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

February, 1901. The play at the 2,500–seat People’s Theatre at 201 Bowery was Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear, starring Jacob P. Adler in the title role he had originated nine years earlier. As spectators flocked in, they faced a splendid curtain displaying a grand rendition—almost the size of the proscenium opening—of Moses atop Mount Sinai presenting the Ten Commandments to the Children of Israel, their multitudes stretching into the distance.1 This depiction of the quintessential moment when Jews became a distinct people with an ethical and religious code redefined the generic interior of the People’s Theatre as a decidedly Jewish space, one that reflected the cultural and religious heritage that audience, performers, and staged material shared. Grounded in the Exodus narrative, the curtain evoked collective and personal memories of dislocation and an arduous journey from oppression to freedom, an experience the newly arrived Yiddish–speaking immigrants shared with their biblical ancestors. It also implicitly conveyed the lofty aspirations of the serious Yiddish stage to serve as educator and guide for the Jewish immigrant masses in America, where the religious hegemony of Eastern Europe no longer held sway.

Writing in 1968, Harold Clurman noted that, between 1888 and the early 1920s, when immigration had ground to a virtual halt, the Yiddish theater “more than the lodge or the synagogue,” served as “the meeting place and forum of the Jewish community in America.”2 Clurman (1901–1990), a leading theater director and critic, a founder of the Group Theatre, and a devotee of the Yiddish stage, was not engaging in hyperbolized nostalgia. In its day, New York’s Yiddish theater offered its public—many of them young men and women navigating their way in a new land—a decidedly Jewish lens for looking at such key issues as acculturation, labor relations, women’s rights, intergenerational conflicts, and personal relationships. It also represented a sanctuary where one could luxuriate in memories of the old country—the home, family, and community left behind. And where but in the Yiddish theater could these new New Yorkers feel their hearts clench with emotion upon hearing Anshel Schorr and Sholom Secunda’s 1915 song “A Heym! A Heym!” (“Homeward! Homeward!”), the shattering outcry of a lonely greenhorn who feels like a lost bird pining for its nest. A fine example of the theater’s impact could be seen on an early morning in 1892, immediately after the premiere of The Jewish King Lear, when a very long line of young men and women formed in front of the “Jewish” bank on Delancey Street. Stirred by the theatrical event of the previous night, they had queued up to send money back to their parents in the Old Country.³

Interior of the former Yiddish Art Theatre (today the Village East Cinema), at 181–189 Second Avenue, 2015.

The ornate, Moorish–style auditorium boasts a unique ceiling; a double–tiered, gold–leaf chandelier hangs from the center of a shallow dome within which is set a Star of David. In 1993, the auditorium and other interior spaces were officially designated by New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission in recognition of the theater’s historical and aesthetic significance.

Historian Moses Rischin estimates that in 1900 alone, when New York City’s Jewish population had reached 580,000, the three local Yiddish theaters, the People’s, the Windsor, and the Thalia (all located on the Bowery) presented 1,100 performances, selling some two million tickets.4 Noting this extraordinary popularity in 1902, the Jewish Messenger explained to its uptown readers, “The East Side has but one chief amusement, and that is the theatre. Instead of attending prize–fights, football games, dog shows, and automobile races, it centers its interest, spends its money, and flocks in great numbers to the People’s Theatre, the Thalia Theatre, or the Windsor’s Theatre. It loves their plays, admires their actors, and sings their music.”⁵

The stars of the Yiddish theater were the royalty of an otherwise drab Lower East Side. During its formative years, enthusiastic young patriotn (fanatical fans of a particular star) fought over the merits of their respective idols, occasionally engaging in fisticuffs. The actors’ lifestyles, the clothes they wore, and their romantic affairs were closely followed by an adoring public. Yet these stage actors were not fabricated personae. They were familiar faces who shared the same roots, experiences, and ethnic commitments as their more plebeian admirers, and they never detached themselves from their community and its concerns. When a star of the Yiddish theater succeeded on Broadway, the triumph was seen as being shared with every ghetto Jew. When some returned to the Yiddish stage after failing in the English–speaking world, their faithful public embraced them with welcoming arms. When they were sick or down on their luck, special benefit performances were arranged in order to provide financial support. The enormous crowds that came to pay their respects when a popular actor passed away revealed the community’s emotional bond with the great performers who had brought joy and laughter and passion into their lives. When Jacob P. Adler died in 1926 at the age of 71, well over 50,000 mourners packed every square inch of the Bowery pavement as the cortege moved past the Yiddish theaters en route to Mount Carmel cemetery.⁶

Seen within a larger context, The Jewish King Lear, a play about Jewish life in Russia that was written and first produced in New York, illuminates the relationship of Jewish immigrants both to their European past and to their new surroundings: their keenness to engage in a conversation with America and to incorporate icons of Anglo culture while still preserving and cultivating a distinct ethnic subculture. In fact, the theater often served as mediator between the ghetto and American life and culture. Audiences of New York’s early Yiddish stage loved plays about sensational national and world events, such as Marie Barberi notorious murder trial, the Johnstown Flood, or the sinking of the Titanic, and adaptations of popular American works like Trilby and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Their hunger for exposure to the wider culture is also reflected in the popularity of Shakespearean productions in Yiddish, beginning in 1893 with Moyshe Zeifert’s adaptations of Othello and Hamlet, staged respectively at the Windsor Theatre and its rival, the Thalia Theatre. The audience clearly preferred Judaized versions over straight Yiddish translations of Shakespeare’s work, much to the chagrin of the Jewish literary intelligentsia, who scoffed at the adaptations as corrupt and foolish.

Yiddish theater audience, drawing by Jacob Epstein for Hutchins Hapgood’s book The Spirit of the Ghetto, 1902.

The use of the term “ghetto” to mean a homogenous urban enclave with its own subculture was introduced by Anglo–Jewish writer Israel Zangwill in his best–selling novel Children of the Ghetto (1892). It was quickly incorporated into the titles of other works on the life and culture of Yiddish–speaking immigrants. Hapgood’s work must be seen within the context of the public’s interest in Jews, primarily triggered by the massive immigration from eastern Europe, as well as by hair–raising reports of Russian pogroms, shockwaves of the Dreyfus Affair, and a measure of philo–Semitic sentiments triggered by progressive ideals and religious interest in the Jewish origins of Christianity.

The Grand Theatre presents Jacob P. Adler in The Broken Hearts by Zalmen Libin.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1903.

