Now he’s starring in Fyvush Finkel Live!, a musical revue that runs through November 7 in Manhattan. On his day off, Finkel regaled Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry with stories about the early days of Yiddish theater, his expedited entry into serial television, and the mesmerizing maggid of his neighborhood shul. And he sang for her, too. Running time: 14:22.

But Finkel is an even bigger star in the world of Yiddish theater. He is currently back on that stage for a three-week run of Fyvush Finkel, Live, a musical revue, which was the perfect excuse for Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry to pay him a visit. The interview got off to a rocky start, however:

Soon, though, he and Sara became fast friends. Come back and give a listen Monday. It’s probably the most charming conversation you’ll hear during election week.

The New York Times has the story. You have the Folksbiene group, which has been around for almost a century, and still insists, to some extent, on doing things the old-fashioned way—the old productions, acting troupes dominated by big burly men with big burly beards. And you have the upstart New Yiddish Repertory Company, which started only two years ago, and does things clearly outside the purview of traditional Yiddish companies. There has been talk of Folksbiene taking New Yiddish Rep under its wing; negotiations are mediated in part by Jack Lebewohl, the owner of the Second Avenue Deli. Of course, that’s now on Third Avenue in Murray Hill, which is as good a commentary on the evolution of old Lower East Side culture as you could find.

One of New Yiddish Rep’s productions is The Big Bupkis, the one-man-show from non-Jewish Yiddo-phile Shane Baker. Marissa Brostoff profiled him for Tablet Magazine a few months ago.

How To Say Theater in Yiddish? Two Ways [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

“It’s the end of an era,” said Corey Breier, president of the Yiddish Theatrical Alliance. “Mina was the last European star of the Yiddish theater still working. She was the last connection, so it’s a real loss.” … Even into her 90s, Ms. Bern was known for rattling off lusty tales and bawdy songs and for cooking the best chicken soup on the Lower East Side. And she insisted on speaking Yiddish almost always and on expanding her speaking parts in scripts whenever possible.

Among those the Times interviewed is Shane Baker, one of the Yiddish theater world’s youngest and least Jewish (he grew up Episcopalian) members. Marissa Brostoff profiled Baker for Tablet Magazine last month.

Mina Bern, Matriarch of Yiddish Theater, Recalled Fondly [NYT]
Related: The Ventriloquist [Tablet Magazine]

The current Yiddish revival movement, spurred by institutions like KlezKamp and artists like DJ Socalled, has attracted a small but devoted following among young Jews, largely through its ability to provide a cultural home for those who feel an affiliation with a secular, politically progressive, haimish—and slightly anachronistic—version of Jewishness. One of the most interesting things about the movement, though, is that it’s also swept up some non-Jews for whom Yiddish has no connection to a real or imagined ancestral past. No one exemplifies this better than Baker, who grew up Episcopalian and stumbled, apparently by intuition and chance, into New York City’s Yiddish scene, where he’s risen to the helm of not one but two Yiddish organizations: the Congress for Jewish Culture and the New Yiddish Rep, a theater company. The unlikely arc of his life so far is the subject of Baker’s new one-man-show, The Big Bupkis, which opens tonight at the New Yiddish Rep.

“I’m from the Midwest, and I was born just 20 miles outside of Peculiar, Missouri. It wasn’t at all clear that I was destined to stand before you here tonight,” says Baker, who is tall, thin, elegant, and prematurely graying at 41, at the start of the show. “Gosh, when I was a child, I was an acolyte in Saint Andrew’s Episcopal church in Kansas City…. But I remember even then, as I’d walk down the aisle carrying the crucifix, or wash the priest’s hands before he administered Holy Communion, I would daydream about Yiddish vaudeville.”

