"Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past"

by AMELIA MERRILL 

[On 23 and 26 August 2012, I posted “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” a two-part look at the Yiddish language, literature, and theater, and the history of the Folksbiene company, the longest-surviving Yiddish theater in the world.  The present piece, “Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past,” can be seen as an update.

[I also published Carol Rocamora’s American Theatre report “Could It Happen Here?” last week on 10 February.  The post below, also from AT (on the website on 29 December 2022, AMERICAN THEATRE | Yiddish Theatre: Not Just a Thing of the Past), might be read as a contrast to Rocamora’s article, which examines how the English-speaking theater is responding to the current surge in anti-Semitic violence.  Amelia Merrill’s report looks at how the Yiddish-speaking stage is faring here in New York City after more than a century of producing plays.]

In New York City, once home to dozens of Yiddish theatres, 2 companies now tend the flame in different ways—just don’t call it a renaissance.

As a historic hub for both theatre and international immigration, New York is unsurprisingly home to many theatres created by and for ethnically specific audiences: Ma-Yi Theater Company develops new works by Asian American artists; multiple companies, from Teatro Latea and Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater to Repertorio Español, produce works in Spanish; the Irish Repertory Theatre and Irish Arts Center are key outposts for drama by and about this signature New York population.

Another integral immigrant population has had ample stage representation in the past: At one point in time, New York was home to more than 50 Yiddish theatres, where stars speaking the language of Ashkenazi Jews delighted audiences both Jewish and not, both fluent in the language and entirely unfamiliar with it. Today, reflecting both the relative decline and the cultural persistence of this unique heritage, there are two remaining Yiddish theatres in the city, New Yiddish Rep [founded in 2007; New Yiddish Rep] and National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF [National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene]).

The latter company had a crossover hit in 2018 with its Yiddish-language production of the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof, Fidler afn Dakh ([directed by Joel Grey; Museum of Jewish Heritage, 16 July-30 December 2018; Off-Broadway, 21 February 2019-5 January 2020] now back in an encore engagement Off-Broadway [21 November 2022] through Jan. 1, 2023). The company had been no stranger to good fortune before then, keeping its doors open as competitors folded throughout the 20th century. But Fiddler has had the kind of mainstream success NYTF hadn’t experienced in years, leading critics to wonder if both the Yiddish theatre scene and the wider world of Yiddish were experiencing a rebirth. NYTF acknowledged the trend by naming a 2021 fundraiser “A Yiddish Renaissance.”

Many Yiddishists—the language’s champions, who include scholars, teachers, students, playwrights, musicians, archivists, podcasters, and more—dislike this term. “Renaissance” implies that the work of both professional and amateur Yiddishists stopped cold at some point or went underground of its own accord, rather than, as they see it, being deprived of funding and continued support. Too often, the Yiddishists feel, the theatre industry looks backward at Yiddish theatre as if paying homage to a bygone era is the only option left.

If we are in the midst of a Yiddish renaissance, it is one that has built up gradually, not sprung to life overnight. Long before the popular language-learning app Duolingo added Yiddish to its lexicon in 2021, organizations like YIVO [a partner of, and co-located with, the Center for Jewish History in the Flatiron District of New York City] and the Workers Circle offered classes in New York and online. Online learning options have gotten so popular that NPR covered the phenomenon last year. The Jewish Daily Forward, one of the oldest Jewish newspapers in the country [founded in 1897], still publishes a Yiddish edition online (the print publication folded in 2019). In 2016, Sandy Fox launched Vaybertaytsh, a feminist podcast in Yiddish whose name refers to Torah commentaries written for (but not by) women, and WUNR in Brookline, Mass., releases their weekly Yiddish radio show, the Yiddish Voice, as a podcast as well. Cameron Bernstein, an alum of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Mass., boasts over 44,000 followers on TikTok, where she posts Yiddish music, memes, translations, and tidbits of historical information. Students can take Yiddish classes at select universities across the country, or even pursue doctoral programs in the language and its literature. Beyond academia’s walls, Yiddish is a first language to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. Though Yiddish remains a minority language, it would be inaccurate—and exquisitely annoying to Yiddishists—to call it a dead one.

The Yiddish theatre community has remained similarly steadfast for generations, even as it gradually lost its wide audience reach and now faces a dearth of actors who speak the language. What was a mainstream component of the theatre industry a century ago, selling well over a million tickets each year, is now categorized as affinity theatre [theater that attracts audiences with the same or similar interests].

There have been high points in Yiddish literature and arts since that height: Writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose Yiddish stories are characterized by a witty, tongue-in-cheek embrace of death and disaster, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. And then there was klezmer, the jazzy, folksy dance music of Ashkenazi Jews, which Zalmen Mlotek, the artistic director of the NYTF, credits with keeping Yiddish performing arts afloat; playwright and Yiddishist Rokhl Kafrissen, a 2019 fellow at LABA Laboratory for Jewish Culture, said in an interview last year that the 1990s klezmer revival was her gateway to Yiddish and its theatre. Indeed, the Klezmatics’ original score for the 1997 Public Theater production of Tony Kushner’s A Dybbuk, an adaptation of S. Ansky’s most famous Yiddish play, was considered one of the production’s high points.

These musical and theatrical strains, and the persistence of theatres like NYTF, led to the success of Fidler Afn Dakh, which bridged the gap between niche or cultural affinity art and mainstream success, effectively taking one of the most iconic Broadway musicals back to its roots.

Fiddler has, of course, been revived on American stages, including on Broadway, numerous times since its 1964 debut, but it had never been produced in the original language of writer Sholem Aleichem (whose stories inspired Joseph Stein’s libretto) until NYTF produced Shraga Friedman’s translation. (Aleichem’s own Yiddish-language play about the character of Tevye the Dairyman was not produced in his lifetime.) The production resonated with audiences, prompting a 2019 transfer to Stage 42, a cast recording, and a Drama Desk Award.

But Fiddler was not the first Yiddish play to take hold of the New York theatre world in the 2010s: In 2016 and 2017, New Yiddish Rep produced God of Vengeance [22 December 2016-22 January 2017], a controversial Yiddish play by Sholem Asch whose 1923 production featured the first kiss between two women on a Broadway stage, resulting in the arrest of the company and theatre owners for obscenity. Playwright Paula Vogel in turn chronicled Asch’s life and creative process and the history of the play in Indecent [Off-Broadway. 17 May-19 June 2016; Broadway, 18 April-6 August 2017], which played on Broadway around the same time as New Yiddish Rep’s production and won director Rebecca Taichman a Tony Award. Indecent, which features both Asch and Hebrew and Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz as prominent characters, is primarily in English, but Vogel sprinkles Yiddish dialogue throughout the script and infuses the play with a spirit of song and dance essential to Yiddish theatre. The play ended up extending for six weeks after its initially announced closing date due to public outcry.

Yiddish cinema has shown strength as well: In 2017, Joshua Z. Weinstein released the Yiddish-language tale Menashe, featuring a company of native speakers from Brooklyn. The lead actor, Menashe Lustig, also lent his talent to the 2019 horror film The Vigil, an English and Yiddish production from Keith Thomas about a man hired to keep watch over the body of a deceased man from his Jewish community. The film’s protagonist, like the captivating Esty in Netflix’s controversial 2020 miniseries Unorthodox—the first American streaming series in Yiddish—is off the derech, or OTD, a Hebrew term for a formerly Orthodox person who has left the “path” (derech).

Many of New Yiddish Rep’s actors are OTD themselves, having been raised in Yiddish-speaking homes and communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and throughout the city. As OTD people face economic hardship after leaving their communities, New Yiddish Rep offers creatively inclined Yiddish speakers new opportunities.

Indeed, OTD artists and teachers from Yiddish-speaking backgrounds may be ideally suited to help foster a Yiddish theatre community committed to preservation of the language’s nuances and dialect differences; several of the OTD actors of New Yiddish Rep have also lent their voices to Duolingo’s Yiddish lessons. Not every Yiddish theatre company or program, however, requires performers to be native speakers, or even fluent: NYTF trains actors, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, in the dialogue and idiosyncrasies necessary to perform their Yiddish-speaking roles. NYTF’s approach views Yiddish as a component of actor training, not a disparate prerequisite for building a company of Yiddish-speaking performers.

“They’re learning phonetically,” Mlotek said in an interview last year about actors new to NYTF’s rehearsal processes. He said that Actors’ Equity Association allowed the Fiddler team to feed auditionees one sentence to repeat as a “test” of their Yiddish capabilities. “Of course they have to understand every word they’re saying so they can act in the language,” Mlotek said.

Though they both share the stages of a city once bursting with Yiddish theatre and its stars, NYTF and New Yiddish Rep sometimes clash ideologically over this core question: Is the Yiddish language an intrinsic part of the Yiddish theatre experience, or is it part of the acting?

“When you have a show with 27 actors, and only one of them speaks Yiddish or only two of them speak Yiddish, is it Yiddish theatre?” David Mandelbaum, the co-founder and artistic director of New Yiddish Rep, bluntly posed in an interview last year. “Would you go to see a French play with all non-French-speaking people onstage?”

