"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.]

The Purim Play

[Back on 31 December, I published “Sight & Sound” by my friend Kirk Woodward.  For those who don’t know the post, it’s about the productions of religious spectacles by the titular theater troupe, a Christian company.   When I read the article about a month earlier, one of my responses was:

I had a recurring thought while reading [“Sight & Sound”].  I was wondering, as I read this, what the relation of what you describe here as “religious drama” and the Purim play in a Jewish congregation is.  They don’t seem to be the same, and not only because Purim plays are traditionally performed by children.  (I’ve never seen, nor even heard of, a Purim play given by adults, or even teens.)  The answer, I think, is the evangelism—altho’ I don’t know that all religious theater is intentionally evangelistic.  The Purim play isn’t an inculcation of a religious principle but a (fun) way to teach children the story of Esther and Haman, considered part of Jewish history (even tho’ it may be mythical or legendary in reality).

[I began to think about the Purim play, and even did a little research on it.  A little less than a week later, I wrote Kirk again, telling him:

I’ve just learned that, at least in Eastern Europe, there are Purim plays given by adult “actors,” but they’re usually satirical and comedic (the kids’ plays are usually serious—at least ours were—as far as little kids can be “serious”).  I’ve even read that there are puppet Purim plays by both adults and kids for an audience of children.  I never knew that.  That may also be a European practice.  (Given the breadth of American Jewish culture, it wouldn’t surprise me that there are some of all these variations—and others, like musical performances and performances in Yiddish or even Hebrew—somewhere here.)

[I was intrigued and decided I’d look into the subject more thoroughly.  Below is the result of that self-edification.  I learned a lot I didn’t know—and maybe you will, too. 

[This year, Purim started at sundown yesterday, Wednesday, 20 March, and runs till sundown today, Thursday.  ~Rick]

Purim, also known as the Feast of Lots, is a holiday that commemorates the Jewish peoples’ deliverance from their enemy Haman, royal vizier, a high-ranking political advisor or minister, to the Persian King Ahasuerus in the 5th century B.C.E.  According to the Old Testament Book of Esther, Haman had planned to kill all of the Jews in Persia because Mordechai, a prominent member of the Jewish community, had refused to bow to Haman.  (The alternative name for the holiday, Feast of Lots, comes from the notion that Haman drew lots to determine the date on which he’d carry out his extermination.)  When Queen Esther, who was Jewish and Mordechai’s cousin, told Ahasuerus (probably Xerxes I, aka Xerxes the Great, 519-465 B.C.E.) of Haman’s plot, the king  instead ordered Haman’s execution on the very gallows on which Mordechai was to have been executed.   

The historical truth of the story of Esther is disputed, and many scholars believe that Purim is a palimpsest on a pagan holiday marking the Babylonian New Year.  The holiday was celebrated with “masks, dances, and Mardi Gras shenanigans,” observes humorist and Yiddish lexicologist Leo Rosten.  Both Jews and Babylonians enjoyed this festival of abandon and license when conventional restraints and common pieties were set aside (this would be during the Babylonian Captivity of 597-539 B.C.E.).  Later, when the Jews of the Levant (Eastern Mediterranean) wouldn’t give up this “unseemly deportment,” the rabbis took the colorful story of Esther and Haman and slapped it onto the festival to which they couldn’t put a stop and the celebration of Purim took on the frivolous and profane aspects of the Babylonian festival.  

Rosten contends that “Purim is the closest thing to the carnival in Jewish life.”  As a result, Purim isn’t like the solemn observations Jews conduct at Pesach and Chanukkah; it’s observed with a general eat-drink-and-be-merry approach and even drunkenness.  (The Talmud even admonishes: “One must drink on Purim until that person cannot distinguish between cursing Haman and blessing Mordechai.”)  In Israel today, Purim is one of the most widely celebrated festivals, with costume parties, mummery, masquerading, busking, street fairs, and, in many towns and cities, parades with floats—and drinking.  Think Mardi Gras/Carnival/Fasching or St. Patrick’s Day.