The reality was a little bit different, though no less bizarre. Baker really was an acolyte at Saint Andrew’s, where his father, a judge, and mother, a romance novelist, were active members. He was also, on a local level, a professional performer as a child, doing magic routines in ad-hoc neighborhood variety shows and occasional other gigs. (“I don’t know how this was arranged,” he said, “but when the circus came to town, I would ride the elephants.”) On Saturday mornings, as he notes in the show, he would visit Claude Enslow, an aging former vaudevillian and carny.

In the Big Bupkis version of the story—which is frequently interrupted by magic tricks, ventriloquism, rubber chickens being shot out of canons, and audience members being sawed in half—Baker left Kansas City after summoning the ghost of Yiddish vaudevillian Ludwig Zats in a séance. “I found out that Ludwig Zats was buried in New York, so naturally I packed my bags and hopped the fastest train to New York City, where I knew there was Yiddish vaudeville on every corner,” he deadpans. “This was in 1993.”

This is, once again, not entirely untrue. Baker came to New York a few years after college to pursue theater (he still performs regularly as a magician and has acted and directed off-Broadway and in regional theaters). He also became close with two octogenarian actresses, Luba Kadison Buloff and Mina Bern. Both were one-time stars of the Yiddish stage, which had been, in its heyday, a site of exciting theater not only for Yiddish speakers but for sophisticated non-Jewish audiences. Baker began studying Yiddish himself, and, he bragged, quickly excelled at it. Often, though, Yiddish speakers he met didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“I would go to an event—like, they would have a mock shtetl wedding at the Workmen’s Circle”—a fraternal organization devoted to promoting Yiddish—“and I would stand by the side and wait to run into somebody I knew,” he said. “Always, a pair of older women would come over: ‘So, are you Jewish?’ ‘No.’ ‘Have a Jewish girlfriend?’ ‘No.’ ‘Converting?’ ‘No.’ And they would shake their heads.”

The easiest solution to the riddle—how did this Midwestern goy wind up in the Yiddish theater?—is that Baker is gay. Gay and thus a likely candidate to leave Kansas City to pursue theater in New York; gay and thus attracted to the campy elements of vaudeville, of Yiddish culture, and indeed, of speaking a “dead” language at all; gay and thus at home in the contemporary secular Yiddish scene, which itself has been shaped extensively by young gay Jews seeking to create an alternative Jewish culture.

Baker gamely discussed these connections, but refused to wrap things up quite so neatly; instead, he seemed more inclined to telegraph his sexuality and its relation to his adopted culture the old-fashioned way, through broad hints and knowing looks.

This is even more true in The Big Bupkis, which comes very close to making the gay/Yiddish equation explicit but never quite does. In the first gag of the show, Baker sings a Yiddish version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.” When he gets to a line that means, “I say that as a Jew,” he gives the audience a huge wink, as though letting them in on the joke: that what’s really funny about the show is watching a young gay goy channel an old straight Jew. The play ends with Baker in drag as the Yiddish actress Annie Hoffman, who is having a catfight with Sophie Tucker (“No one sings that song but me, you little oysvurf !”) Whole books have been written about the connection between queerness and Yiddish, but Baker doesn’t talk about it, he performs it.

Baker earned a Master’s degree in Yiddish from the University of Texas in 2002, and when he returned to New York he became the director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, which hosts Yiddish-related events and publishes Yiddish books. More recently, he became a director of the New Yiddish Rep, which was founded two years ago by a group of Yiddish theater folk who wanted to produce shows that were too off-beat for the Folksbiene, New York’s long-established Yiddish theater. (The cadre includes Allen Lewis Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson, who play the shtetl couple at the beginning of A Serious Man.) They have taken an unusually aggressive approach to the goal that almost every Yiddish organization shares: attracting younger audiences. A page about the Rep in the Big Bupkis program, for instance, all but directly targets other Yiddish organizations: “The days when Yiddish theater could depend on audiences coming for the language itself are over. Nowadays the theater that we present must be the selling point, not the language that we present it in. We must present Theater That Happens to Be in Yiddish, not Yiddish That Happens to Be On Stage.” As a publicity stunt for the show, the Rep also announced that no one over 65 would be admitted into the theater. (When they’ve occasionally “enforced” this rule during previews of the show, audience members who appear to be over-age are sold fake IDs for a quarter. No one was “carded” on the evening this reporter attended, but the entire audience of 15 could have been.) This approach has exacerbated the Rep’s already strained relationship with the Folksbiene; in an offended response to the no-one-over-65 stunt, Folksbiene director Zalmen Mlotek told the New York Post, “I would hardly call them a theater company.”