Mandelbaum observed matter-of-factly that actors being coached in Yiddish dialogue who lack contextual knowledge of the language outside the script in their hands may not only struggle with their acting process but with a personal disconnect from their cultural heritage—one that plagues many Jews trying to learn Yiddish for the first time. Mandelbaum grew up in a Yiddish-speaking home with his parents, who were Polish Jewish immigrants. Mlotek’s father was a Yiddish writer who came to the U.S. after World War II, while his mother was an ethnomusicologist who “devoted her life’s work to collecting Yiddish songs.” (Bashevis Singer once called Mlotek’s parents the “Sherlock Holmeses of Yiddish folk songs,” according to Mlotek’s mother’s obituary.) This immersion in Yiddish language, let alone in the Yiddish literati, has grown rare outside of Haredi (or “ultra-Orthodox”) communities.

For many other American Jews, however, Yiddish has been the dividing line between religious and secular cultures, and some have chosen not to teach the language to their children to allow them—or force them—to assimilate into mainstream culture. My own family adopted this view generations ago; the Star of David atop a Christmas tree in Tom Stoppard’s Leopoldstadt [See Rick On Theater posts “Tom Stoppard & Leopoldstadt” (22 October 2022) and “Tom Stoppard” (26 December 2022)], on Broadway this season, reminds me of my great-grandfather’s decision to put the Christmas tree near the windows so that the neighbors would know that the family was similar, secular, “normal.”

“They wanted their kids to be Yankees,” Mandelbaum said of the waves of Jewish immigrants who encouraged their children to speak only English. Mlotek referred to Yiddish as a “secret language” spoken between parents and grandparents, but not to children. This assimilation trickled down: From 1980 to 2011, the population of Yiddish speakers in the U.S. declined by almost half, sitting at around 250,000 now.

Still, Yiddish theatre artists aren’t sure that native speakers are the ones buying tickets to Yiddish theatre productions and noticing mistakes or regional variations. In fact, Mandelbaum joked that Yiddish theatre survives because Yiddish speakers aren’t coming to see shows and point out mistakes. While some Yiddish-speaking Haredi Jews do engage in secular pop culture, others restrict their exposure and may not feel comfortable at a theatre performance not explicitly designed for religious audiences. Others may be wary of Yiddish theatre’s historic penchant for depicting religious life as archaic or anti-intellectual; some playwrights in the golden age of Yiddish theatre were reacting to the shtetls where they grew up, while others had never experienced such a life and were poking fun at their countryside brethren. 

“When the Museum of Jewish Heritage invited us to be the resident theatre company, I had to go through—not an inquisition, but a meeting,” Mlotek told me. A trustee believed that all Yiddish theatre had to offer was this stereotypical fare that denigrated religious Jews as primitive peasants. “I happen to be a traditional Jew in the sense that I keep Shabbos, I have a relationship with the Creator,” Mlotek said he told the trustee. “There’s no agenda to ridicule any segment of the Jewish population.”

By focusing on outreach work with OTD Yiddish artists, Mandelbaum also addresses the disparities between Jewish religious communities and Jewish performing arts. His work at New Yiddish Rep helps a niche within a niche: Yiddish speakers are a small demographic, and OTD people are an even smaller one who often struggle with tension in their former communities.

Onstage, however, neither New Yiddish Rep nor NYTF caters only to Yiddish audiences. The popularity of New Yiddish Rep’s God of Vengeance and NYTF’s Fiddler proved that the language is not a barrier but a part of the theatre experience, akin to going to the opera, with projected supertitles aiding comprehension. Assuming that there are no Yiddish-speaking Jews in the audiences of these shows may paint with too broad a brush, but we can safely assume that they are not the majority. Mlotek and Mandelbaum both spoke about trends they have noticed among Jewish audience members, but as of the time of my interviews, neither company had data about whether their patrons speak Yiddish at home or at all. Perhaps dividing Jewish audience members into groups of secular and religious, native Yiddish speakers and not, is an unproductive exercise—not all Jews will accept the labels applied to them. (You know the saying, “Two Jews, three opinions”?)

At the end of the day, most of the audience for NYTF’s storied Yiddish Fiddler production (also referred to as “Yiddler”) does not care if it represents an authentic linguistic interpretation of a language spoken mostly in cloistered communities, or if such a judgment can even be made. These conversations, while interesting from a scholarly point of view, feel more like splitting hairs to the average theatregoer. Fidler afn Dakh was popular enough to be revived this year, and may follow in the footsteps of other pre-COVID hits that have transferred to Broadway. Though Mlotek and Mandelbaum don’t agree on every facet of Yiddish artistic pedagogy, they don’t see themselves as rivals in their cultural and linguistic niche. Their companies simply offer different works from different perspectives, which Mandelbaum compared to the history of Yiddish theatre in New York.

“They used to do ‘claques,’ where fans of a particular impresario would be given free tickets to come to the theatre and clap, or to go to another theatre and create chaos,” he described. Yiddish theatre actors were not afraid to confront each other, directors, or audience members whose reactions they deemed not up to snuff. Perhaps this seems a little uncouth to the modern theatre attendee, but Mandelbaum called it a “wonderful, crazy, marvelous” time that encapsulated some of the vaudevillian spirit of Yiddish theatre.

The debate over accessibility versus authenticity—and whether these elements can live in harmony—grips the whole Yiddish world today, not just the Yiddish theatre. While some Jewish users and media celebrated Duolingo’s addition of Yiddish last year, others scoffed, deeming the program inferior to in-person, in-depth language learning. The platform does gamify learning to a degree, conflicting with pedagogical opinions of language acquisition, but it does incentivize users to keep coming back and, most significantly, it is free of charge. While organizations like YIVO and the Workers Circle offer classes, workshops, and immersion programs and sell textbooks for students to learn on their own, these pose financial barriers to many, and students outside New York don’t have the same opportunities for in-person learning. 

Kafrissen thinks the level of interest that young people, Jewish or otherwise, have shown in Yiddish in recent years doesn’t match the level of investment from Jewish institutions. “Something like Duolingo sort of rushes into the vacuum to provide that [learning], because it’s free,” she explained. “Duolingo can’t answer your questions. A real teacher is expensive and valuable.” 

Duolingo’s Yiddish voice actors also represent different backgrounds, which can affect accents, pronunciations, and even some words. These differences (which were once determined by regions of Eastern Europe and are now also determined by regions of New York) account for an inconsistent, and thus inauthentic, auditory experience on the app. Some Yiddishists may liken the disparity between Duolingo and other Yiddish learning experiences to the conversation about which Yiddish stories gain pop culture prominence: While quotable and beloved, stories like Fiddler and other depictions of the shtetl may not paint entirely accurate pictures of Jewish life—sometimes because Yiddish writers of the haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, intended them that way.

Kafrissen, for example, admitted that she has a love/hate relationship with Fiddler.

“I love musical theatre and I love Fiddler, Fiddler is amazing,” she said. “At the same time, I’m done with Fiddler. I never want to see another revival.” She’s in good company: Jewish literary critic Irving Howe said the original 1964 production represented “the spiritual anemia of Broadway and of the middle-class Jewish world,” while Jewish novelists like Philip Roth and Cynthia Ozick similarly dismissed it as “kitsch.” Kafrissen likened the choice to revive Fiddler and even Funny Girl again and again rather than patronize new Yiddish playwrights and stories to “malpractice.”

“You would think that with the tremendous success of things like Hamilton that people would understand the value of developing new voices and seeing that new works can be financially successful,” she said.

Nostalgia, of course, comes with an economic cushion. But nostalgia can also erase the vibrant, living world of modern Yiddish. The presentation of Yiddish art that focuses only on the past can lead Americans, Jewish and otherwise, to believe that Yiddish only exists in the past. Art that relies on the jokes, insults, and quippy proverbs that Yiddish offers can sometimes reduce the language and its culture to such quips. When Billy Crystal performed Yiddish “scat” at this year’s Tony Awards, spouting off gibberish and almost no actual Yiddish words, some Yiddishists were perturbed. Kafrissen, for her part, said that Crystal’s performance of Yiddish as “a pre-verbal string of guttural grunts [. . .] index[ed] Yiddish speakers in a way that reflects unconscious discomfort/disgust with Yiddish itself.” Like the question of whether or not to teach novice actors Yiddish, such displays can easily toe the line between appreciation and appropriation. 

Perhaps this is why terms like “Yiddish renaissance” have become such a thorn in the side of some Yiddishists.

“Nostalgia is a kind of story that American Jewry tells itself,” Jessica Kirzane, a professor at the University of Chicago and the editor-in-chief of the Yiddish studies journal In geveb [Yiddish for 'in web'; a reference to a collection of poetry by Yiddish writer Yehoyash], said at a YIVO talk last June. (The talk was appropriately titled, “Are We in the Midst of a Yiddish Renaissance?”) Every generation of Yiddish students and speakers tussles with this debate of the Yiddish revival, and “renaissance,” Kirzane said, becomes nothing more than a marketing term.