Thalia Theatre and Atlantic Garden, engraving, 1912.

The theater opened on the Bowery in 1826 as the New York Theatre, changed names several times, and was renamed the Thalia in 1879. It functioned as a Yiddish theater from 1891–1911. In 1929, the building was destroyed by a fire.

Spectators in front of the Grand Theatre.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1905.

The marquee announces Jacob P. Adler in The Jewish King Lear.

It did not take long for America to take notice of the booming Lower East Side theatrical scene. In the late 1890s and early 1900s, such New York–based writers as Hutchins Hapgood and Lincoln Steffens were fascinated by the downtown Yiddish theater. They admired the exuberance of the Yiddish stage, the forceful expressiveness of its actors, the intensity of audience response, and the palatable connection between stage and auditorium. In 1903, reviewing a Yiddishized version of Romeo and Juliet by Nakhum Racov, John Corbin of The New York Times contrasted the blandness of Shakespeare productions on the American stage with their vibrant Yiddish paraphrases and posited rhetorically, “Given a devitalized Shakespeare plus an anemic drama on the one hand and an adapted Shakespeare plus a vital drama on the other, which would a wise man choose?”7

English–language critics may have poked good–natured fun at the informalities of the immigrant audience, many of whom had not been to the theater before arriving in America, and whose folksy conduct, especially in the early years, included munching on food, popping soda bottles, talking among themselves, and treating the theatrical gathering as an occasion for socializing. But uptown visitors also recognized the seriousness and rapt attention the immigrant audience accorded the stage. Writing in 1910, the New York Dramatic Mirror exclaimed, “You could have heard the proverbial pin drop. Not a soul in the audience stirred. It hardly breathed. There was no coughing, no clearing of throats. The little children kept their eyes riveted on the stage and listened as intently as their elders.”⁸

Poster for a September 3, 1897, performance of Moyshe Horowitz’s King Solomon at the Thalia Theatre, with “first–rate artists” Regina Praeger, Bertha Kalich, Dina Fineman, David Kessler, Bernstein, and Heine. At the bottom, two performances for Saturday, September 4, are advertised: a matinee of Bar Kokhba starring Regina Praeger and an evening performance of Kol Nidre starring Bertha Kalich.

It is noteworthy that the three theaters that served Yiddish audiences in 1900 had storied histories of catering to earlier immigrant groups, particularly Germans and Irish. Their conversion into Yiddish houses points to the layered history of the Bowery’s entertainment venues and to the commercial and creative exchange among ethnic cultures, at least at the professional level. At times, economic necessities encouraged interethnic collaboration. From June 1 to June 15, 1902, for example, Italian–American actor Antonio Maiori performed an Italian–language repertoire at the normally Yiddish–language Windsor Theatre, with costumes loaned by Jacob P. Adler, who held the lease on the theater. In the spring of 1905, Maiori leased another Yiddish house, the People’s Theatre, where he staged a series of Shakespearean productions, including his own interpretation of Shylock, a role that had already earned Adler the admiration of New York’s theatrical world. Maiori capitalized on this association, and shortly before his own opening of The Merchant of Venice he took the confrontational step of sending a letter to The Times in which he extolled his own portrayal of Shylock and rejected Adler’s outright as “all wrong.” But there was also a more benevolent aspect to interethnic theatrical relations. In 1903, when the harrowing news of the Kishinev pogrom in Russia reached New York, the actors of the city’s Chinese theater on Doyers Street put up three benefit performances to aid the victims.9 The bond between Jews and Chinese as persecuted minorities was the key theme evoked by speakers from both communities.

The relationship between the Yiddish and German stages in New York is particularly interesting: first, because the linguistic affinity between the two languages greatly facilitated intercommunication and, second, because of the significant presence of Jews in New York’s German theater, both as artists and spectators. German–language theater preceded Yiddish performance by half a century in the city, and by the late 1800s, newly arrived Yiddish thespians were able to negotiate and contract with local German theater people, take over leases of theatrical properties, and even import some of the German actors—not all of them Jewish—onto the Yiddish stage. The first notable crossover was the much admired classical tragedian Morris (Moritz) Morrison (?1855–1917), a Romanian–born Jew who began his acting career in Germany in 1878 and came to America by the late 1880s. He was hired by Yiddish–speaking actor–manager Boris Thomashefsky and performed his classical repertoire in German while the rest of the cast spoke Yiddish. Around 1900, Morrison was also the first actor to introduce un–adapted Shakespeare originals to the Yiddish stage, playing Othello and Hamlet.10 Another recruit from the German stage was Rudolph Schildkraut (1862–1930), a Jewish actor who had developed a notable career in Germany and had been a leading actor at the Max Reinhardt–led Deutches Theater in Berlin. He began his American career at the German–speaking Irving Place Theatre in 1911, but soon crossed over to the Yiddish stage when he was offered a highly lucrative contract by Thomashefsky, and switched to performing in Yiddish. Jacob P. Adler, Thomashefsky’s rival, countered Thomashefsky’s coup in nabbing Schildkraut by contracting Ferdinand Bonn, a gentile German–American actor of some renown. Yet another interesting import from the German–American stage was gentile actress Jennie Valliere, who in 1918 was recruited by actor–manager Maurice Schwartz for his Yiddish Art Theatre. Valliere learned Yiddish for the job and in the 1920s performed leading roles as written in the original, starring in major works by Gordin and others.

Jacob M. Gordin cabinet card, c. 1900.

Gordin (1853–1909) was the first major dramatist of the American Yiddish stage.

Funeral procession for Jacob P. Adler, April 2, 1926.

More than 50,000 mourners followed Adler’s casket from the Hebrew Actors’ Union, where he lay in state, to David Kessler’s Second Avenue Theatre for the service. He is buried in Mount Carmel cemetery in Brooklyn.