Despite this rivalry and the generally argumentative culture of the remaining Yiddish organizations, Baker said he’s rarely felt marginalized or resented in the Yiddish scene for not being Jewish. In fact, “I’d say sometimes I get more respect than I necessarily deserve,” he said wryly. “Oscar Wilde said of women writers that they’re like a dog who speaks English: it doesn’t matter what they say. It’s the same with a gentile who speaks Yiddish.” Others simply assume he’s a member of the tribe, thanks to his ambiguous last name. “I get a lot of mail addressed to ‘Miss Sheyna Baker,’” he said.

Baker’s not in Kansas City anymore, but does the Yiddish world remind him at all of home? His answer was, as usual, satisfyingly odd. “I happen to like a little tongue with my pastrami, and I prefer the tip of the tongue,” he said. “That was something I learned from Mina and Luba. My mother used to serve tongue but I didn’t know what the parts were. Was it exotic or uncannily familiar? Both.”

Except this week in Montreal, a city whose summers are generally filled with festivals, from the 12-day Festival International de Jazz to the Juste Pour Rire (Just for Laughs) Comedy Festival. In this cultural capital of French Canada, Yiddish theater, rather than being mourned, was celebrated in grand style, at the nine-day Montreal International Yiddish Theatre Festival, an event with no precedent in Jewish history—not even in the interwar heyday of Yiddish theater.

At the festival’s opening evening gala, which had the elegant ambience of a Viennese grand ball, Montreal’s francophone mayor, Gérald Tremblay, addressed a standing-room only crowd in his city’s Segal Theater for the Performing Arts (which is the only permanent stage for a Yiddish theatrical company in North America). Tremblay expressed his amazement at the tenacity with which the city’s Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theater, currently celebrating its golden anniversary, has not only survived, but grown to include youth ensembles and a newly-announced academy for training Yiddish actors. Tremblay likened the cultural depth that allowed Yiddish to survive in Montreal to the similarly remarkable survival of French as the official language of Quebec, in the voracious sea of Anglophone North America. The survival of Yiddish theater in Montreal is largely thanks to the insurmountable spirit of its late founder, Dora Wasserman (herself a student of Mikhoels) and her daughter, Bryna, its current artistic director.

This same note of affinity between Jews and French Quebeckers (or Quebecois) was sounded by French Canadian theater historian Jean-Marc Larrue, one of a dozen scholars of Yiddish culture—including myself and several other Tablet Magazine contributing editors—who presented papers at the Festival’s day-long symposium, an event supported by McGill University, one of the festival’s many co-sponsors.

But the centerpiece of the festival was a schedule packed with almost non-stop Yiddish acting, singing and dancing on a single stage, thanks to the convergence in Montreal of just about every surviving Yiddish theatre troupe in the world—the Kaminska Polish National Theatre from Warsaw; Israel’s Yiddishshpiel from Tel Aviv; Le Theatre en L’Air from Paris; the State Jewish Theatre of Bucharest from Romania; Melbourne Yiddish Theater, from Australia; and the New Yiddish Rep Theater from New York, among them—to perform more than 20 classics of the Yiddish stage over the course of a single week. In tandem with this frenetic activity there was a Yiddish film festival featuring 12 different screenings, daily Yiddish music performances, a grand Sunday outdoor Yiddish Woodstock style “Zumerfest,” and more than 20 workshops and classes on every aspect of the Yiddish theatrical arts.