“Renaissance” also risks dismissing the ongoing, active work of Yiddish creators and their compatriots. Within the theatre field, projects like the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee document translations, digitize scripts and interviews, and review new Yiddish performances. The project, which functions as a living archive, hosts a database of Yiddish plays (including new ones), and scholars and critics alike can contribute work. The University of Haifa’s DYBBUK project has similar goals and hopes to soon launch its own database. The Royal Dramatic Theatre Stockholm staged Shane Baker’s Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot in 2021 with the Congress for Jewish Culture; it was first produced with New Yiddish Rep and Castillo Theatre in 2013. Across the country, Yiddish artists gather, read, collaborate, and draft and redraft bold new Yiddish works.

In many ways, the challenges facing Yiddish theatre are no different from those facing any emerging or under-resourced artist or arts organization: Yiddish artists must find a way to uplift their work and strive for further recognition without relying only on legacy institutions for validation, in much the same way that theatre artists of color and the avant-garde disrupt, for example, the Broadway/Off-Broadway dichotomy. The origins of Yiddish theatre in America can offer a blueprint for a way forward. Kafrissen noted that amateur Yiddish theatres popped up alongside professional ones in the U.S., and were more likely to be “playwright-friendly” rather than produce only audience favorites.

“The amateur-professional theatre tension within the history of Yiddish theatre was very productive and generative,” Kafrissen said. With more Yiddish artists working and more Yiddish theatre projects springing to life, perhaps this sense of friendly competition—with or without the zealous staged clapping of the turn of the century—can return.

Or if not, as it is said: Az me ken nit vi me vill, men vi me ken (If you can’t do as you wish, do as you can).

[Amelia Merrill (she/her) is an arts and culture journalist, critic, playwright, and dramaturg.  A contributing editor at American Theatre, her work has been featured in Mic, Hey Alma, Narratively, and more.

[Merrill’s remarks about Christmas trees in Jewish homes made me think of my own family.  We had Christmas trees in our homes, though, like many American Jewish families, they later came to be renamed Hanukkah bushes, half jokingly.  My parents first Christmas tree as newlyweds, however, had a somewhat significant part to play in my family history.

[On Christmas Eve afternoon, my soon-to-be mother was decorating the tree with the help of her mother, visiting from New York, when she went into labor—with me.  They called my father at his office and rushed off to the hospital, only to be told that it was a false alarm.  I was not making an appearance that day.

[I did, however, make my entrance the next day, Christmas afternoon at 2 p.m.  I was born at Georgetown University Hospital, a Catholic institution, and the nurse at the admitting desk, who was an Irish nun, said to my mother—according to Mom—“That’s a dirty Irish trick!”

[Later, when I was a somewhat older boy, we stopped celebrating Christmas—but we continued to mark the day as a family holiday.  It was my birthday.]

Black Wedding

From the New York Evening World of Monday, 4 November 1918, page 4 (no byline):

WEDDING IN CEMETERY.

Brave Couple Carry Out Ancient

Tradition to Beat Influenza

Now watch the “flu” follow Austria into the discards.

In Mount Hebron Cemetery [Flushing, Queens], Miss Rose Schwartz, No. 369 East Tenth Street, stood beside Abraham Lachterman, No. 638 East Eleventh Street, yesterday afternoon, and before than them stood Rabbi Unger, who performed a marriage ceremony.

The tradition upon which the couple acted is an ancient Jewish one which declares that the only way to stop a plague is to hold a wedding ceremony in a cemetery.

When Miss Schwartz and Lachterman consented to offer themselves to stop the influenza epidemic, the neighbors were so grateful that they provided food, taxicabs, a wedding gown and even the furnishings for a flat.  Two thousand persons cheered the courageous pair as they started for the cemetery.

This short newspaper report from over a hundred years ago was the impetus for a New York Times article called “A Century Ago, a Cemetery Wedding to End a Pandemic” by Steve Bell, which ran in the “Metropolitan” section of the Sunday edition on 14 June 2020. 

The ceremony’s called a “black wedding” (in Yiddish, shvartse chasene—with variations) and it’s supposed to stop a plague.  The one recounted in the article was the 1918 Spanish Flu, but other accounts are about cholera outbreaks.  

Okay, the whole story is bizarre, but the thing that stopped me was the date of the original Evening World report.  4 November 1918 was one day before my dad was born (5 November ’18)! 

Furthermore, Dad was born at home because it was deemed too dangerous for a pregnant woman to give birth in a hospital during the very pandemic for which the black wedding was intended as a remedy

The way the macabre story popped out at me made me curious, so I googled shvartse chasene and there are lots of posts (plus one painting and an album of klezmer music) on the ritual.  Some had some synchronicity with aspects of my life which intrigued me.

In addition to the newspaper report the Times used for its article having been dated the day before my dad was born, the New York Times article attributes the black wedding tradition to Jews from “Eastern Europe”—though I never heard of the practice and my dad’s family was from Eastern Europe.  His father came from the Ukraine in the late 1890s and his mother from Latvia in the early 1900s. 

(My mom’s family was Central European, from Austro-Hungary—mostly Austria—but that was many generations earlier.)

Then, one tale of a black wedding ceremony I found was a translation of a 1929 Yiddish story by an apparently well-known Yiddish novelist named Joseph Opatoshu.  That’s not a last name I’m likely to forget easily—and it turns out that Joseph Opatoshu (1886-1954) was the father of actor David Opatoshu (1918-96). 

(By the way—David Opatoshu’s life dates are the same as my father’s!)

David Opatoshu was in Exodus (1960; he played Akiva ben Canaan, the head of the Irgun, an underground Zionist paramilitary organization, and the uncle of Ari ben Canaan, the character played by Paul Newman) and guested on many, many TV shows, including two of my favorite series, the Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon” (1967) and Perry Mason’s ”The Case of the Feather Cloak” (1965).

The main reason I recognize David Opatoshu’s name, though, is that I wrote his biographical entry in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (1993). 

Later, I gathered up some sites for research.  I found another account of a black wedding from the papers of Mayer Kirshenblatt, another name that’s hard to forget.  It turns out that Mayer Kirshenblatt (1916-2009). a Polish-born Canadian painter and author, was the father of Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (even harder)—who just happens to have been the chair of the Department of Performance Studies when I was at New York University.

BKG (as we referred to her) was something of an anomaly at DPS.  Almost everyone on that faculty was either a theater scholar or a dance scholar—sort of Thalia and Melpomene versus Terpsichore.  Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (b. 1942) is neither; in fact, she isn’t even in a performance field.  She’s a folklorist, and the black wedding would be right in her wheelhouse.

I looked at the Google hits a little more carefully on my second search than I had when I was just browsing to see if there was any info.  I discovered that several posts about black weddings mention a town called Uman.  That’s the small city in the Ukraine were my paternal grandfather was born. 

It’s not a big city, and it doesn’t come up in the press or anything.  In fact, other than the times my dad mentioned it when he told me about his family and the couple of times I deliberately looked it up, I’ve only come across it once that I can recall.  It was a passing mention in some novel—by Leon Uris or James Michener or someone like that—as the birthplace of a character.  Now it pops up again.

I think something’s telling me I should write this post . . . .

The World article labels the black wedding an “ancient” ritual, but none of the stories and accounts go back very far.  I found one mention of black weddings at the end of the 18th century, but there were few details and I couldn’t really confirm it. 

If the practice was observed before that, say in ancient times or the Middle Ages, it’s not recorded in any source I could find on line.  (Physical library facilities aren’t available these days, so I can’t check older, printed sources.  But I have to believe that if there were reports of black weddings earlier than the 18th or 19th  century, someone would at least have mentioned it on the ’Net.)

I’ll be sticking with the English phrase ‘black wedding’ rather than any of the Yiddish names for the rite.  There are too many variations to keep up with that.  First of all, the Yiddish words have variant spellings in English: shvartze chassene and shvartse khasene, for two alternatives. 

Then some accounts call the ceremony mageyfe chasene, or ‘plague wedding’; others use cholere chasene for ‘cholera wedding’—though that has a more limited application, I’d imagine.  I presume there are other permutations as well.

As the 1918 World report suggests and the 2020 Times article states, a wedding ceremony between two of the community’s most unfortunate members performed in a cemetery was believed to be the only way to stop a plague.  Quoting another 1918 newspaper article, from Philadelphia’s Public Ledger, the Times added that “the attention of God would be called to the affliction of their fellows if the most humble man and woman among them should join in marriage in the presence of the dead.”

The bride and groom might be orphans, for example, as they were in an 1892 ritual in Poland.  The bride, in fact, was what the Jewish community labeled a “round orphan” because she had no living family.  Other than being orphaned, the couple might be poor or disabled or some combination of the three. 

Their misfortune was the hook to attract God’s sympathy and the dead surrounding the celebrants were seen as an enhancement of that attraction—sort of a sweetener, if you will.  The idea was that a marriage by the graveside would attract the attention of the dead, who would intercede with God on behalf of the living.  In addition, He would look down on the unfortunate bridal couple, two strangers marrying in a grim place, and take pity on them and halt the plague.

Sometimes the wedding pair didn’t even know each other—though in decades past, that was often just as true of ordinary betrothed couples whose marriages were arranged by parents and marriage brokers.  The townspeople would pay the expenses for the ceremony, donate the bride’s and groom’s wedding outfits, and supply the food served at the ceremony.  The people of the community pledged to support the couple after the marriage.

A local klezmer band played music after the ceremony and the attendees, pretty much the whole Jewish community—if the location was a shtetl (a town whose population was entirely or almost entirely Jewish), then the whole village—danced among the burial plots and headstones.