Insufficient command of Yiddish was an issue on both sides of the Yiddish footlights. From the early days, anglicized and translated titles appeared on posters and advertisements, and an English–language synopsis was a regular feature of Yiddish playbills. Language proficiency became even more of a problem when American–born actors began joining the Yiddish stage. Molly Picon (1898–1992), a superstar of the Yiddish stage, born in New York and raised in Philadelphia, wrote in her autobiography that in the early 1920s her husband, Jacob Kalich, took her on an extensive tour of Europe before launching her career in America because “the Yiddish I spoke was completely bastardized, and part of our plan was for me to learn correct Yiddish, with its soft, guttural European accent.”11 By the 1930s, the acting studio of the Artef workers’ art theater, which attracted second–generation youth, devoted considerable time to the instruction of the Yiddish language and Yiddish literature. Actor and distinguished film director Jules Dassin (1911–2008), who began his professional training at the Artef, said he was not alone in having to “learn Yiddish in order to become part of that theater.”¹²

The first Yiddish theatrical production in America took place in New York in 1882, when theater was still a novel phenomenon in Jewish life. Yiddish theater had come into being only six years earlier in Jassy, Romania, when writer Abraham Goldfaden (1840–1908) joined forces with two singers, then performing at a local tavern, and provided a skimpy storyline that offered narrative continuity to their musical numbers. The new entertainment was soon all the rage, and before long Goldfaden was heading his own traveling theater company, for which he functioned as producer, playwright, director, composer, and librettist. He soon began to author lavish Yiddish operettas, some of which—The Witch (1879), The Two Kuni–Lemls (1880), and Shulamith (1880)—became classics that are occasionally still performed. From the beginning, music was part of the DNA of the Yiddish stage, and the operetta was the most popular and beloved genre. Its musical numbers, hummed and sung at home and in shops, were recorded and did a brisk business as sheet music, especially as immigrant Jews began to purchase upright pianos for their tenement living rooms, one of the first luxuries of the Lower East Side.13 At times, the theatrical origin of a song was obliterated by its popularity, as was the case with “Donna, Donna,” often thought of as an old folk song though originally composed by Sholom Secunda for the Yiddish Art Theatre production of Aaron Zeitlin’s Esterke (1940–41).

The Yiddish Art Theatre building occupied by the 12th Street Cinema.

Photograph by Edmund V. Gillon, 1975.

Built in 1926, this is the only surviving Yiddish theater building on Second Avenue. It is currently home to Village East Cinema.

Hebrew Actors’ Union building at 31 East 7th Street.

Photograph by Martin Leifer, 1968.

The Hebrew Actors’ Union, founded in 1900, was the first actors’ union in the country.

Given Goldfaden’s influence, it is not surprising that the first record of a Yiddish theatrical production in New York is of one of his operettas—The Witch. The event, featuring a newly arrived troupe headed by the brothers Golubock, was financially backed by Frank Wolf, a well–to–do saloon owner who was also president of the Henry Street Synagogue, where the sweet–voiced Boris Thomashefsky (1866/8?–1939), a recent arrival then employed at a cigar factory, was a chorister. In his memoirs, Thomashefsky offered a transparently self–serving and sensational description of events surrounding this first production, including a highly questionable account of efforts to sabotage the evening by uptown “German” Jews. We do know, however, that the performance occurred on August 12, 1882, at Turn Hall, located at 66–68 4th Street (between Second Avenue and Bowery), home to a local branch of the Turnenverein, a progressive German–American fraternal and gymnastics society. It was presented as the “grand entertainment” for a benefit organized by the HEAS (Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society) to raise funds for a small group of Russian immigrants.14

This first performance was inconspicuous, attendance sparse, and the acting amateurish, but the timing was fortuitous: the number of Jewish newcomers was growing rapidly, and their yearning for amusement would soon be felt. Many were young and unmarried and, though poor, eager to spend the little extra cash they had on entertainment. By year’s end, the troupe, now calling itself the Hebrew Opera and Dramatic Company, moved to the Old Bowery Garden at 113–113½ Bowery, a former beer garden owned by a German Jew, Edward Levy. The Garden was already the site of various theatrical productions, including English and German plays and vaudeville. The company presented a repertoire consisting primarily of Goldfaden operettas and some new plays. Of the original plays staged by the company, Israel Barsky’s The Orphans is credited as the first Yiddish play about life in New York.

Bi–annual publication Kunst un Teater (Art and Theater) with cover illustration by Boris Aronson, 1937

Communal interest in the Yiddish theater was expressed by the significant number of Yiddish books and periodicals devoted to the stage. Aronson signed this illustration “Baruch Aronson” in Hebrew letters.

The Hebrew Opera and Dramatic Company performed twice a week. The shows were on Friday night and Saturday afternoon; in the absence of a strong rabbinical authority, there was no serious objection to this violation of the Sabbath. Still, the stage respectfully reflected the audience’s religious sensibilities. There was no evidence of activities specifically prohibited on the Sabbath: the lights were turned on in advance, matches and cigarettes were not lit, and letters arrived conveniently unsealed. Friday and Saturday performances remained the most popular and lucrative for the Yiddish theater and were frequented by traditional Jews as well as freethinkers.

The first company was short–lived, however. In 1883, the year after its opening, plagued by financial difficulties and personal feuds, the troupe split in two. Neither fared well, and by the end of 1884, the arrival from Europe of the more professional Karp–Silberman company forced the Golubocks and Thomashefsky to leave town. Most of the original players never developed much of a career on the stage. The notable exception was Boris Thomashefsky, who returned to New York three years later to become the long–time matinee idol of the Yiddish theater.

More actors arrived over the next few years, an influx triggered by the 1882 czarist ban on Yiddish–language performances. Many of the exiled Russian Yiddish actors first moved to London, but they soon migrated to America, the new central source of audiences and capital, and they made New York the headquarters of the Yiddish stage worldwide. The Karp–Silberman troupe, known as the Russian Yiddish Opera Company, leased the Bowery Garden (by now renamed the Oriental Theatre), and, though Goldfaden operettas continued to be a major attraction, the troupe also introduced historical operettas by other writers. Notably, they staged works by their own resident playwright and prompter, Joseph Lateiner (1853–1937) whose Esther and Haman and Joseph and His Brothers both proved highly successful. Lateiner’s output was legendary. By 1903, he had written and staged more than 100 plays, some of them originals, others adaptations from German, French, or English sources. Lateiner would come to write some of the most successful musical melodramas of the Yiddish stage, including The Jewish Heart (1908), a huge box–office success.

Another new troupe arrived from London in August of 1886. The Romanian Opera Company was an accomplished ensemble that gained its name from having played for two seasons in Romania. Their resident playwright and prompter was self–anointed “Professor” Moyshe Hurwitz (1864–1910), who, like Lateiner, kept the scripts flowing, authoring more than 100 melodramas and operettas. Unlike Lateiner, however, Hurwitz wanted to do more than write. He became the lessee of the Windsor Theatre at 37–39 Bowery and went on to successfully manage his own company for several years until a new owner took over the house. Hurwitz died penniless, a broken man.