At the opening gala, after the lavish cocktails, and following the local Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre performance of a few choice musical scenes from their brilliant Yiddish adaptation of Pirates of Penzance, all the visiting Yiddish actors—from nine different countries—were called onto the center’s massive stage. And, joyfully, there was not nearly enough space for half of them. As they joked, jockeyed for room and did all the shtick one expects of actors fighting for space, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house (mine included).

Yiddish culture—the meteoric rise and brutal destruction of which encompass less than a century—was felt, at least during this extraordinary and glorious festival, not simply to be off life support, but to be alive and generating an exuberant celebration. These were not the nine days of mourning that mark the summer of the Jewish calendar, but rather nine exuberantly happy Yiddish days of summer. And this unexpected festival can only be classified as existing somewhere between the counterintuitive and the miraculous.

Allan Nadler is professor of religious studies and director of the Jewish studies program at Drew University.

Caraid O’Brien was born in Ireland, but after moving to Massachusetts as a girl, she found herself drawn to works by Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. She followed that passion to become one of the foremost translators of Yiddish theater. But she’s still true to her roots, and tomorrow, June 16, she’ll host New York’s Radio Bloomsday—an annual reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses on WBAI. She’ll also perform the role of Molly Bloom in the broadcast. Vox Tablet’s Sara Ivry spoke with O’Brien about the links between Irish and Yiddish literature, and about how a nice Irish girl became embroiled in Jewish culture.

To listen to Radio Bloomsday, tune into WBAI (99.5 FM in New York City) or WBAI.org on June 16 at 7 p.m.

Caraid O’Brien photo by Pablo Aguilar. Bloomsday 2008 by Drew Saunders; some rights reserved.

After emptying my winter coat of coins, I still set off the impressive metal detector at the Center’s entrance. As the guard moves his beeping wand up and down my body—my arms held aloft as if for flight—I think of my old roommate, the Yiddish actress Esta Salzman, who died in 2007 at the age of 94. Remembering the spark of energy that ran through her every movement, I see her gracefully punctuating a conversation with her quickly moving hands, her once storied—now unsteady—legs rooted to the plastic cushion of her kitchen chair.

Walking through the exhibit, which is curated by the American Jewish Historical Society, I remember discussing Molly with Esta over bowls of chopped salad, smoked white fish, and sweet potatoes baked perfectly in her ancient electric dome-topped baker. Esta toured with Molly for decades, as well as appearing with her on Broadway and at the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue. Molly even sang at the bar mitzvah of Esta’s son Jamie. What, I would ask her again and again, made Molly so spectacular, so winsome, so beloved? Esta’s only answer would be that whenever Molly came onstage, she had the audience eating out of the palm of her hand in seconds, and that was it: they were hers, never to be lost again.

Curator Ari Y. Kelman shows us why, capturing the variety and scope of Picon’s career, which transcended gender, age, and nationality. As a teenager in Philadelphia, Molly played an aging Jacob Adler’s wizened grandmother. At a time when the leading ladies of the Yiddish theater were buxom matriarchs and lithe sirens, this saucer-eyed pixie became a star playing orphans and yeshiva boys. She wrote her own song lyrics, and took over classic male leads from major comedians like Ludwig Satz. In 1964, Molly earned a Golden Globe nomination for portraying Frank Sinatra’s mother in Come Blow Your Horn. In addition to Kelman’s written narrative, the exhibit displays Molly’s actual scrapbooks in front of posters, photos, and sepia-toned enlargements of newspaper articles from her career.