In some cases, apparently, the townsfolk even got the newlyweds a place to live and give them gifts of money at the wedding (also not uncommon at Jewish weddings of bygone days—or perhaps even now!).  At a black wedding in Philadelphia in 1918, the guests reportedly made gifts totaling $1000—the 2020 equivalent of almost $17,000.

It’s uncertain what the ceremony looked like.  It was certainly based on traditional Jewish marriage ceremonies as they were performed in the region.  There was a chuppah, the canopy that’s raised over the bride and groom on the synagogue’s bimah, or “stage.”  It symbolizes the home that the couple will build together.  It was set among the graves, sometimes right between two gravestones.

As least one or two accounts say that the bride’s wedding dress is black—the groom’s in black anyway—and the chuppah, which is traditionally made of white cloth, is also black.  The section about black weddings in Luboml: The Memorial Book of a Vanished Shtetl (composed c.1968) is entitled “The Black Chupa (The Black Wedding Canopy).”  A photo of a black wedding in Israel last March shows a black chuppah, though another shot shows the bride wearing a white gown. 

(The “memorial book” cited above is a phenomenon, which we’ll encounter again in this post, of the post-World War II era.  Yizkor is Hebrew for ‘remembrance: and the sefer yizkor, or memorial book, commemorates a Jewish community destroyed during the Holocaust.  The books are published by former residents as remembrances of homes, people, and ways of life lost during World War II.)

Mayer Kirshenblatt, The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892 (April 1996); '
acrylic on canvas, 36" x 48"

A contemporary painting of an 1892 wedding shows a bride in white and a blue chuppah (though it may be supposed to represent purple) in the background—but the artwork, The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892 (April 1996) by Mayer Kirshenblatt, is an artist’s imaginary rendering of the event.

Zoya Cherkassky, Black Chuppah (2020);

Ink and markers on paper, 12¼" x 9¼"

An article entitled “Zoya Cherkassky: Lost Time: Black Chuppah” by Alison M. Gingeras (b. 1973) shows a drawing by artist Cherkassky (b. 1976) of a wedding couple under a black canopy (as the title Black Chuppah, 2020, suggests) and the bride dressed all in black.  Of course, this is again a modern artist’s depiction of an imagined scene.

There’s obviously a strong element of magical thinking (positing a causal link between a thought and an action or event which seemingly cannot be justified by reason or observation) and superstitious appeasement (the belief in the influencing of a deity by sacrifice or other ritual) to the black wedding.  Furthermore, the black wedding doesn’t have one sole meaning.

Some rabbis, for example, feel it works because helping a needy couple or the marginal of the community who were unlikely to marry is a mitzvah, an act of kindness or a good deed,  That would please God who’d reward the townspeople for their kindness and solicitude by halting the plague. 

Others, however, were afraid that the ritual would only make things worse.  On 25 October 1918, for instance, The Jewish Exponent, a weekly community newspaper published in Philadelphia since 1887, called a black wedding in that city, “the most deplorable exhibition of benighted superstition” and lamented that “the publicity given to the occurrence will convey to many people the impression that this is a custom sanctioned and encouraged by the Jewish religion.”

The disagreement sounds to me like a somewhat lurid instance of the question Jews ask whenever something controversial or newsworthy involving a member of their faith arises: Is it good or bad for the Jews. 

The origins of the black wedding are entirely unknown, except that the ritual had been imported from Eastern Europe two to two-and-a-half centuries ago.  That’s hardly “ancient” as the Evening World report determined, and it wasn’t really a “tradition,” in the sense that it grew up over generations.  It was invented, probably by a rabbi, to meet the specific needs of a particular time and place, namely a cholera, typhus, or influenza outbreak in an East European town.

According to Aliyah Guttmann on the website Ketubah, the practice of black weddings may have arisen from a mash-up of Hasidic thought, Orthodox Christian celebrations, pagan rituals, and the many superstitions which were common all over Eastern Europe.

The earliest report of a black wedding that I found on the ’Net goes back to 1785.  The writer, Jeremy Brown, an emergency physician and Director of the Office of Emergency Care Research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who writes on science in the Talmud at Talmudology.com, cites some sources for his accounts, but I didn’t see any other reports except ones obviously derived from Brown’s.

In fact, all the reports of this ceremony I read are almost identical, not just with respect to the information revealed, but also the phraseology in which the reports are written.  That’s not really confirmation; it’s just repeating the same hearsay multiple times. 

In an article on The Lehrhaus website, Brown reports the 1785 black wedding was performed to address an outbreak of cholera, but I couldn’t determine in what town or region it occurred or who was involved.   The rite was attended by two of the most eminent masters of Hasidism: Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk (1717-87) and Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz (1745-1815; better known as the Seer of Lublin).  That’s essentially all we know; no other modern report tells any more, including what the ceremony looked like.

(Hasidism is a Jewish religious practice that arose in what is now Western Ukraine—then part of Poland—during the 18th century and spread across Eastern Europe.  Hasidism in general—there are many sects, usually named for the birthplace of the founder—is ultra-Orthodox, distinguished from other Haredi Jews by their distinctive garb, different for each sect, and its belief in Kabbalism, Jewish mysticism.  Most Hasidim today live in either Israel or the U.S.

(Rabbi Elimelech Weisblum was one of the founding Rebbes of the Hasidic movement; Lizhensk was his hometown in Poland.  Rabbi Horowitz, also from Poland, was a leading figure in the early Hasidic movement, he became known as a “seer” or “visionary” due to the belief by his followers that he was able to see supernaturally across great distances.)

Brown also reports that black weddings were celebrated for orphaned teenagers in Jerusalem and Tzfat  (also called Safed, the center of Kabbalism in Palestine) in 1865 to combat an infestation of locusts that destroyed the crops across Palestine (then part of the Ottoman Empire), causing hundreds of death.

Brown cites an “eyewitness account” reporting that in Tzfat

the leaders of that holy city took boys and girls who were orphans and married them off to each other. The huppot [alternative spelling for the wedding canopies] were in a cemetery between the graves of our teacher the Ari z”l [Rabbi Isaac Luria Ashkenazi (1534-72)] and the Beit Yosef [Rabbi Yosef Karo (1488-1575)].  For this was a tradition that they had, and thanks to God who removed this deathly outbreak from among them.” 

(The abbreviation z"l that follows Rabbi Luria’s common name is an honorific for the dead that stands for “of blessed memory” [Hebrew transliteration: zikhrono livrakha].  It’s used here for a rabbi, but it is equally applied to non-rabbinical figures.

(Luria, a leading rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Tzfat, was considered the father of contemporary Kabbalah.  Karo was the author of the last great codification of Jewish law, the Shulchan Aruch, which is still authoritative for all Jews.)

The Jerusalem ceremony was performed on the Mount of Olives, also called Mount Olivet, and “was attended by many, and was a very joyous occasion.”  In addition to its biblical significance, both Old and New Testaments, the Mount of Olives has been a Jewish cemetery for over 3,000 years.

Cholera was frequently breaking out all over Europe in the 19th century.  It’s a particularly terrifying disease, especially in an era when little was known of modern medicine, hygiene, and sanitation.  It’s transmitted through contaminated food and water; the principal contaminant being fecal matter infected with the cholera bacterium.

The disease is highly contagious, though it’s not usually passed from person to person.  An exposed person can go from infection to the onset of symptoms in as little as two hours.  I won’t go into the full range of symptoms—it’s a pretty disgusting illness—but the principal manifestation is watery diarrhea that can leave the victim fatally dehydrated.

It’s not hard to see why people who are ignorant of any scientific or technological means of preventing or modifying a potentially fatal disease with revolting symptoms, mysterious origin, and no real treatments would be afraid of such an epidemic.  And people in fear cope in many different ways,

Some turn to science and research to look for an effective cure or treatment, but others try to find answers in superstition and ritual.  In one town at the turn of the 20th century, where the outbreak was blamed on adultery and sexual transgressions, a self-appointed corps of health-guardians went on a killing spree aimed at the known adulterers in the community.  (And Hester Prynne only had to wear a scarlet A.)

In another cholera crisis, in 1866, rabbis in the town of Uman, the Ukraine, a city of 10,100 in 1860, of whom about 6,100 were Jews (ca. 61%), decided that the cause of the epidemic was Jewish women wearing crinolines and earrings.  (I suppose it was considered immodest, ostentatious, and sexually alluring, and thus displeasing to God.)

So the protectors of public health (and, I presume, morals) went on a rampage and attacked the crinoline-and-earring-wearing women, tearing off their undergarments and beating them.

(And this is the town in which my dad’s father was born some 24 years later.  No wonder his family left for the U.S. around 1896!  Of course, the pogroms had a lot to do with that decision, but aside from that . . . .)

Rokhl Kafrissen, a writer for Tablet, a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture, reported that the first evidence she found of a black wedding was one that took place during the Russian cholera outbreak of 1831.  Subsequently, there was reference to another one in 1849 in Crakow, Poland (now known in English as Krakow).

Other such ceremonies took place in Berdichev (about 140 miles northwest of Uman), then part of the Russian Empre (now in northern Ukraine and called Berdychiv) in 1866 and at Opatow, Poland (known as Apt in Yiddish), in 1892.