Traditionally, in Jewish congregations around the world, one of the ways in which Purim is marked is the annual recitation in the synagogue of the story of Esther, called the Megillah.  In the Mishniac Era (10-220 C.E.), from which the first mentions of a Purim observance date, the reading of the scroll was formal and solemn.  Later, parody and satire was added to the reading and, as they do today, both children and adults booed and jeered loudly and shook groggers (ratchety noisemakers) whenever Haman’s name was mentioned, and, of course, today everyone munches on hamantaschen, the traditional triangular pastry usually filled with poppy seeds that resembles the distinctive three-cornered hat that Haman is supposed to have worn.  (The hat may, in fact, be apocryphal, but the belief and tradition persists nevertheless.) 

Another tradition at Purim is the Purim play, which grew out of the reading of the Megillah.  Also called a Purimspiel or Purimshpil (from the German Spiel and Yiddish shpil for ‘play,’ as in both an amusement activity or a theatrical presentation), the Purim play is usually a comic dramatization of the story of Haman and Esther, the narrative that describes what transpired on Purim and why it is celebrated as an important Jewish holiday.  Because it’s a comic, often satirical and farcical rendition of the story, with great liberties taken with the plot and characters, it’s not usually performed inside the synagogue, where such levity and low humor is considered vulgar and frivolous, but outdoors in a courtyard or lawn. 

The satiric Purim play is drawn from the so-called Purim Torah, a parody of Talmudic learning and logic that depends a great deal on a travesty of pilpul, the intense disputation used to analyze and interpret the Torah among Talmudic scholars and yeshiva students.  The marshelik, a kind of MC or interlocutor/narrator, specializes in this kind of verbal comedy.  Aside from that, different parts of the Jewish diaspora have different ways of presenting the Purim play.

In the United States, the Purim play is mostly performed by children for one another or for their parents.  When I was a boy, we did our Purim play in our Sabbath school classroom—ostensibly not part of the synagogue itself even though it was the same building—but, of course, ours was a reformed congregation.  (The children’s version, of course, was also less irreverent and not at all profane.  It was a more-or-less straight telling of the story of Esther and Haman, not unlike the children’s nativity plays put on in Christian churches.  It was seen as a lesson about Jews and other persecuted peoples triumphing over their oppressors.)  In other countries, the performers are adults, leading to a more profane and less faithful rendering of the story. 

Another tradition in some European communities is for the play to be performed by puppets, most likely in the style of 19th-century Punch-and-Judy shows.  It appears that the Purim play tradition, in whatever form it takes, is mostly observed today in Ashkenazi (that is, Central and Eastern European) Jewish communities.  (The Sephardim, the Jews of southern Europe and Holland, apparently also stage Purim plays, but from what I’ve gleaned, the impulse seems to have derived from the Ashkenazi tradition.  One oddity: at least some of the performances were in Hebrew rather than Ladino, the language of Sephardi Jewry; that would have been anathema to Ashkenazi Jews who’d never use the liturgical language for a secular purpose.)  Hasidic communities, both in the U.S. and abroad, continue to present elaborate Purim plays (though the vulgarity is severely suppressed).

Historically, the Purim play is considered the “only genuine folk theater that has survived a thousand years in European culture.”  (The European Passion Play dates from around the mid-14th century at its earliest.  Some Asian folk performances that are still enacted are older.)  It bears striking resemblance in many of its iterations to the medieval mystery or morality plays of Europe.  Integrating texts, theater, music, dance, songs, mime, and costumes, the Purim play is considered to be the origin of Yiddish theater.  Avrom (or Abraham) Goldfadn (1840-1908), the “father” of Yiddish theater, acted in Purim plays at his rabbinical seminary in the Ukraine from 1857 to 1866.  (For more about the Yiddish theater, readers are directed to my two-part post, “National Yiddish Theatre – Folksbiene,” 23 and 26 August 2012.)  The term Purimspiel became common among Ashkenazi Jews as early as the mid-16th century.  (The German word is frequently used even in English because, apparently, it was German Jews who first developed what we recognize as the modern Purim play.) 