Sheet music for “Isrulik Kim a Heim” (“Israel Come Home”) from Tate–Mamme’s Zures (Father and Mother’s Trouble), sung by Boris Thomashefsky, 1904.

During their heyday, Lateiner and Hurwitz ruled the stage. Pressured to produce a constant stream of scripts, they and their imitators supplied their companies with often half–baked goods that usually consisted of historical and biblical operettas, some melodramas, and tsaytbilder—dramatizations of such contemporary events as the notorious Tisa Esslar blood libel, the sinking of the Titanic, and the Dreyfus Affair. Though most of the plays were crude and filled with plagiarized scenes and historical inaccuracies, they transported unsophisticated spectators from the dreariness of their tenements and sweatshops to a fantasy world of glamour and heightened emotion.

As the theatrical field deepened, a fierce rivalry developed between the companies. They used printed pamphlets to discredit and denigrate each other, and when possible lured away each others’ actors. At times, the plays bore nearly identical titles: when the Romanian Opera House produced Hurwitz’s opera King Solomon, the Oriental immediately responded with Lateiner’s Solomon’s Trial. In his memoirs, Thomashefsky offers a vivid description of the competitive culture of the period:

To look like a star an actor had to wear slashed doublets, satin cloaks, golden crowns. Everyone had to do it, there was no other way. [Actor David] Kessler wore a hat with a feather, bare feet, and a shirt with red silk patches. [Jacob P.] Adler, to outdo him, wore a hat with three feathers, a naked throat, a spangled throw over his shoulders, and to make it more realistic, he put on chains, bracelets, and long Turkish earrings.

I showed the two of them I could play the game! I put on a crown, a sword, chains, bracelets, silk hose in three colors, and three cloaks instead of one! If they had lightning I had thunder. They declaimed; I sang. If they shot, I stabbed. If they made their entrance on a horse, I came in on a golden coach drawn by a team of horses. If they had thunder, I had lightning. If it snowed in their theaters, I had rain. If Kessler sang the Prayer for Forgiveness, I sang the Mourner’s Kaddish. If, at their theaters, they murdered one enemy, I murdered many and all at one blow.”15

Most of the first generation of actors who began their careers in the 1880s were reared in the culture of popular entertainment, where scripts served largely as vehicles for the display of performative skills. At the heart of their world stood the actor, not the text, and acting was considered most commendable when it hoisted primal emotions to fever pitch. On the New York Yiddish stage, actors were known to improvise lines and interject songs or vaudeville shticks that had no bearing on the storyline. Thomashefsky used to insert his popular song “A Letter to Mother” whenever the pace of the performance slackened. Actors adlibbed, slipped in lines from other plays, and relied heavily on the prompter, a fixture of Yiddish theater.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

English–language production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Academy of Music.

Photograph by Byron Co., 1901

The actor–managers of the young Yiddish stage in New York were eager to offer their patrons renditions of popular American fare. In 1901, following an immensely successful English–language revival of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the Academy of Music, two competing downtown Yiddish theaters, the Thalia and the People’s, produced near–simultaneous productions of the racial melodrama. Adapted from the 1852 novel by abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, the play follows the journeys of several long–suffering slaves. The subject matter, milieu, religious sentiment, and Southern vernacular of the story presented a unique challenge for linguistic and cultural translation. The Thalia production, which used an adaptation by Isidore Zolotarevsky, a popular Yiddish dramatist, sidestepped some of the obstacles by keeping the original English lyrics for at least some of the musical numbers: “In Ol’ Kaintuck,” and “Down on the Swanee River” were sung entirely in English; the character of Topsy sang “Shoo Fly, Don’t Bother Me,” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers” in Yiddish, but the refrains were sung in English. Since the Christ–like submissiveness of Uncle Tom was alien to the immigrant Jewish ethos, the Yiddish play emphasized the combative spirit of the slave who is willing to fight for his freedom. But Jewish actors and audiences alike also experienced an affinity for Stowe’s sympathetic figures. “Members of one persecuted race portrayed the wrongs of another,” wrote the Chicago Tribune of their local production. The character of George Harris, noted one critic, “became a desperate and solitary Maccabee,” and when Legree whipped Tom, the audience hissed out of pure hatred of him. One member of the audience declared, “The play is not so strange to us of the Israelitish descent as its American setting may suggest.”

Young intellectuals were contemptuous of the popular Yiddish fare, labeling it shund (trash), and they called for a more elevated theater for New York Jewish audiences. Their hope for a Yiddish Henrik Ibsen was finally realized in Jacob Gordin (1853–1909). Gordin, who introduced literary melodramas to the Yiddish repertoire, had no theatrical experience, but he impressed Jacob P. Adler, by then an important actor–manager, with his intellect and command of Russian culture. Adler commissioned him to write a play; the result was Siberia (1892), which failed to capture its audiences. But Gordin quickly followed it with the enormously successful The Jewish King Lear (1892), in which Adler played the old patriarch—one of his signature roles. Gordin went on to pen more than 30 original dramas, mostly domestic “problem plays,” written in what was then considered a realistic mode. The best known are God, Man, and Devil (1900), based on the Faust legend, albeit with a happy ending; Mirele Efros (1898); and The Kreutzer Sonata (1902). He also translated and adapted more than 40 plays from other languages, introducing Jewish audiences to the works of Ibsen, Hermann Sudermann, Gerhart Hauptmann, Leo Tolstoy, and Maxim Gorky.

Before literary and cultural reformers like Gordin began to change Yiddish theatrical culture, actors generally had delivered their lines in Daytshmerish, an artificially Germanized Yiddish deemed more appropriate for “higher–class” characters. Gordin was important in instituting a more natural stage language. He demanded a faithful rendition of the author’s text and forbade adlibbing and interpolation of unrelated musical and comedic numbers. Writing on commission, he provided actors with strong parts, and the reputation of actors associated with his work—Jacob Adler and his wife Sarah, David Kessler, Sigmund Mogulesko, Keni Liptzin, and Bertha Kalich—rested largely on their roles as the originators and interpreters of specific Gordin characters. His The Kreutzer Sonata was the first Yiddish play to be translated into English. It was in the lead female role that Bertha Kalich captured the attention of American producers. Known as the Yiddish Eleonora Duse, she was the first leading actress to cross over to major roles on the English–speaking stage, appearing in works by Victorien Sardou, George Bernard Shaw, Maurice Maeterlinck, Hermann Sudermann, and other important European writers.