The 1892 black wedding in Apt is the one depicted in Mayer Kirshenblatt’s naïve painting The Black Wedding in the Cemetery, ca. 1892.  Kirshenblatt, who was untaught and only picked up a brush when he was 73, based his art on memories of his Polish homeland—he emigrated to Canada in 1934—before World War II. 

The scene of the wedding in Apt, where Kirshenblatt was born, was obviously painted not from a childhood memory—the artist wasn’t even born when the marriage took place—but from stories told by his elders, part of what Alison M. Gingeras called the “oral history” of Apt.  The artist recounted the story in They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood before the Holocaust (2007), a book he and his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, published together.

The memorial book [sefer yizkor] for Apt recounts how a holy rabbi helped the town during a cholera epidemic in 1892.  Every few days someone died.  In a community of about six thousand, that was a calamity.  Prominent citizens went to the holy rabbi, imploring him to say a few prayers to the Almighty.  Maybe the epidemic would subside.  The rabbi thoughtfully replied, “Let’s try a wedding on the Jewish cemetery.  Perhaps the dearly departed will intervene with the Holy One to help.”  It is considered a great mitsve, or good deed, to help the poor to marry.  All that was needed was a bride and groom.

The matchmakers got busy.  In town there was a young bachelor who was supported by the community.  His job was to clean the communal bath.  Each week he drained the water and replaced it with a fresh supply.  He also kept the fire going in the mikve, the ritual bath, so that the water would always be hot.  He lived in the hegdesh, a room where the burial society kept the implements for cleaning the dead for burial.  Itinerant beggars also slept there.  On being approached, the young man gladly accepted.

Now a bride was needed.  There was in town a young lady, an orphan.  In Yiddish, it is enough to have lost one parent to be an orphan.  This woman had lost both parents.  She was what is called a kaylakhdike yesoyme, a round orphan, because she had absolutely no relatives.  In exchange for a place to sleep on top of the oven, her daily bread, and a few cast-off clothes, she did the housework for a well-to-do family.  She received no wages.  On being approached she also gladly agreed.

A proclamation was issued in the synagogue, the houses of study, and the Jewish schools that a black wedding, a shvartse khasene, would be held on the cemetery at a designated time.  Everyone was to attend.  On the appointed day, the whole town, including people from the surrounding villages, streamed into the cemetery.  They gathered near the oyl, the little building housing the graves of holy rabbis.  The sexton brought a wedding canopy.  The bride wore a donated wedding dress.  The rabbi conducted the ceremony.  Many people shed a tear on this solemn occasion.

The community donated gifts and food.  A table was set up with a small barrel of vodka, glasses, and large joints of roasted mutton.  Everyone wished each other a long life.  When the assembly was already a little tipsy, Yankl Krokowski, the badkhn  or master of ceremonies, stood on a stool and announced that the time had come to call out the wedding gifts.  Seeing as this poor couple had no home, the appeal went out for cash donations.  Everyone reached into their pockets and in a short time the iron pot was full of money.  When it became too heavy to hold, Yankl set the pot down on the table.  He regaled the company with jokes and songs.  The band struck up a lively tune, and everyone, men, women, and children, danced.  Reb Zvi Hirsh, who officiated at the wedding, stepped into the large circle of dancers.  Small in stature, head held high, his eyes looking toward the sky, his beard and sidelocks [payess] flying, Reb Zvi Hirsh began to dance.  He invited the newlyweds to join him in the obligatory mitsve tants.  The merriment continued late into the night.  Sure enough the epidemic subsided in a few days.

(The honorific ‘Reb’ is used to designate someone in an Orthodox or Hasidic community who is revered and honored for his wisdom and learning.  In the case of Reb Hirsh above, he was also a rabbi, the spiritual leader of a community or congregation.  The word’s short tor Rebbe, which is the title used to designate the leader of a Hasidic sect.

.

(The mitsve tants, or ‘mitsve [mitzvah] dance,’ is a custom at Hasidic weddings.  It literally means ‘commandment dance,’ referring to the commandments demanded of a Jew in Jewish law, but since the dance isn’t actually commanded by the law, it’s closer to ‘customary dance.’  Indeed, in Orthodox and Hasidic communities, in which men and women are kept separate in public, dancing involving men and women together is a violation of religious custom.

(In the mitsve tants, usually done at the wedding when the guests have all departed and only the close families of the bride and groom are left, the barriers dividing the genders are all removed, or the bride is brought into the men’s section.  The men, including the groom, the bride’s father, the groom’s father, and the Rebbe, each dance individually in front of the bride—who doesn’t actually dance; in fact, she doesn’t even move.  It’s an energetic and joyous dance, intended to express great happiness and joyousness.)

In 1918, just weeks before the Mount Hebron ceremony in Queens, New York, Harry Rosenberg and Fanny Jacobs got married in a graveyard near Cobb’s Creek in Philadelphia on 20 October.  The pair, both poor, were strangers but they wanted to help save their community from the Spanish influenza pandemic.  The ceremony was celebrated before an audience of 1,200 immigrant Russian Jews. 

Unhappily, according to Kaushik Patowary on the website Amusing Planet, “genealogical research suggested that neither Harry nor Fanny survived the Spanish flu, perishing along with 50 million others.”

Three weeks later, on 11 November, a similar ritual was performed in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Canada.  The Winnipeg Evening Tribune, the local newspaper, reported that the sumptuous ceremony had been planned for over a month.  

The Tribune reported: “At one end of the cemetery a quorum [minyan] of ten Jews conducted a funeral.  At the other, 1,000 Gentiles and Jews witnessed the wedding. . . [.]  Harry Fleckman and Dora Wisman were contracting parties at the wedding. Rabbis Khanovitch and Gorodsy officiated.”

Even in our modern times, the start of the third decade of the 21st century, the trend continues.  On 18 March, in the face of a latter-day plague, the COVID-19 pandemic, an orphan couple wed in a cemetery in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak, in the center of the country’s Mediterranean coast, just east of Tel Aviv..  Bnei Brak, a city of nearly 200,000, is one of Israel’s poorest and most densely populated.  It became a hotspot for coronavirus infection.

It’s also a center of Haredi Judaism (ultra-Orthodoxy). 

The website Kikar reported that the chuppah, which photos show was black, was set up inside the cemetery.  The ceremony was recorded and the video posted online (https://youtu.be/okAHpZkrHc0) and showed Haredi men surrounding the chuppah, chanting and standing amidst the graves among which the couple was posed.

This is the canopy of the Roth and Berber families, where the bridegroom is an orphan from a father, and the canopy was held near the tombs of the rabbis buried there. The canopy was held in the cemetery, as a purple against epidemics.

(In Judaism, a person can become an orphan with the loss of one parent.)

Almost nothing is known about the outcomes of these marriages.  No one recorded if they were successful and happy or disastrous.  Apparently some ended in suicide, such as a 1905 ceremony in Jerusalem a week after which the groom was reported to have killed himself.  There’s no telling, however, if the causes were the essentially forced marriages. 

At the end of Joseph Opatoshu’s short story, “A Wedding in the Cemetery,” he describes the moment just before the vows are taken.  The groom is “the hunchback Shloyme—a freeloader” and the bride is “the schoolteacher’s daughter Brokhe, a young woman who was disabled.”

The wedding canopy had been set up at the tomb.  The tall, gangly groom, wearing a high fur hat, covered his eyes with his hand.  Under his black silk caftan he wore a white ceremonial robe with wide sleeves.  The rabbi, the Hasidic leader, and the members of the rabbinical court stood around, impatiently asking again and again, “Where is the bride?”

The bride, dressed in white and covered with a veil, approached from a distance.  The limping beggarwoman danced in front of her, carrying a loaf of challah in both hands.  Every once in a while she stopped and blurted out, through thick, fleshy lips, “From me, to you!”

Accompanied by a soft melody, the bride was led with dancing steps under the canopy.  She looked about and grew terrified.  She raised her withered hand and looked as if she were about to flee, then stopped, and exclaimed in a thin voice, “Our neighbor won’t be able to stand it!  She’s so jealous, she was always teasing me that I’ll never get married.”

The people who had led her to the canopy tried to calm her: “Hush, hush, Brokhe, a bride mustn’t speak now.”

Brokhe tore the groom’s hand away from his face and stared at him, the way a child stares at a new doll, and then she turned away.  “But that’s Shloyme—that good-for-nothing Shloyme is my groom?  No, no, no!” Her voice became a thin, sharp cry, rising over the thousands of bowed heads, reaching up to the blazing sky.

[I’d have loved to post the whole of Opatoshu’s story in this article—it’s certainly perfect content—but even as short as it is, it’d make the post much too long for the blog.  You can read it, however, at, among other sites, Jewish Currents (https://jewishcurrents.org/a-wedding-in-the-cemetery/).

[In addition to the short story and Kirshenblatt’s painting (on the Museum of Family History website at http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/ce/kirshenblatt/kirshenblatt-black-wedding.htm), readers can find Zoya Cherkassky’s Black Chuppah on Fort Gansevoort (http://www.fortgansevoort.com/zoya-cherkassky-black-chuppah).

