas, and entertainment to a population standing between their premigration antecedents and the America into which their children would integrate.

Eastern European Jewish immigrants made the journey to America largely for economic reasons, a force that pulled in all newcomers regardless of place of origin or religion. Jews found New York particularly attractive and, unlike others, opted for New York more than any other city. Most Irish, Italian, Polish, and other immigrants spread out over many American cities; while they formed solid enclaves in Gotham, New York did not dominate their American experience. Comparatively fewer Jews ventured beyond the metropolitan area, so that more than half of American Jews lived in the city by the early 20^th century.

The economic profiles of the city and of the Jews explain the New York–centric dynamic of their migration and settlement. The city had emerged as the center of American garment making in the 1860s and 1870s. The garment industry, the city’s largest employer by 1930, served as the Jews’ economic niche. In the early decades of the migration, most work took place in tenement apartments, labeled pejoratively by progressives as “sweatshops.” Each day, Jewish families transformed their tenement dwelling spaces into shops, employing women and men, other Jews, who sat down in front of sewing machines and stitched together garments, brought in unsewn and brought back finished to contractors. Sweatshops gave way to more modern factories by the 1910s, like the infamous Triangle Waist Company, which in 1911 was the site of the worst industrial accident in American history.