Thomashefsky’s National Theatre, architectural drawing by Anthony F. Dumas, 1919.

The National Theatre, at 111 Houston Street, opened in 1912. Above it was a smaller theater, the National Winter Garden.

The People’s Theatre, architectural drawing by Anthony F. Dumas, 1934.

In 1889, Jacob P. Adler and Boris Thomashefsky took over the People’s Theatre at 201 Bowery, reopening it as a Yiddish theater. The building included a drug store and had rooms to let.

In the early years, Yiddish performances were put up only on weekends and Jewish holidays, which were conducive for premiering “special” productions. Daily performances were instituted soon thereafter, with weekdays usually reserved for “benefits”—involving an older repertoire sold at a reduced rate to social and labor organizations, which used them for their own fundraising purposes. The theaters themselves were originally run as stock companies, where the actors shared in the profits in accordance with their status (i.e., hero, juvenile, comedian, etc.). This arrangement was soon replaced with the advent of the star–manager, who ran a salaried company that he engaged for a full season, a paradigm that had already become obsolete in American theater.

This division into management and labor spurred early unionization efforts. The Hebrew Actors’ Union, established in December 1900, 20 years before Actors’ Equity, held a tight rein on every Yiddish production for many years. It enforced a salary scale and often required managers to engage actors regardless of preference or ability. It was also very resistant to admitting new members. Until the 1950s, gaining membership was a humbling experience, with applicants forced to audition before the union’s entire rank and file. Some accomplished actors, including Stella Adler and Maurice Schwartz, failed their first auditions. In addition to the actors’ union, there were separate unions representing costumers, prompters, chorus people, ushers, stage carpenters, scene shifters, and musicians. Though some of them were tiny—the prompters’ union membership peaked at a dozen—their strength lay in affiliation with the United Hebrew Trades. If one union had a grievance against a manager, the entire Yiddish theatrical scene was affected. On the whole, in the ongoing struggle between managers and unions, the latter usually held the upper hand.

The prosperity of the Yiddish theater—and the confidence in its longevity—was manifested in the construction of the Grand Street Theatre (1903), the first theatrical house built specifically for Yiddish productions. Located at 255 Grand Street at the corner of Chrystie Street, it opened to much fanfare, with major local politicians in attendance. Seating 1,700, the theater reflected the social mobility and aesthetic aspirations of its patrons. Its elegant red and gold interior included an orchestra floor and three balconies, each with its own lobby, cloakroom, and smoking room. The Grand’s success was short–lived, though. By the end of 1909, it was no longer a Yiddish house but had become home to moving pictures and vaudeville. It was demolished in 1930.

Shortly before the First World War, Yiddish theaters began to move farther uptown. Improved economic conditions, the decline of the Bowery area, and the gradual migration of Jews out of the Lower East Side prompted the formation of a new Yiddish theater district on Second Avenue, between Houston and East 14^th Streets. Lower Second Avenue had a rather dignified past. In the mid–19th century, it had been one of the aristocratic residential areas in the city; it was later taken over by German immigrants, who were by then themselves in the process of leaving the area for more upscale climes. For the Yiddish–speaking community, moving from the Bowery represented upward mobility. As Lulla Rosenfeld put it, Second Avenue offered “a wide, clean, prosperous street with no elevated tracks overhead and without the derelicts and saloons of the Bowery.” From the early 1910s until the 1940s, this small urban strip, often referred to as the “Yiddish Rialto,” was the undisputed nerve center of the Yiddish stage worldwide.

Yiddish Theater Uptown

Terrace Garden Theater (Lexington Opera House).

Photograph by Wurts Bros., 1913.

Not all of the early Yiddish theater in New York took place in the Lower East Side. Some productions were presented farther uptown, catering to a Jewish population that was more affluent than recently arrived immigrants. During the 1884–85 season, the Bowery–based Russian Yiddish Opera Company offered performances—mostly operettas by Abraham Goldfaden—at the Terrace Garden, also known as the Lexington Avenue Opera House. The complex, stretching from East 58^th to 59^th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, was a premier performance venue and gathering place for the city’s German–American community. The Yiddish performances were organized for the enjoyment of uptown Jewish patrons who, like their downtown brethren, enjoyed Goldfaden’s popular operettas. In December 1884, the uptown newspaper, the Jewish Messenger favorably reported on a performance of Goldfaden’s Shulamith, noting the large audience and frequent applause.

This uptown–downtown collaboration challenges the commonly held belief that German Jews turned up their noses at the Yiddish culture of East European Jews and highlights the link between German–speaking Jews and the early Yiddish stage in New York.

The playhouses of Second Avenue, built in the 1910s and 1920s, constituted the backbone of a thriving Jewish entertainment industry that encompassed cafés, restaurants, cabarets, and vaudeville and cinema houses, as well as such related businesses as photography studios and music, costume, and flower shops. The four flagship theaters were imposing structures, built specifically for Yiddish productions, and each costing about a million dollars, a substantial amount at a time when the average American was earning $25 a week. They were designed by first–rate architects, often from without the immigrant community. Unlike the old Bowery playhouses, these elegant buildings articulated the success and solidity of the Yiddish stage in America.

The Second Avenue Theatre, the first Yiddish theater on the strip, was built in 1911 for the star David Kessler. It sat 1,986 and also boasted a summer rooftop theater. The National Theatre, built for Boris Thomashefsky, opened a year later. It likewise had a 1,986–seat auditorium and a rooftop theater that could accommodate 1,000. The Yiddish Art Theatre, built in 1925–26 for actor–manager Maurice Schwartz, had an auditorium seating 1,236 and a restaurant/cabaret in the basement. In 1927, the Public Theatre opened—the last Yiddish house to be built on the avenue—with a seating capacity of 1,743.

While “Second Avenue” became a near–generic term for the commercial Yiddish stage, new Yiddish theaters also came into being in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx. This dispersion of theatrical activity reflected the migration of a considerable number of Jews from the Lower East Side to other parts of the city. A 1928 survey concluded that 45.6% of greater New York’s 1,728,000 Jews lived in Brooklyn, which had supplanted Manhattan as the center of the Jewish population. Manhattan came in second with 28%, with slightly more than half its Jews living on the Lower East Side and in Harlem; 22% lived in the Bronx and 3% in Queens.16 Some sections of the boroughs, especially in Brooklyn, were nearly entirely Jewish. The Yiddish theater followed this movement. For example, while Second Avenue remained the definitive capital of Jewish entertainment, in 1925 there were four Yiddish houses in Brooklyn and four in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, bringing to 14 the total number of the city’s Yiddish theater houses (including two in the Bowery area).