[There are several other peculiarities I came across while doing my reading and research.  There’s a record album of klezmer music C Minor: Di Shvartse Khasene by the Khevrisa klezmer ensemble on Smithsonian Folkways (https://folkways.si.edu/khevrisa/c-minor-di-shvartse-khasene/american-folk-judaica/music/track/smithsonian) which is also available for listening on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5DAJ2Ybe-g).

[For those who aren’t familiar with it, klezmer music is a folk tradition of the Jews of Eastern Europe.  It flourished largely in the late 19th century and the early 20th—though it’s actual origins are uncertain. The genre originally consisted largely of dance tunes and instrumental display pieces for weddings and other celebrations.  Typical instruments are violin, cimbalom, clarinet, accordion, trombone, trumpet, piano, double bass, cello, and flute.

[There are several Russian films that have scenes of black weddings, but rather than list them all, I refer interested readers to “Polish Shtetl Through The Soviet Eyes: Mikhail Dubson’ Border (Old Dudino)” by Anatoliy Klots, a PDF on the ’Net that discusses these movies (https://jsis.washington.edu/ellisoncenter/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2017/05/Klots_Anatoliy_Polish-Shtetl-Through-The-Soviet-Eyes.pdf).

[Finally, what strikes me as the oddest of black wedding material, a children’s book called The Wedding That Saved a Town (Kar-Ben Publishing, 2008; 32 pages) by Yale Strom and illustrated by Jenya Prosmitsky.  I can’t really imagine using the black wedding ceremony as the basis for a child’s story book, but there it is. 

[If you’re curious, a website with a review and other information, including online purchasing, is Jewish Book Council (https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/the-wedding-that-saved-a-town).  It’s also available for purchase through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, where it’s also sold as an e-book.]

National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene, Part 2

YIDDISH THEATER

[In Part 2 of “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” I pick up with the development of Yiddish drama and theater, first in Eastern Europe, then in New York City. In the final section, I’ll trace the history and, so far as we can predict, the future of the last producing Yiddish theater troupe in New York, the Folksbiene. As much as the language itself fascinates me, the existence of a Yiddish theater astonishes me. It is, as I’ve stated, what I believe to be an entirely unique achievement in human cultural history.

[At the end of Part 2, after I reiterate some the definitions of some of the Yiddish words that have cropped up in the article, I name a few useful sources and resources for anyone who is curious enough to look further into this art form.]
Jewish drama in Europe began in the Middle Ages with performances of the traditional Purim play (Purimspiel), the Biblical story of Esther, Mordechai, Ahasuerus, and Haman by amateurs going from house to house. By the 16th century, these itinerant performances, which included references to contemporary matters as well as improvisations, songs, and dances, were performed in Yiddish. I’m giving short shrift to the prehistory of Jewish theater, but suffice it to say that during their sojourn in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, the Jews of the Diaspora came into contact with the theatrical entertainments of their host countries from the Middle Ages on. During the 18th-century Haskala, intellectuals wrote plays that extolled their beliefs, but popular plays, ones that entertained and probed, began to appear in the late 19th century. By the 19th century, the new Jewish theater, following the tradition of the serious European art theater in its dramatic writing and content, was equally famous for its music. (There was a parallel development in Eastern Europe of Jewish minstrelsy that grew out of the impromptu singing and dancing performed at weddings. At a certain point, the two traditions met.) Offerings ranged from revues to operettas to musical comedies, melodramas to naturalist dramas to expressionist and modernist plays.

Abraham Goldfaden (1840-1908), a Ukrainian journalist, teacher, and poet (whose poems had already been set to music and become popular songs), is credited with staging the first Yiddish play, a presentation of one of his own musical scripts at a Romanian tavern in Iasi in 1876. The location isn’t entirely coincidental as some of the foundational influences for Jewish drama happened in Romania in the Middle Ages: while Jews elsewhere in Europe had been barred from attending the Christian religious performances, such as the Passion Plays and the miracle, mystery, and morality plays that were the origins of post-Roman European theater, the Romanian Orthodox Church wasn’t so restrictive and Romanian Jews saw these seminal performances. In any case, the Iasi presentation was successful and Goldfaden, known as the father of Yiddish theater, soon established the first professional Yiddish theater troupe there, though he later moved his base to Bucharest. Decades later, Bucharest is one of the three remaining centers of Yiddish theater, with Tel Aviv and New York.

The Jews of Europe being among the most literate people—out of necessity, many spoke three or four tongues—and Yiddish having been established as a literary language, this new art form was immediately appealing. A few Jews were familiar with the theater of their home cultures, but for most, literary pursuit meant books and prose. Within a few years of Goldfaden’s success in Romania, however, the idea of Jewish theater spread abroad. Goldfaden himself was urged to come to other cities like Warsaw and Vilnius to start Yiddish theaters and his Romanian company toured frequently, playing taverns and cafés across Eastern and Central Europe. Since the Ashkenazim shared common experiences despite their different countries of residence, the new Yiddish plays traveled easily and the successful playwrights immediately gained international followings. This spurred more Yiddish theaters to open and Goldfaden’s scripts were also published, spreading the idea of Yiddish plays and playwriting even further. Almost immediately, other Yiddish theaters popped up all over the Ashkenazi diaspora, prompting a simultaneous burgeoning of Yiddish playwriting to fill the little stages from Moscow to Berlin and beyond, stretching all the way to Vienna, Paris, London, and finally New York.

Joining a tide of Yiddish-speaking Jews fleeing the wave of anti-Semitic pogroms that followed the assassination in Russia of Czar Alexander II in 1881, Abraham Goldfaden emigrated to America. (In 1883, the government of Czar Alexander III banned Yiddish theater. The ban was lifted in 1904.) By 1887, two established companies from Eastern Europe had already crossed the Atlantic to set up in New York City—comedian Sigmund Mogulesko (1848-1914), from Moldavia via Romania, and his dramatic co-star, David Kessler (1860-1920), also Moldavian, were playing on the Bowery at the Rumania Opera House and a smaller troupe was working out of the Oriental Theatre. Goldfaden attempted to put his work on in New York in 1887, but the success he had in Europe eluded him here. His last play, however, Ben Ami (1907), opening five days before his death, was well-regarded in a production directed by Boris Thomashefsky, the première actor-director of the Jewish Broadway, Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many other playwrights arose, a number of them following Goldfaden to the United States and New York City, fast becoming the world capital of the Yiddish stage.

In 1880, there were 240,000 Jews in the United States, 60,000 of them in New York City. New York already had the largest concentration of Jews in the world, all from different countries with different languages. Between 1880 and 1910, the Golden Age of Yiddish theater, one-third of all the Jews in Eastern Europe had emigrated, 90% of them to the U.S. They were a ready-made audience for the migrating Yiddish theaters expelled from Eastern Europe. Much of the early stage fare were translated, often bowdlerized versions of European plays—but they offered astonishing talent, with the likes of Boris Thomashefsky (1868-1939), who arrived in New York from Russia in 1881 as a 12-year-old, and his wife, Bessie (1874-1962); and Jacob Adler (1855-1926), two of whose children, Stella (1901-92) and Luther (1903-84), became both famous and influential on the English-speaking stage and in Hollywood. (Stella Adler, a founding member of the Group Theatre, became one of America’s most respected acting teachers and one of the world’s most important interpreters of the Stanislavsky system of acting.) In 1899, the United States’ first actors’ union was formed by the Yiddish performers; the Hebrew Actors Union fought for actors’ rights 14 years before the Actors’ Equity Association was founded. 

Audiences began to include non-Yiddish-speakers and by 1900, there were three professional Yiddish theater troupes on New York City’s Lower East Side, charging from 25 cents for the gallery to a dollar for orchestra seats. In 1918, there were as many as 20 companies in the city, presenting over a thousand performances which brought in two million spectators from across the entire spectrum of Jewish society. The strip of 15 Yiddish theaters along Second Avenue between about 6th and 14th Streets was dubbed “The Yiddish Rialto” and New York’s Yiddish theater became a significant cultural establishment not just for the Jewish population, but the entire city. (Indeed, it benefited the entire country eventually. Vaudeville in the ’30s and ’40s and TV comedy of the ’50s inherited the talent that had been honed by New York’s Yiddish stages. Broadway and Hollywood did well from Second Avenue as well, with stars like the Adlers and Muni Weisenfreund—better known as Paul Muni.)

The young Thomashefsky, still only a child himself, orchestrated the emigration of two Romanian brothers with theatrical backgrounds and when they arrived in 1882 with four other actors, the boy, who’d never seen a play himself, persuaded a neighborhood tavern-owner to hire a hall and produce a play, Goldfaden’s Koldunye (The Witch, 1877). It was such a success, despite stiff opposition from upper-class German Jews who looked upon Yiddish theater as undignified, that Thomashefsky’s credited with staging the first Yiddish theatrical performance in New York. No older than 13, Thomashefsky became the first impresario of New York’s Yiddish theater. He took the new company on tours to Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Baltimore; Pittsburgh; Boston; and Chicago, playing before enthusiastic audiences of working-class Jews. Besides original plays by Goldfaden and others, Thomashefsky’s troupe, one of the most celebrated of the many then playing in New York City and touring the country, also presented Yiddish adaptations of such works as Hamlet (called The Yeshiva Student), Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Faust, and Oscar Wilde’s Salome, starring a hugely successful Bessie Thomashefsky in the title role. (Many of the adaptations, like King Lear or Hedda Gabler, were given haimishe—‘homely’ in the sense of ‘warm,’ but here connoting ‘happy’—endings.) Still, while the English-speaking audiences uptown were seeing lightweight comedies or melodramas like Alias Jimmy Valentine or The Heart of Maryland, the Jews on the Lower East Side were seeing the work of modern European writers such as Shaw, Strindberg, Ibsen, and Gorki, along with the new Yiddish works of Ansky, Asch, Aleichem, Pinski, and others.