Molly’s husband and collaborator—yeshiva drop-out-turned-actor-writer Jacob Kalich—is featured in several images together with his wife, reminding me of the many great artistic couples that formed that backbone of the Yiddish theater: Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison, Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, Jacob Jacobs and Betty Jacobs. Looking at a picture of Molly performing for the Maxwell House Coffee radio show in 1938, I think of the Yiddish crooner Rexite, who dueted with Molly on that show while backed by a full orchestra. I remember sitting in his living room, lined floor-to-ceiling with reel-to-reel tapes while he played his Yiddish version of “Tea for Two” on a Wallensach machine for me. Looking at the photo of Molly’s Broadway debut in Sylvia Regan’s Morningstar in 1940 opposite fellow Yiddish actor Buloff, I am reminded of the countless Sunday afternoons I spent in an Irish pub on the Upper West Side with Buloff’s widow, Kadison, discussing her and Buloff’s artistic triumphs, from a play that influenced Eugene Ionescu in 1924 Romania to an acclaimed Yiddish production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn in 1951.

In conjunction with the exhibit, there is a reading of a new play, Stella in the Bois de Bologne, about the relationship between the Yiddish actress Stella Adler and the celebrated founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Stanislavski. Stella later became an influential acting teacher who was championed by Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty. Waiting for the play to begin, I recognize the languid voice of Stella’s daughter, Hamptonite Ellen Alder, holding court with her cousins, the Freeds, in the row behind me. Dr. Freed, a retired physician, grew up in the wings of Yiddish theaters, listening to his father, Lazar, perform the mystical lead in The Dybbuk or the wrongly accused rabbi’s son in Kidush haShem.

Directed by Stella’s former student Donald T. Sanders, the docudrama by Jane Wood and Tara Prem is full of characters from a time when theater was practically synonymous with political revolution: Strassberg, Clurman, Carnovsky, and Chekhov’s wife, the actress Olga Knipper. Academy Award-winner Mira Sorvino and her father, veteran actor Paul Sorvino, powerfully portray the filial relationship between Stella and Stanislavski. After the show, the elder Sorvino eloquently recalls his acting apprenticeship in the 50s, when the proclamations of various acting gurus were parsed like Talmudic commentary. His daughter speaks movingly about how her father is her first and best acting teacher, reminiscent of Jacob Adler’s formative influence on Stella. The excited crowd is reluctant to leave. Everyone wants to share their own connection to Stella, to the Yiddish theater, to acting.

Later, YIVO archivist Krysia Fisher spirits me to the second floor to see the remnants of a Yiddish theater exhibit she designed two years ago. An inspiring altar to the artistic majesty that is Second Avenue, the air fairly buzzes with proximity to great artists and their work. I stare at a copy of Jacob’s Gordin’s play The Jewish King Lear, written in his own hand. I read a passionate typewritten poem to the dramatic actress Bertha Kalisch. I look at a glamorous photo of Stella’s half-sister Celia, a letter from the impresario Sol Hurok to Ludwig Satz, a prompter’s notebook: all artifacts representing the formidable talents of a hundred years of artists who created theater to change their world, and who lived and died by their art less than a mile from where the Center for Jewish History, the repository for these treasures, now stands.

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, by stars such as Boris Tomashevsky and Jacob Adler, and went on to write plays—like The Kreutzer Sonata and The Jewish King Lear—that unflinchingly portrayed the conflicts and difficulties faced by new immigrants. His often heartbreaking, sometimes incendiary works earned him a devoted following (they called him “the Shakespeare of the Jews”), and more than a few enemies, among them Forward editor Abraham Cahan, who made it his mission to destroy Gordin’s career.

Today Gordin is all but forgotten. But that may change with two recent publications: a biography by Beth Kaplan, Gordin’s great-granddaughter, and a new, annotated translation of his King Lear by Ruth Gay and Sophie Glazer.

Eric Molinsky speaks with Kaplan, along with Yiddish theater scholars Barbara Henry and Stefan Kanfer, about Gordin’s work and legacy.

Photos: From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York.

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 soul who can possess the body of a living being.

Ansky went on to write a play about the dybbuk, and that play has since undergone numerous reinterpretations, becoming a legend in its own right.

Arts reporter Eric Molinsky speaks to playwrights Tony Kushner and Rachel Dickstein, as well as historians Gabriella Safran and Joel Berkowitz, about why this play continues to captivate directors, playwrights, and audiences.