There are really two strains of the Purim play: one a religious rendering of the Biblical story (the Akhashveyresh-shpil, or Ahasuerus Play), the other a far more profane version, deviating widely from the Megillah.  From its very beginnings, the performative presentation of the Esther story included a farcical, irreverent, and melodramatic telling of a tale of escape from an existential threat, told with masks and disguises, costumes, songs and dances, pageantry, and mime.  It was and is a story of rejoicing over the defeat of an enemy—and has often, in its adult incarnation, even been accompanied, as I’ve noted, by drunkenness.  As Leo Rosten puts it, “[I]t tells [Jews] that tyrants and fanatics can be defeated.  In a larger sense, it signifies that evil cannot prevail forever.” 

The origins of the play go back to the Levantine Jews of the early centuries of the Christian Era when the east end of the Mediterranean Sea was under first Roman and then Muslim rule.  Jews commemorated the defeat of Haman and their escape from his plot to exterminate them by beating, hanging, and burning him in effigy.  It’s reasonable to assume that this event was accompanied by rejoicing and raucous singing and dancing and probably some spontaneous acting out of episodes from the Megillah.  (In an ironic twist, the Catholic Church of the day reported these celebrations as actual hangings and even crucifixions, thus provoking anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and synagogues.)

The true Purim play, however, didn’t take shape until the Middle Ages in Europe, when the cultural phenomenon of folk theater spread around the continent.  The term Purimspiel or Purimshpil appeared about 1500, according to historians.  This often referred first to dramatic monologues or poetic recitations, which then grew into narrative presentations performed by several actors.  These might be performances of not only the Esther story but other tales from the Hebrew Bible as well as, such as the selling of Joseph and David and Goliath.   

The performers might also add episodes from the Torah and stories inspired by Talmudic commentary.  Like the Italian Commedia dell’Arte, the Purim play might also satirize the local figures of authority like the rabbi, cantor, leaders and well-known members of the community.  (During World War II, Purim plays in the Jewish ghettoes of Germany and Nazi-occupied countries frequently portrayed Haman as Hitler.)  In keeping with the rise of minstrelsy in Jewish communities, Purim players borrowed from liturgy, folk traditions, secular Jewish songs, or non-Jewish musical sources.  The plays increasingly presented satirical commentary on economic, political, and social issues and topics of faith and contemporary life. 

The reference to Commedia isn’t entirely accidental.  The Purim players told secular stories as well, borrowing some of them from the Italian folk theater that was popular all over Western Europe from the 16th to the 18th centuries.  Often, the stock Commedia characters were blended into the characters of the  Megillah and composites developed: King Ahasuerus might become Pantalone, the foolish old man; Esther, his young queen, might be portrayed as La Signora, the old man’s wife who habitually cuckolded him; and Mordechai might morph into a clownish character like a Zanni, perhaps Brighella.  Jewish folk caricatures like the clown (lets), the fool (nar), and the jester (badkhen) were often added; a master of ceremonies (payats or marshelik) also appeared. 

Commedia, which was improvised and performed in the streets, was topical and often extremely vulgar, and the Purim plays influenced by this form could be sexually suggestive and loaded with double-entendre—so much so that at times, rabbis banned the performance of Purim plays altogether.  The bans never stuck, of course, because Purim had become the one time in the Jewish calendar when irreverence and even vulgarity were tolerated—possibly thanks, first, to the Babylonians and later, to the Renaissance Italians.

Unlike the improvised Commedia performances, Medieval and Renaissance Purim plays were carefully rehearsed.  Performances, often by students or craftsmen, and also by local musicians, dancers, and acrobats, were staged at yeshivas (religious schools) or in the homes of wealthy citizens.  The rehearsals were conducted in secret and the performers, called shpilers (‘players’), wore heavy make-up and costumes (and sometimes masks) to keep their identities hidden.  The troupes, which were restricted to men and boys (again, unlike the Commedia, which included female actors), went from home to home, often trailed by crowds of onlookers, especially children who would climb up to the windows of the houses to see the performances.  The performers were paid after the play in cash or food and would go off somewhere to pool their take and eat while regaling each other by parodying their wealthy patrons.