Though adaptations of European classics dominated the fare on the Yiddish stage, a practice often disparaged by the Jewish intellectual class, that began to change drastically around 1890, the start of the Golden Age of Yiddish theater. Jacob Gordin (1853-1909) took his lead from the best Russian theater, including the Moscow Art Theater of Konstantin Stanislavsky which was already reforming the theater of the western world. His début play for the New York theater, Siberia (1891), incorporating some of the style of secular Yiddish literature, was the first realistic play about Jewish life of the day (though by today’s standards, it was full of melodramatic plot elements). His Yiddish King Lear (Der Yidisher Kenig Lir, 1892) wasn’t a translation of Shakespeare but an original play inspired by the Elizabethan classic. Gordin’s central character is Dovid Moishele, a wealthy Jewish merchant in 19th-century Russia, the family patriarch and a most familiar figure to the East European theatergoers.

Though Gordin’s plays demanded sincerity on stage and attention from their audiences, he wasn’t above incorporating comic and musical elements to appeal to the spectators. The plays, both Gordin’s and those of other popular Yiddish dramatists, were most often about family life and problems—one popular theme was the generational conflict between American-born children and their old-country parents—with characters that resembled the playgoers and their neighbors, and situations they saw around them. Topical events also found expression on the Yiddish stage: the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the sinking of the Titanic were both subjects of downtown dramas. Some of the plays were serious art and others were shund, trash, but the theater quickly became the cultural core of the Ashkenazim’s life in America. Playwright Isaiah Sheffer (b. 1935), a child actor on the Yiddish stage who eventually became artistic director of Symphony Space, explained that he went to Yiddish theater “for great depth of feeling, a richness of feeling. The idea of fullness, richness and overflowing table.” The great director Harold Clurman (1901-80), describing his own response to the output of Second Avenue, said that “it really satisfied and responded to the needs and the feelings and sentiments and the hopes of the people. It was not an entertainment or a pastime. It was a necessity.” Broadway actors came downtown to have a look and the New York press began to take serious note of this rival to Broadway as the English-language papers began running reviews of Yiddish performances around 1900.

The Yiddish Rialto also had its own culture, much like Broadway’s uptown. There was even a “Sardi’s of Second Avenue”—the Cafe Royale on East 12th Street—where fans and artists hung out after performances and between gigs. (The famous coffee shop was fictionalized in the 1942 play—revived on Broadway in 1989—and 1964 musical Cafe Crown.) The world of Yiddish theater was a separate universe, possibly an escape from the drudgery of daily life or the reality of the bleak world the immigrants had so recently left behind. In fact, more than Broadway, the Yiddish theater resembled the world of Kabuki, in which the actors’ children went into the family business as soon as they could manage to cross the stage. Lulla Rosenfeld, the late granddaughter of Jacob Adler and his colleague and friend Abba Schoengold (her parents were Adler’s daughter Frances and Schoengold’s son, Joseph), recounted that her sister Pearlie “made her debut at the age of 2, and created an uproar when, forgetting her role, she addressed Jacob Adler as ‘Zayde’ (Grandpa) . . . .” (The error brought laughter and “a rain of coins” from the audience.) The few Yiddish artists who married outside the profession introduced the spouses to the theater immediately and soon found an excuse to get them on stage. At the other end of history, sadly, is the burial ground, Block 67 at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens, maintained by the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance (a branch of the HAU) exclusively for artsts and stage hands of the Yiddish theater.

The theater managers engaged in publicity wars with one another over their stars on posters and handbills and in the press, and insults to rival actors at another theater were inserted into scripts. Devoted fans, called patrioten, truly adored their stage stars; many were fans of particular actors and would even yell advice from their seats at critical moments (much the way Japanese patrons of Kabuki might shout out encouragement or criticism at performers). Just as in a Kabuki-za, spectators ate and drank, exchanged loud remarks, and shamelessly cheered and booed the performers. Patrioten rabidly defended their favorite’s turf to all boosters of anyone else, even resorting to tossing a rival patriot out of the auditorium. Once a well-known patriot of actor David Kessler, Jacob Adler’s chief rival famous for his histrionics, turned coat and began supporting Adler, known for his dignity and reserve on stage. This was such an upheaval in the sphere of Yiddish theater, it got full-page coverage in the Jewish press.

Not only were productions quickly sold out, even among the working-class immigrants for whom the 25-cent ticket price was a small fortune, but the stars’ off-stage luster helped raise up their fans and the whole Jewish community. As I noted, many of the later stars—the Marx Brothers, Molly Picon, Paul Muni, Fyvush Finkel; even Leonard Nimoy and Tovah Feldshuh had a taste of the Yiddish stage in their youths—moved on to stardom on Broadway or Hollywood, but the star that shone brightest on Second Avenue was Jacob Adler, an émigré from Latvia via London in 1889. His performances in such Yiddish classics as The Yiddish King Lear moved audiences beyond control. It’s reported that one spectator ran toward the stage bellowing:

To hell with your stingy daughter, Yankel! She has a stone, not a heart. Spit on her, Yankel, and come home with me. My yidene will feed you. Come Yankel, may she choke, that rotten daughter of yours.

(“Yankel” is the common nickname for Jacob, Yakov in Yiddish. Yidene is a derogatory term for a Jewish woman, somewhat more insulting than “old lady.”) In 1901, Adler performed the role of Shylock in a Yiddish translation of The Merchant of Venice at the People’s Theatre on the Bowery. So successful was his portrayal of “The Jew of Venice” as a man driven not by revenge but pride, motivated, in the words of the New York Times review, to vindicate “Israel against the despiteful usage of the Christian merchant and his friends,” that he was invited to repeat the performance on Broadway and in May 1903, Adler appeared at the American Theatre on West 42nd Street in a production where he spoke in Yiddish and the other actors responded in English. When Adler, who had been nicknamed Nesher Hagodl, Hebrew for “The Great Eagle” (Adler is German and Yiddish for ‘eagle’), died in 1926, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers gathered to view his body as it lay in state for two days at the HAU.

But the New York Yiddish theater also presented the particular world of the American Jew, expressing pride in both the people’s Jewishness and their Americanness. Patriotism for their new land, keenly felt because of the freedoms they found (despite what we would recognize as casual and societal anti-Semitism and general xenophobia—far less than the new Jewish Americans had left behind in Europe) and the opportunities they had to express themselves artistically and intellectually, was expressed in plays like Boris Thomashefsky’s Der Yidisher Yenki Dudl (1905). The United States’ entrance into World War I in 1917 found the Stars and Stripes adorning every Lower East Side stage as Yiddish stars sold thousands of dollars of Liberty Bonds and raised large sums for the Red Cross. They could look with pride at fellow immigrant Irving Berlin (1888-1989), whom George M. Cohan had dubbed “the Yidishe Yankee Doodle,” and his raft of popular—and often patriotic—American songs and Broadway scores.

At its height of popularity, up to about the Second World War, Yiddish theater spawned as many as 200 troupes in New York City and around the U.S. Today, the only producing Yiddish company in New York City is the Folksbiene, founded in 1915 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There were over a dozen companies in New York City when the Folksbiene Yiddish Theatre formed, an arm of the Workmen's Circle/Arbeter Ring, a socialist-oriented labor organization founded in 1900. (Another company, the Yiddish National Theatre, was affiliated with a different labor organization, the now-defunct Hebrew Actors Union.) Remember that the large majority of Yiddish-speaking immigrants were working-class people laboring for wages and their culture reflected that. It’s this association to which I was referring when I suggested earlier that there’d been a practical effect of Yiddish literature’s leftist proclivity.

After the genocide of World War II destroyed most of the European Yiddish-speaking community, the pool of both writers and performers, as well as spectators, who spoke Yiddish diminished. (In 1921’s Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924, Congress had imposed restrictions on immigration from Eastern Europe.) American Jews had meanwhile become so assimilated that they preferred the English-language theater (as was true of most ethnic groups who arrived in the mass immigration of the turn of the century) and many of the stars of the Yiddish theater transferred to the English-speaking stage and Hollywood. In 1959, two of the most prominent Yiddish theater buildings on Second Avenue were demolished (initially for parking lots); in 1985, the last Yiddish play was produced on Second Avenue; in 1996, the same year the Hebew Actors Union went out of business, the Yiddish Rialto’s last theater was torn down.