Art section of the Forverts, advertising Der litvisher yenki (The Lithuanian Yankee) at the National Theatre, 1929.

Aaron Lebedeff (pictured center) was well known for his performance in this operetta by Alexander Olshanetsky.

By the mid–1920s, theater managers regarded the Yiddish stage as a stable American institution that attracted some 300,000 New York–area families to its shows every year. Indeed, The Times went as far as predicting that “the Yiddish stage may become a serious competitor of the American.”17 But change was on the horizon. By 1929, as the affluence and optimism of the Roaring Twenties evaporated into the crisis of the Great Depression, economic collapse conspired with other changes to threaten the future of the business. With the cessation of immigration due to federal legislation in 1924, the Yiddish theater was gradually losing audiences. Yiddish culture was being eroded by Americanization, with Jewish audiences drifting to Broadway and to motion pictures. Further, the high overhead (with personnel costs higher than those of Broadway productions) and the contract requirements of the unions (featherbedding was rampant) took their toll. The Yiddish theaters of New York closed midseason in 1929–30.

In 1930, the entirety of American Yiddish theater appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Some big stars left for overseas tours or took jobs on the non–Yiddish stage. The managers of the nine remaining Yiddish theaters declared that they would have to close unless the unions allowed a 40% cut in salaries. The unions threatened to strike, and on December 8, 1930, the theaters closed and remained dark for two weeks. Labor was ultimately forced to make concessions: the salary scale was cut by 10–25%, and unions waived their power to set a quota for actors at every theater for the duration of the season. In the 1932–33 season, five Yiddish theaters again had to close their doors midseason.¹⁸ Four remained open, but they were unable to pay their actors full wages.¹⁹

Even as the fortunes of the Yiddish stage waned, new opportunities arose for its artists. An increase in Jewish–themed shows on Broadway in the 1920s and ’30s offered crossover roles for Yiddish actors, some of whom divided their time between the Yiddish and English stages. Ludwig Satz was immensely successful in Potash and Perlmutter; Rudolph Schildkraut appeared in the controversial God of Vengeance; Jacob Ben–Ami joined Eva Le Gallienne’s Repertory Theatre, where he starred in plays by Chekhov and Tolstoy; and Paul Muni became a major movie actor. These decades also witnessed the rise of a new cadre of Yiddish stars, some of them born and raised in America. The darling of musical comedy was Molly Picon, a multitalented, sweet–faced pixie with an androgynous look. Menasha Skulnik proved an outstanding comic and would gain great success on the postwar English–speaking stage. Aaron Lebedeff and Michal Michalesko sang, and Jennie Goldstein reigned as the queen of melodrama.

Café Royal

Café Royal.

Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1938.

During its heyday (1920s–50), Second Avenue between Houston and 14^th Streets was the entertainment area of Yiddish New York, a hub of theaters, restaurants, and nightclubs. Particularly important was café life, which provided the nexus for before–and after–theater socializing and networking. One locale stood out for almost half a century: the Café Royal, located at 190 Second Avenue at East 12^th Street, at the heart of the Yiddish rialto. It was a place to eat a hearty goulash, to have a stiff drink or sip some tea, and, mostly, to talk a lot. “No Jewish actor worth his claque, no Jewish critic worth his enemies, and no Jewish art–lover worth his prejudices,” wrote Harry Golden in 1937, could afford to miss this “Colosseum of talk.” The café served as a meeting place and trading mart for the theatrical world and as a thrilling showcase for fans hoping to glimpse the Yiddish matinee idols who held court there.

The simply decorated café opened in 1908, replacing a former saloon. It was originally named for its founder, a Mr. Breslau, but when he left the business in 1911 it was renamed Café Royal. There were many stories told about the place. According to one urban legend, the owner who had succeeded Breslau lost the café to his Hungarian waiter, Oscar Szathmary, in a game of pinochle; in a second game, Oscar won Herman Tantzer, the establishment’s busboy. The owner was never heard from again. However it actually happened, with Oscar and Herman in charge, the café achieved a mythologized status as the Sardi’s of the Lower East Side.

Herman became a legend in his own right. Known as the millionaire busboy, he amassed a fortune from his share of tips and from charging a service fee for cashing checks; he came to own significant real estate assets, and admitted to losing $290,000 in the 1929 crash. Herman admired the theater and backed numerous Yiddish shows, making money on hits, losing heavily on flops. Prone to acts of generosity for out–of–luck actors, his checks, always signed with a plain “Herman,” were rock solid. Despite various offers, he never aspired to advance his status, refusing promotion, happy to don his black tie, sling a white napkin over his arm, and show the guests to their “traditional” reserved tables. The café was divided into three sections: the one near the door, which had tables with white tablecloths, was meant for infrequent guests; the middle, with blue–checked tablecloths, was kept for the regulars; the back, which had no tablecloths, was reserved for card and chess players, always surrounded by a few kibitzing onlookers.

Ten years before it closed in 1952, the Café Royal had become such an icon of New York Jewish life that it became the setting for an English–language Broadway production—created by alumni of the Yiddish stage—when its unique atmosphere and its celebrated habitués were depicted in Hy S. Kraft’s comedy Café Crown (1942). The play starred Morris Carnovsky as David Cole, a Jacob P. Adler–based character who dreams of a modern–dress version of King Lear, and Sam Jaffe as Hymie, the rich busboy who finally agrees to back the venture. The play was staged by Elia Kazan, with sets by Boris Aronson. It was revived in 1989, with Eli Wallach as David Cole and Bob Dishy as the busboy. A musicalized version was produced on Broadway in 1964 with Theodore Bikel as Cole and Sam Levene as Hymie.

While operettas remained the bread and butter of the Yiddish stage, the inter-war era is remembered for its art theaters, notably the Yiddish Art Theatre, led by Maurice Schwartz from 1918 to the mid–1950s; the Artef, a semiprofessional troupe allied with the communist camp that flourished during the Depression; and in the 1920s, the short–lived Jewish Art Theatre, Unser Teater, and Schildkraut Theatre.