Photo from Betrothed: Rachel Dickstein.

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 the newspaper’s extensive archives and destined for coffee tables across Long Island, the paper was not the first aimed at a Yiddish-speaking audience, but within 30 years, it had become the most successful, selling about 250,000 copies a day.

A Living Lens, edited by the Forward‘s current arts and culture editor (and sometime Nextbook contributor) Alana Newhouse and tied to an exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, contains over 500 pictures—a neat peek into the history of both the paper and the worlds it covered. And yet, even with an array of lucid essays—by Ruth Wisse, J. Hoberman, Ilan Stavans, and Jenna Weissman Joselit, among many others—the book hints at more stories than it tells. Some of the most intriguing images give us no more than a brief glance at what was, in many ways, the Forward‘s chief competition for the hearts and minds of its newly arrived audience—the Yiddish theater, a bustling entertainment and business whose influence and stars would trickle into Broadway, Hollywood, and beyond.

Though the first Yiddish theater companies weren’t founded until the late 1800s, their roots lay as far back as the Middle Ages. As told by Joel Berkowitz, a Jewish studies professor at the University of Albany and author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, “There had been an amateur—which doesn’t’ mean necessarily bad—performance tradition for hundreds of years, in terms of the Purimspiel, much of it improvised, some scripted.” Still, until the 1800s, Jewish theater remained a strictly seasonal event, constrained by two traditional laws: a woman could not perform in public, and men (as well as women) were forbidden to cross-dress. “If you’re going to have a year-round theater, then all the performers and characters have to be male, which takes a lot of interest out of it,” says Berkowitz.

It wasn’t until after the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah, that adherence to those laws began to loosen. Widely acknowledged as the father of Yiddish theater, Russian-born poet and playwright Abraham Goldfaden was living in Romania in 1876 when he became one of the first to gather a permanent, professional troupe of actors and actresses. Before him, “There were sporadic efforts to professionalize, but Goldfaden makes it stick,” Berkowitz notes. Soon after, Yiddish theater became an international event; when 3 million Jews fled the pogroms and restrictions of Russia for London and the United States, they brought Yiddish theater along.

The Forward was by no means a simple booster for Yiddish theater, but rather one of its toughest critics, as Stefan Kanfer notes in his lively history of the Yiddish stage, Stardust Lost. At the paper’s helm for most of its first 50 years was Abraham Cahan, best known today for his classic novel of immigration and assimilation, The Rise of David Levinsky—written, it should be noted, in English. Cahan’s own opinions of theater were not unlike those held by the novel’s beautiful Anna Temkin, the daughter of a Hebrew poet, who looks to plays for “moral force and beauty,” and dismisses those without it as “mere froth.” Many of the shows found downtown were, indeed, unabashed trash, or shund, to use the Yiddish term—soapy melodramas, musicals, and vaudeville—though more and more playwrights and performers would eventually answer Cahan’s call for more serious fare.

Not that Cahan’s tastes are evidenced—or even mentioned—in A Living Lens. Some faces will be familiar to anyone who’s ever waxed nostalgic for the heyday of the Lower East Side—Boris Thomashefsky, Paul Muni, and Molly Picon—but for all those stars there are many more whose names have been forgotten, if they ever were well-known to begin with.

Peretz Hirshbein’s 1906 play, the premiere effort of the Diaspora Drama Group, rests on moments of frustrated ambition followed by violent rage; soon Mendel strangles his drunken dad. It feels a lot like The Beauty Queen of Leenane—the dark country house, the claustrophobic regionalism, a dysfunctional family, and a fair share of blood—and the dialogue occasionally nears the same acidity, if not quite the cleverness. Why then, if Carcass had all the makings of a Martin  McDonagh play, was I so eager for it to end?