Like many of the small theaters in New York City and around the country, Folksbiene, thought to be New York City’s longest continuously-producing theater troupe of any kind, began as an amateur company. It soon became a semi-professional outfit, first hiring renowned directors like Joseph Buloff (1899-1985) and Jacob Ben-Ami (1890-1972), followed by professional actors. Its earliest commitment was to present plays of literary worth, including Yiddish versions of classics from other cultures, though it now produces more popular fare to attract a wider audience. Folksbiene—the name, as I explained in my introduction, is Yiddish for “the people’s stage”—became an independent, not-for-profit theater in 1998, hiring a professional staff (currently about 10 personnel) and acting company. It embarked on a program of modernization in an effort to expand its audience. Having renamed itself the National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene in 2006, its modern mission, as stated on the company’s own website, is “to preserve, promote and develop Yiddish theatre for current and future generations.” Toward this end, along with the more liberal repertory, Folksbiene has also added supertitles in English and Russian for theatergoers who don’t understand Yiddish. Formerly housed in a midtown synagogue on the East Side, the company has been nomadic for several seasons now but has raised around $2 million towards building its own permanent performance space. The troupe, one of just five professional Yiddish theaters in the world still operating, currently presents one main play a year during the winter (though it also has other programs).

Folksbiene says that these efforts have increased their audiences threefold. In 2007, the theater won the Drama Desk Special Award “for preserving for 92 consecutive seasons the cultural legacy of Yiddish-speaking theatre in America”; its 2006 mounting of Di Yam Gazlonim, a Yiddish adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical. Though the troupe’s original focus was on preserving and memorializing the traditional Yiddish theater culture, both the popular work and the classical plays, it has turned in recent years to original work that continues the tradition in modern ways. In 2011, for example, Folksbiene presented a co-production with Theater for a New Audience of a new klezmer musical, Robert Brustein’s Shlemiel the First, an English-language adaptation of a story by Isaac Beshevis Singer. Folksbiene artistic director Zalmen Mlotek, a Yiddish music specialist and conductor, explained: “We’re encouraging young artists to use the Yiddish culture and reinterpret it for the widest possible audience.” Its outreach efforts include bringing Yiddish shows to communities outside of New York City and offering free performances at colleges. Folksbiene has also expanded its offerings beyond theater to include concerts, literary programs, and children’s performances (Kids & Yiddish) in an effort to redirect its emphasis to the whole of Yiddish culture.
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Coming up on its 100th anniversary, Folksbiene has announced plans for an international Jewish arts festival in 2015. Kulturfest: The First Chana Mlotek International Festival of Jewish Performing Arts will include performances and workshops exploring Jewish identity through the arts. (Chana Mlotek, the mother of Folksbiene’s Zalmen Mlotek, is the music archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.) The company anticipates a week of celebration featuring 100 concerts, film screenings, and theater events, though fundraising isn’t complete yet. One question the plans raise, however, is embedded in the festival’s proposed name. As Jewish novelist Thane Rosenbaum, who writes frequently about Jewish culture, phrased it: “Is there is a distinctly Jewish art today, and what is its connection to Yiddish?”

The concepts of “Jewish” and “Yiddish” aren’t identical, though they clearly overlap. If nothing else, of course, “Jewish culture” must include not just Ashkenazi and Sephardi arts, but the creative work of Mizrahim (the Jews from Muslim-majority lands of the Middle East) and even the Falashas (the Jewish sect that arose in Ethiopia), among the many Jewish sects and communities around the world whose language isn’t Yiddish. (There are, for instance, centuries-old, indigenous Jewish societies in India and China.) “Jewish” theater, for instance, can be written in any language—there’s a lot of it in English, for example—and be creatively based in any nation, even as the Yiddish theater can be. But shouldn’t “Yiddish” theater be written exclusively in Yiddish? Traditionally, it also depicts the Ashkenazi world, either of the past or the present, though there’s no reason it must. As Rosenbaum put the query: “Is this really about world Jewish culture?” or “Is this just homage to Yiddish culture?” Does the use of Yiddish automatically make something Jewish? Shane Baker, executive director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, declared, “I’m a gentile fluent in Yiddish, and I play in Yiddish theater” and suggested, “I imagine one of the things they’ll be looking at is what is Jewish culture.” (It’s provocative to note that the official announcement of the Kulturfest plans came at a gala Town Hall concert in honor of, among others, pop singer Neil Sedaka, a Sephardic Jew—raised, curiously enough, in an Ashkenazi-influenced home).

Another provocative question, pertinent more today in this time of assimilation and homogenization, is raised by Theodore Bikel, the actor and folksinger: “Is someone a Jewish artist or a Jew who happens to create music or books?” Was Death of a Salesman a Jewish play (Willy “Lohmann”?) because Arthur Miller was a Jew? Is Barefoot in the Park a Jewish comedy because Neil Simon’s Jewish? West Side Story was famously written and staged by five Jews. It’s hardly a Jewish play, I wouldn’t say. (All five artists were also gay. Is West Side Story a gay musical?) On the other hand, Fiddler on the Roof is surely a Jewish play and story—albeit with universal themes and appeal. But when it opened in Tokyo, Japanese theatergoers and critics reportedly declared, “It’s so Japanese”! (A recent Broadway revival of Fiddler was mounted with no Jews among the principle artists engaged in the staging. It was humorously dubbed “Goyim on the Roof” and, coincidently or not, roundly criticized for its lack of personality and verve. Goy is the slightly derogatory—“condescending” is perhaps a kinder adjective, remembering that Yiddish words never have a single translation—Yiddish term for ‘gentile.’)

Is there even still a “Yiddish culture”? Thane Rosenbaum reminds us, “It is still a dying language,” spoken in fewer and fewer households, especially outside the Hasidic world. Rosenbaum also asks, “Are there original plays being written in Yiddish?” The theatrical section of the Mount Hebron Cemetery is steadily filling up as the practitioners of Yiddish theater dwindles. Could there possibly be a resurgence? Does it matter? Is the long and stunning history enough to justify the celebration or even the existence of an organization like Folksbiene? As I admitted, Yiddish and the Yiddish theater have intrigued me most of my adult life—yet I never learned the language. Are most Jews like me? Is the Folksbiene fighting a losing battle, sticking a finger in a dyke that's going to burst anyway? Are we getting ready to say, as one Mount Hebron epithaph reads, “The play is done, the curtain drops slow, falling to the prompter’s bell.” Sentimentally, I hope not. Realistically? “God alone knows,” as Hodel, Tevye’s daughter, says in Fiddler.

[I’ve tried to make clear what I’ve meant by the Yiddish words and phrases I salted through “The National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” either by defining them specifically or carefully situating them in context. Still, just to be safe, let me go over some of them again, in the order in which they appear above. Bear in mind that a) English spellings will vary and b) no Yiddish word has a simple, one-dimensional meaning.

[Folksbiene, the company’s name, means ‘people’s stage.’ Mame-loshen refers to the Yiddish language, the ‘mother tongue.’ A mavin is an ‘expert,’ a ‘knowledgeable person.’ Haimishe means ‘humble,’ ‘homey,’ ‘comfortable.’ Yidishe (note the single d) is the Yiddish word for both ‘Yiddish’ and ‘Jewish’; only the context reveals the proper sense. (Yid is the word for ‘Jew,’ though it’s usually an offensive name if pronounced with a short i as in ‘kid,’ the way anti-Semites say it; if pronounced in Yiddish, “yeed,” it’s neutral.) Shund means ‘trash’ or ‘rubbish.’ A zayde is a ‘grandfather,’ though it can be used as a term of endearment for any old man. Patrioten (plural of patriot) means ‘fans’ as in ‘devotees’ and shouldn’t be confused with the English cognate it looks like. Yidene is an ‘old woman’ and is always a put-down in the sense that “my yidene” would be the equivalent of a man calling his wife “my old lady.” Klezmer music is traditional Ashkenazi folk music and hymns played by itinerant groups of three to six musicians playing trumpets, bugles, flutes, clarinets, fifes, violins, cellos, or drums. (The name comes from the Hebrew for ‘musical instrument.’) Originally, the players were untrained and the groups informal, though today the musicians are trained and the music is notated. Goy (pl.: goyim) is the way Jews refer to a ‘gentile’ or a ‘non-Jew’ and it can carry a condescending, even insulting connotation, depending on whether it’s spoken with a sneer or a smile.

[There are lots of books and articles about the three main topics I’ve covered in “The National Yiddish Theatre”—the Yiddish language, Yiddish literature, and Yiddish theater—too many to list. For the language, one of the most amusing—and still informative—is Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. It’s principally a vocabulary with wonderful examples of the uses of a word or phrase, but it also has encyclopedia-like articles about many surprising aspects of Yiddish culture and language and Jewish life and history. Another fun book, if you can find a copy, is Martin Marcus’s Yiddish for Yankees. For Yiddish theater, I recommend starting with Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater by Nahma Sandrow. Lulla Rosenfeld’s biography of her grandfather, Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theatre is also a fascinating and engaging entrée into that world. Most libraries, especially university collections, have excellent resources on these subjects, and the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division at the Stephen A. Schwartzman Building (5th Avenue at 42nd Street) is easily one of the best collections of Judaica in the U.S., but for all three subjects, plus anything else about Yiddish culture (food, music, poetry) or Jewish customs and life, check out the Center for Jewish History in New York City (15 W. 16th Street); CJH includes the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.]