Of course, the common language of the Purim performances was Yiddish, until modern times when local vernaculars (including Hebrew in Israel, something that would never have been tolerated in earlier eras because Hebrew was the language of faith alone, not daily commerce of any kind) came into common use.  It is partly for this reason that the Purim play is seen as the source of the Yiddish theater that blossomed in the 19th and early 20th century.  It’s not a direct line of descent, but the popularity and increasing secularity of the Purim play led the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe to adopt and adapt the form to more expansive themes and purposes.  

The Purim plays, though not improvised like the Commedia dell’Arte scenarios, were not written down but passed on in an oral tradition from generation to generation and from troupe to troupe.  There are no existing texts or scripts of Medieval or Renaissance Purim plays—prepared scripts are available today, however, including on line—but the Yiddish theater has a pantheon of playwrights and dramatists whose works are still performed today and are available in translation.  (Some may remember the 2017 Broadway production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent which was about the 1922-23 Broadway staging of The God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, 1880-1957.  God of Vengeance was a play from New York’s Yiddish theater in 1907.)

As Europe modernized and Jews mixed with the dominant culture (despite expulsions, ghettoes, and pogroms), the Purim play took on the characteristics of the local secular theatrical entertainments.  In the mid-17th century in Italy and southern France, for instance, where Commedia dell’Arte was very popular, the Purim play adopted the parodistic grotesqueness of the improvised comedies.  In Germany, by the 18th century, the Purim play became heavily influenced by opera.  In the 20th and 21st centuries, Purim plays have taken on the contemporary culture, adapting pop and rock music and even hip-hop to satirize the current political and social scene, especially within the Jewish community. 

The Purim play grew larger and more elaborate over the decades.  From a brief, small-cast performance in people’s houses, by the 17th century, it became a large production with many performers, music and songs, several acts, and scenery,  The performances were staged in public places, including theaters, and the shpilers charged admission.  The vulgarity and satire remained and even increased and in the 18th century, the civic authorities in some cities banned all Purim plays from being performed on the charge that they violated obscenity laws.  (In some cases, there were also objections that the plays contained anti-Christian content, which was sometimes true, and that they insulted government officials and local royalty.)

There are dozens of contemporary versions and adaptations of the story of Esther, inspired, obviously, by the traditional Purim play.  One, for example, is The Megile of Itsik Manger, a Yiddish musical which débuted in Israel in 1972 and was presented in 2014 by New York City’s Folksbiene (music by Dov Seltzer; book by Shmuel Bunim, Hayim Hefer, Itzik Manger, and Dov Seltzer; lyrics by Shmuel Bunim, Hayim Hefer, Itzik Manger, and Dov Seltzer).  Another popular version is The Megillah According to the Beatles (1999) with book and lyrics by Norman Roth.

[When I was in middle school, we had to write periodic book reports.  The assignments were each for a different type of book: a book on sports (I remember reading about football—the first time I encountered the word gridiron, which I had no idea how to pronounce!—one on history, and so on.  The one assignment I remember specifically was biography.  We had to read and report on a book about a real person.  My first choice was Esther.  I had learned about her in Sabbath school and thought she was an amazing person.  My teacher nixed the idea, though, because there was no proof Esther ever really existed—she wasn’t a historical figure, but a mythical one like Paul Bunyan or King Arthur.  I was very disappointed—and I don’t even remember whom I read about instead.]

Interviews with Two Theater Pros

from American Theatre

[In the past two months, American Theatre, the Theatre Communications Group’s journal of the non-profit theater which is represents, published interviews with two especially interesting theater figures, one a rising young (he’s about to be 38 on 17 October) playwright  and the other an esteemed actor with a career of nearly 70 years.  Both artists are embarking on new projects, so I thought it would be good to hear from them on Rick On Theater.