The art theater movement, which had a strong literary orientation, was supported by an impressive new cadre of authors who began to write for the stage: Osip Dymow (1878–1959), David Pinski (1872–1959), Sholem Asch (1880–1957), Peretz Hirschbein (1880–1948), and H. Leivick (1888–1962). Most notably, its trajectory was shaped by Maurice Schwartz (1890–1960), a man of extraordinary talent and energy, who embodied and sustained the art theater ideal. In the 1920s, he experimented with various theatrical forms, including a constructivist rendition of Goldfaden’s The Tenth Commandment (1926), with scenery designed by Boris Aronson. Schwartz’s most successful productions were Yoshe Kalb (1932) and The Brothers Ashkenazi (1937), both based on novels by I.J. Singer.

Yet by the late 1930s, the effects of Americanization on the Yiddish theater had become more pronounced. It was not only an issue of attendance but also one of audience profile. With the exception of particularly successful productions that appealed to the younger generation, who understood the language but were no longer able to comfortably read or write Yiddish, most shows drew audiences who were older and more interested in nostalgic and feel–good productions. The falling–off became particularly evident after World War II. There were only four Yiddish theaters in New York by 1945, three of which opened the season with musicals with such titles as They All Want to Get Married, Good News, and Pleasure Girls. Few serious plays were now written for the Yiddish stage, and though the efforts to sustain quality Yiddish productions did not cease, they were modest and short–lived.

The legacy of the Yiddish theater was increasingly being felt on the English language stage. This coincided with a switch away from creating new original works in Yiddish: with the ebbing of immigration, fewer new Yiddish dramatists emerged, and the established Yiddish playwrights reduced their dramatic output. But there was no such dearth of new scripts on the English–language stage, where a significant cadre of second–generation, English–language Jewish dramatists was coming to the fore. Children of immigrants were now writing for the general public. The new opportunities brought many of them success and even fame, but to gain it they needed to exercise a measure of self–censorship or risk being deemed “too Jewish.” Playwright Arthur Miller recounted how, as a novice playwright in the 1930s, he approached three Broadway producers with a revised version of his Jewish–themed college play They Too Arise: “All of them wanted to do it,” Miller writes, but “all finally gave up for the stated reason that it was not a time to come forward with a play about Jews.” One major exception was Clifford Odets’s 1935 landmark Awake and Sing!, written for the Group Theatre and often considered the quintessential Jewish–American family drama of the pre–World War II era. Critic Alfred Kazin recalled “sitting in the Belasco, watching my mother and father and uncles and aunts occupying the stage […] by as much right as if they were Hamlet or Lear.”20 Odets was praised for his masterful replication of the Yiddish–influenced English of the second generation, but like other playwrights, he had to somewhat modify his original script to avoid a “smaller horizon.”

The first banner of the Hebrew Actors’ Union, 1900.

The text reads, “Hebrew Actors’ Union, Inc. Affiliated with the Associated Actors and Artists of America, the American Federation of Labor, and the United Hebrew Trades. Organized December, 1900.”

Hebrew Actors’ Union striker wearing signs in Yiddish and English, 1930s.

The postwar shift from Yiddish to English and the formation of a new genre of “Yinglish” entertainment is primarily associated with Catskills entertainers, who became the agents of transition. In the “safe space” where English and Yiddish intermingled, up–and–coming comedians and singers honed their craft and rose to international fame by bringing the shtick of Yiddish vaudeville to second–generation Jewish audiences. Many of America’s best–known singers, entertainers, and comedy writers made their bones in the Catskills drawing on Yiddish materials and capitalizing on cultural references. The immensely popular song “Bei Mir Bistu Shein” exemplifies this dynamic, as the Catskills became the crosscultural mediator between Yiddish stage traditions and the broader culture. It was originally composed by Jacob Jacobs and Sholom Secunda for a 1932 Yiddish comedy musical, I Would If I Could (Men ken lebn nor men lost nisht). In 1937, Sammy Cahn, himself a child of the Lower East Side, heard it sung in Yiddish by African–American performers Johnnie and George at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. (Jenny Grossinger, owner of the famed hotel, claimed to have taught the song to Johnnie and George while they were performing at her resort.) Cahn replaced the Yiddish original with English–language lyrics but kept the original title and opening line. The Andrews Sisters, then virtually unknown, recorded the song on November 24, 1937. It earned them a gold record, the first ever for a female vocal group, and became an international sensation that over the years has been recorded by dozens of singers, including Ella Fitzgerald, Eydie Gormé and Steve Lawrence, among others.

God of Vengeance

Cast of God of Vengeance at police station, 1907.

God of Vengeance (1907), a controversial play by Yiddish writer Sholem Asch (1880–1957), gained tremendous notoriety due to its risqué theme: the intersection of prostitution, lesbianism, religiosity, and sacrilege. The story presents a Jewish house whose first floor functions as a brothel, while the second floor is home to the brothel owner (Yankl Tshaptshovitsh), his wife (a former prostitute), and their daughter (Rivkele), who is being raised as a traditionally virtuous girl. Yankl, who dreams of marrying his daughter to a respectable young scholar, brings into the house a sacred Torah scroll. But the physical and moral separation between brothel and family home is destroyed when Rivkele engages in a lesbian relationship with one of the downstairs prostitutes and runs away with her to join another brothel. Distraught, Yankl throws the Torah scroll, which he equates with his daughter’s purity, out of his house.

God of Vengeance was first produced in German translation in Berlin in 1907, starring Rudolph Schildkraut as Yankl. Russian–language productions in St. Petersburg and Moscow soon followed. The play in its original Yiddish opened on October 13, 1907, at the Thalia Theatre in New York, starring David Kessler. It created an enormous stir, with some regarding it as a courageous work of art and others dismissing it as outrageous “filth.” Nearly two decades later, on February 19, 1923, after a two–month run at two smaller downtown venues, an English–language production of God of Vengeance opened at New York’s Apollo Theatre on 219 West 42^nd Street, with Schildkraut making his English–stage debut. Joseph Silverman, rabbi emeritus of New York’s prestigious Temple Emanu-El, filed an obscenity complaint with the police. On March 6^th, a grand jury indicted the producer, cast, and theater owner under section 1140 A of the Penal Gode, which prohibits entertainment that “leads to the corruption of the morals of youth or others.” After the indictment, newspapers declined to print ads for the play and ticket sales dropped sharply, forcing the producer to move the show to a minor theater in the Bronx, where it lasted barely a month.

