More in ‘Yiddish theater’

The New York Times has a great report from Chelsea’s Moonstruck Diner yesterday, where luminaries of what remains of Yiddish theater gathered to remember star Mina Bern, who died Sunday at age 98 (more or less). From the piece:
“It’s the end of an era,” said Corey Breier, president of the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance. “Mina was ...

• David Brooks sees Israel’s economic success and start-up culture as “the fruition of the Zionist dream,” which nonetheless threatens the long-term viability of the state’s secular, modern, and democratic character. [NYT]
• Israel will never give up control of united Jerusalem, including those areas on the Arab side of the Green Line, Prime Minister Benjamin ...

Today in Tablet Magazine, Marissa Brostoff profiles Shane Baker, a latter-day vaudevillian whose one-man show, The Big Bupkis (opening tonight!), chronicles how this Kansas City Episcopalian became one of today’s foremost practitioners of Yiddish theater. Allison Hoffman travels to New Haven, Conn.’s little-used Orchard Street synagogue and to a nearby space where artists have created ...

Shane Baker was about 5 years old, growing up in Kansas City in the 1970s, when he heard a Yiddish word for the first time. He had gone to see the Marx Brothers classic Animal Crackers, in which Groucho sings, “Hooray for Captain Spaulding//The African explorer//Did somebody call me schnorrer?” Baker asked his father what ...

During the past half-century, heart-rending eulogies have been intoned over the death of the Yiddish theater. The demise of countless Yiddish theatrical companies—from the attrition that completely erased New York’s once vibrant Yiddish theater epicenter on Second Avenue to the violent destruction of Yiddish culture in the Soviet Union—has rendered the story of Yiddish theater ...

Caraid O’Brien is a Ulysses performer and Yiddish-theater translator.

Speed-walking in the frigid cold to the opening of “Pages from a Performing Life: The Scrapbooks of Molly Picon,” an exhibit at New York’s Center for Jewish History, I don’t once regret my recent return from the sunny coast of California. At every corner, my own history winks back at me, superimposed on top of ...

When Jacob Gordin first arrived in America in 1891, he had no intention of writing for the Yiddish stage. The plays by Chekhov and Ibsen that had inspired the playwright in Russia had little in common with the melodramatic and vaudevillian charades that dominated popular productions on the Lower East Side.
Gordin was won over, however, ...

Scene from The Dybbuk, 1937.
Alok Tewari (as the Rabbi) and Paula McGonagle (as Leah) in Betrothed, 2007.
In the early 1900’s, Russian ethnographer S. Ansky ventured into shtetl territory, armed with a wax cylinder recording device and camera, to document a fading, if still vibrant, world. There he discovered the tale of the dybbuk, a wandering ...

View photos from A Living Lens

The first issue of The Jewish Daily Forward, or the Forverts, as it was long known to most of its readers, hit newsstands on April 22, 1897, 110 years ago this Sunday. As Pete Hamill notes in his introduction to A Living Lens, a book of photographs culled from ...