[In the September issue, Frank Rizzo, an arts writer and reviewer for the Hartford Courant and Variety, interviews Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose play Choir Boy I saw in Washington, D.C., in 2015 (report posted on 15 January 2015).  Following that, I’ve posted the interview of Joel Grey by Russell M. Dembin, the managing editor of AT whose writing has also appeared in The Drama Review and Theatre Journal.  That conversation appeared in the October issue of AT.]

“TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY WANTS TO FOSTER NEW PLAYWRIGHTS”

By Frank Rizzo

The Oscar-winning writer behind ‘Moonlight’ looks back on his first year as head of the playwriting program at Yale.

Tarell Alvin McCraney (The Brother Sister Plays, Head of Passes) won an Oscar for the screenplay for Moonlight and now heads Yale’s playwriting program. His play Choir Boy hits Broadway in January, and next spring he’ll star in his play Wig Out! at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where he’s an ensemble member.

FRANK RIZZO: Having been a playwriting student at Yale, graduating in 2007, what’s it like to be now heading the program?

TARELL ALVIN MCCRANEY: I’m not in this because I want to be the professor from Dead Poets Society—to get the praise and all. That is not why I’m doing this.

So why are you here?

Because I want to be watching, listening, and learning as the new shapers of the American theatre unleash the waves that are coming. This year has been wildly rewarding.

How did you choose your first class last year?

There is no shortage of talent in America. It’s a relatively simple process, but at the end of the day what you’re really looking for are community members whom you hope will thrive under the auspices of the program here. But narrowing it down through all these wildly talented people—well, that part for me was awful. This coming year we had 180 applicants, from which we chose three writers. The year before, because the deadline was extended, we had 205.

What did these students most want to know from you?

It depends. The third-year writers who were already in the program when I arrived are much more interested in asking career and professional questions. For the others, it’s somewhat different. Sometimes I’d offer [advice] and they’d look at me like, “We didn’t ask.” That’s okay. They’re finding their own voices, and at that moment they don’t want to hear someone else’s voice. But at some point later on, they’ll remember something that I told them. That happened to me. Now I remember something Nilo Cruz or John Guare or Lynn Nottage said and I think, “Oh, yeah, that’s just the thing they said in class.” But when I was at school, I would think, “Well, that’s her experience, that’s not going to happen to me.” And then you get out there and think, Oh, I’m so glad she said that, because now it’s connecting with what I’m doing. So you learn to take what everyone says from their experiences and you just put that in your pocket.

Richard Nelson, who ran the program when you were there, called you at the time “a significant figure in the theatre.” Do you look for others with a particular new voice?

I don’t have to look for that one special voice. They’re all here. You know, I wasn’t the only one who was unique when I was here. Amy Herzog was in my class. Now she has a play on almost every major stage across the country and is constantly sought out for commissions. The same thing is true of other writers when I was there. The thing about writers—and all artists—is that the maturation, or coming into one’s own voice, or blossoming into a career, is different for everyone. There are many ways and means by which people come into their own. I am not here to look for that “one,” but to experience all of them.

How did these new playwrights affect you?

I’m always excited about what they’re doing, and sometimes I am confused and confounded [by the forms and content of their work]. But as you spend enough time telling writers to just be themselves—well, that rubs off on you too. Telling a kid over and over again not to lose patience usually helps you gain patience.

What did you learn here when you were a student? And do your students get the same rewards?

Yale School of Drama taught me to be multi-faceted. I was already, but it helped me refine those skills. I came here as a playwright, but I had been an actor most of my life, though I had been writing forever. At the school, I had the opportunity to at least work on other things while still focusing [on playwriting].

Look at Taylor Mac, and other extraordinary artists who look to tell their stories in the best way possible—that means sometimes you can’t just write it. You’ve got to sing it, direct it, act in it. We can limit ourselves on what we can tell if we only look at one aspect of the telling. All stories aren’t told the same way. There are communities engaged in telling stories in a way that is completely different from the platforms that we set up for traditional theatre.

If you weren’t a storyteller, what would you be?

I always wanted to be a lawyer. I like the idea of social contracts and justice, but I hear there’s a lot of reading involved, and I read so slowly. But I’d give a great summation to the jury!