The case came to trial in May of 1923, and the jury found all defendants guilty as charged. Following the verdict, the show’s producer, Harry Weinberger, rallied the theater community against the obscenity charges. He circulated a pamphlet in which Asch defended his work, writing that American audiences simply weren’t “adequately instructed to accept God of Vengeance.” Weinberger and Schildkraut were fined $200 each, and the rest received suspended sentences.

American playwright Donald Margulies adapted the play, changing its locale from a Russian town to the Lower East Side. His play premiered at the Contemporary Theatre in Seattle in 2000, and was subsequently produced in 2002 by the Williamstown Theater Festival, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Both productions were directed by Gordon Edelstein.

Along with its audience, the style and subject matter of Yiddish theater migrated to the English–language stage. The enormously successful The Fifth Season (1953), a comedy about New York’s Garment District, which enjoyed a Broadway run of 654 performances, strikes one as a Yiddish comedy in English. Its chief creators were affiliated with the Yiddish theater: it was written by Sylvia Regan, wife of Yiddish theater composer Abraham Ellstein; Sam Leve, its designer, had worked with the Artef and the Yiddish Art Theatre; and it starred Menasha Skulnik (1890–1970), the leading Yiddish comedian of his day. Author George Ross used Skulnik’s brilliant performance to examine what was meant by “Yiddish comedy style.”21 He wrote:

Skulnik is the Jew in trouble, but his trouble has become an abstraction and the definition of his style: when he appears on the stage, even before the situation seizes him, his tsores are there beside him like a partner in the act, his straight man. He doesn’t hope to defeat them. He needs them. Without them, he would have nothing to say. Even success means only more trouble. And a good thing, too: if there could be a world in which trouble did not weigh on Skulnik’s shoulders, we would be deprived of the most eloquent shrug ever conceived.

He explains how Skulnik wordlessly lifts a mediocre gag to hilarity through physical and facial performance—“a process of raising and lowering his arms, his shoulders, his eyebrows, his voice”—and fills the moment with “disappointment, resignation, self–effacement.” These, says Ross, are the trademarks of the Yiddish comic style. It is a style we recognize to this day in popular American comedy.²²

The 1960s dramatically altered the country’s cultural landscape. The phenomenal success of Fiddler on the Roof (1964) boldly legitimized ethnic self–representation on the mainstream stage. The musical’s evocation of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl was part of an overall search for roots in an America that had begun to proudly define itself as a nation of immigrants, and Fiddler’s simulacrum of a largely imagined homeland touched a nerve that has not only been lovingly espoused by several generations of American Jews but has also appealed to audiences worldwide.

By the closing decades of the 20^th century, a new theme arose in Jewish American drama—that of the Americanized Jew who returns to the ancestral home located in the immigrant neighborhood after the death of parents or grandparents. There he grapples with bittersweet memories, family dynamics, and personal identity by encountering the detritus of a life that is no more. The themes of the disappearing past, personal memory, and Jewish identity appear in Arthur Miller’s The Price (1968), in Herb Gardner’s autobiographical Conversations with My Father (1994), and in David Mamet’s The Old Neighborhood (1998). Conversations with My Father is a memory play that ends with a confrontation between the successful Americanized son and his immigrant father, an advocate of assimilation who is unhappy with its end product, represented by his successful and intermarried son. The play ends with the son’s Yiddish shriek, “Vos vilst du, Papa? Vas vilst du fun mir? What do you fucking want?” The last tune we hear is the father’s favorite song, sung by Aaron Lebedeff, a popular Yiddish entertainer: “Roumania, Roumania, Roumania, Geven amol a land a zise, a sheyne” (Romania, Romania, Romania/There once was a sweet and beautiful land).

Menasha Skulnik in Uncle Willie, caricature by Al Hirschfeld. Published in The New York Times, December 16, 1956,

Caricature by Al Hirschfeld,

Frank Sinatra and his agent study posters of Menasha Skulnik and Miriam Kressyn, c. 1943.

Menasha Skulnik.

Photograph by Charles H. Stewart, c. 1960.

One is often asked if the Yiddish theater is dead. The answer depends on both definition and perspective. Clearly, despite the dedication of groups like the Folksbiene/National Yiddish Theater, the glory days of Boris Thomashefsky, Bertha Kalich, Jacob P. Adler, Maurice Schwartz, and Molly Picon are long gone, but the impact of New York’s Yiddish theater is felt to this day. Writing in 2001, critic Robert Brustein maintained that in the world of the theater, and the Jewish theater in particular, “everyone and everything is an influence.”23 He explained:

Yiddish vaudeville had a powerful influence on American burlesque, producing such great comics as Smith and Dale, Bert Lahr, Bobby Clark, and Milton Berle. American burlesque and its adjunct the Borscht Belt circuited, in turn, to the comedy of Mr. Berle’s “Texaco Star Theatre” and Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca’s “Your Show of Shows,” with its great Jewish writers: Mel Brooks, Lucille Kalman, Larry Gelbart, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. These in turn generated a lot of Neil Simon comedies and Woody Allen’s films, not to mention Larry Gelbart’s “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” “Mash,” and “Mastergate” and Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner’s “The 2000 Year Old Man.” And those traditions clearly have a link with the Judeocentric humor of Jackie Mason.²⁴

Brustein concluded his theatrical genealogy on a romantic note: “Being in the theater is like being in love. It makes the whole world seem Jewish.”

The Yiddish theater continues to excite the imagination of scholars and artists alike. They document its history in film and write modern stage adaptations that find new meaning in old playtexts. The best–known contemporaries include playwrights Donald Margulies and Tony Kushner, who adapted, respectively, Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance and The Dybbuk by S. Ansky. (Most recently, Indecent, a play about the trials and tribulations about the God of Vengeance affair, written by Paula Vogel, premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre.) Then there are performers like Mandy Patinkin, who in 1998 presented Mamaloshen on Broadway, a one–man show of Yiddish songs. Filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger’s documentary The Komediant (1999) is an exuberant account of the life and career of Yiddish comedy stars Pesach Burstein and Lillian Lux, and Joel and Ethan Coen produced A Serious Man (2009), which opened with a Yiddish–speaking dramatic prologue evoking the dybbuk tale. A sense of continuity is particularly conveyed by the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, run today by Tom Oppenheim, her grandson, who publicly traces his artistic origins to Jacob P. Adler, his greatly admired great–grandfather.

A Survey of the 1932–33 Yiddish Theater Season