*  *  *  *

“JOEL GREY’S YIDDISH ‘FIDDLER’ TELLS A STORY THAT’S STILL GOING ON”

by Russell M. Dembin

He once dreamt of starring as Tevye, but directing the show’s U.S. premiere in Yiddish will do just fine for the son of Mickey Katz.

Joel Grey, best known for his Tony- and Oscar-winning portrayal of the Emcee in Cabaret, has had a storied career in theatre and film, including Tony nominations for his performances in George M!, Goodtime Charley, The Grand Tour, as well as for his 2011 co-direction of The Normal Heart with George C. Wolfe. His staging of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish (Fidler Afn Dakh), produced by National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, runs through Nov. 18.

RUSSELL M. DEMBIN: You’ve said that you decided to direct Fidler Afn Dakh to honor your father, Mickey Katz, who was probably best known for his Yiddish parodies of American popular songs. What do you think he’d say about this staging of  Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein’s classic musical?

JOEL GREY: I know my dad would be very pleased because there are so many people—non-Yiddish speakers and non-Jews—who are responding to this Yiddish Fiddler. He’d be pleased that it is opening a dialogue, because the more you open the dialogue, the more understanding comes right along with it. We had many actors who auditioned who never spoke Yiddish, and yet they knew there was something in this that would speak to everyone, and which would ultimately be universal, which I’m pleased it turned out to be.

What’s the most important lesson you learned from your dad?

Having respect for the audience. When we would go to parties he would be the last one there until everyone was off the dance floor.  He really thought that you had to respect the audience and the people around you.

Like many who’ve seen it, I found your production very moving. Could you talk about what makes a Yiddish Fiddler relevant in 2018?

The Yiddish Fiddler is like any other story, and unfortunately the world has too many of those stories. How can any of us turn our heads away from those tragedies? And yet we are still doing it—it’s in The New York Times every morning.

Last summer I watched Human Flow, a film directed by Ai Weiwei about immigrants all over the world getting put out of their homes. It was stunning and deeply sad that all these years later, human nature doesn’t seem to have changed enough.

With a majority of the cast new to the Yiddish language, the rehearsal process must have been unique. Could you talk a bit about your approach?

Half of our cast were not Jewish, and there were a few Yiddish speakers among the group, but most of them needed to work on the language the way that opera singers learn Italian in order to perform at the Met. I personally worked with everyone first in English. We did that first, and later on they learned the Yiddish version (they were coached daily by a specialist at Folksbiene, associate artistic director Motl Didner). But we worked in English first, because they needed to know the truth of the emotional scenes.

You’ve mentioned that you once wanted to play Tevye. What attracted you to that role?

I think it is one of the greatest roles in musical theatre. When I saw Zero Mostel play the part, his portrayal captivated me, and I had an immediate feeling for the entire story. I had the feelings for the story for many years, always thinking about playing Tevye, being a father and having to face all those challenges. I think I was up for the part at some point, but it never happened. Directing the show is a wonderful way of fulfilling the dream.

What’s an especially useful Yiddish expression?

Genug iz genug, which means, “Enough is enough.”

In 2016 you published your memoir, Master of Ceremonies. What advice would you give to someone writing a memoir?

Have compassion for yourself.

What’s the funniest joke you’ve ever heard?

What’s funny to me might be tragic to someone else.

If you weren’t an actor or director, how would you spend your time?

I might be a painter. I am a photographer, and that is how I spend a lot of my time, and that’s my other passion.

If you could visit any time period, which would it be?

Maybe my first 20 years, to go back and relive them, what I know now might be interesting, and then again…

If God exists and you could ask God one question, what would it be?

How did you make this life so beautiful?

[The Manhattan Theatre Club production of McCraney’s Choir Boy is scheduled to open at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on West 47th Street under the direction of Trip Cullman on 10 January 2019.  Grey’s Yiddish-language Fiddler opened at the Edmond J. Safra Hall in the Museum of Jewish Heritage on Battery Place in lower Manhattan on 16 July 2018 and closes on 25 October.  The presentation was produced by the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, on which I blogged on 23 and 26 August 2012.]

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.]