Diaspora Drama was founded in hopes of resuscitating the Yiddish theater tradition, performing gritty plays in English translation, skewing away from the nostalgic bent of the Folksbiene, last seen uptown producing the musical revue On Second Avenue. Yet for all Carcass‘ darkness, Diaspora gets lost in another kind of nostalgia, resurrecting the color and shape of Hirshbein’s world but not its texture. Their mainly realist take—the shadow-box set, the dreary, vaguely period clothes—left me wanting to stage an intervention. For a few short scenes, the production casts off its drab, dire tone when the country house walls open to reveal Mendel’s mother’s blindingly white hospital room and her nurse, played here by a black actress. The characters come alive as Shprintze, just cold enough, lightly reveals her disappointment in her son, like a moment out of Driving Miss Daisy.

The real battle to wage in reviving Yiddish theater is not against nostalgia but for relevance—and it won’t be won with a reverent, by-the-book production. Unless Hirshbein and other long-dead playwrights get the lively, inventive treatment their works deserve and a contemporary audience demands, I’m afraid they will be relegated to the library stacks.

We’re not high-brows, we’re not low-brows,
Anyone can see
You don’t have to use a chart
To see we’re He-brows from the start. 

The Gershwins’ song remained unpublished for a decade after its composition. Today, it is rarely performed and all but forgotten.

“Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha” is unlikely to resurface on any of the 60 CDs that Naxos is set to release by spring 2005 as part of the budget label’s landmark recording deal with the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music. While a final list has yet to be released, the vast majority of the 600 featured works will be world premiere recordings—of symphonies, concertos and art songs (the usual Naxos fare) as well as Yiddish theatre music, cantorial singing, and liturgical music going all the way back to the Colonial era.

Early Milken CDs feature Kurt Weill, Joseph Achron (standing, with his brother Isidor), and Darius Milhaud.

Still, the Gershwins’ ditty crystallizes many of the challenges of the project—established in 1990 by philanthropist and investor Lowell Milken—which has thus far spent $17 million in an ambitious attempt to catalogue and record the “rich and diverse repertoire of music specifically related to the American Jewish experience.” There’s an awful lot of music “related to the American Jewish experience” out there. And notwithstanding the first offerings from Milken and Naxos, which began appearing in the fall, there are good reasons why much of it is obscure.

So far, the project has attracted little but praise for its efforts—at least publicly. The New York Times‘ Allan Kozinn lavished 2,500 words on a Milken-sponsored conference in November. In The Jewish Week, George Robinson claimed that the project had “taken a giant step towards reshaping the canon, not only of Jewish music but of American music.” But behind the scenes (and largely off the record), there’s been plenty of grumbling, especially by those who have cooperated with the Milken Archive or participated in its conferences. Some believe that certain branches of Jewish culture—particularly the Sephardic and Reform traditions—have been shortchanged by the archive’s organizers. For scholars, the project’s consumer appeal and vigorous cheerleading have undermined the careful scholarship necessary for a serious “archival” undertaking. Preserving the rich musical heritage of American Jewry, it’s clear, requires making difficult—and inevitably unpopular—choices about what’s worth preserving and how.

The man ultimately responsible for making these difficult choices is artistic director Neil W. Levin, a professor of Jewish music at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Before the establishment of the Milken Archive, Levin explains, “there was a lot of old music nobody had ever heard about before. Whole genres that were just not thought about: symphonies, piano concertos, and operas relating to Jewish experience directly. There are thousands of Yiddish lieder—art songs—that only a handful of people even knew about.”

Throughout history, much of the music created by American Jews existed ephemerally in the synagogue or on the stage. Take the case of Henry Jacobs, a choir director and prolific composer of synagogue music for Temple Sinai, in New Orleans. After Jacobs’ death in 1964, stacks of his musical manuscripts, none of them published, remained at the temple. “It was sitting in a room in the temple where the roof was leaking, and it was getting damaged,” says John Baron, a professor of music at Tulane University and co-author of the forthcoming Music in Jewish History and Culture. By the time Baron, who helped Milken arrange some local recordings, tried to move Jacobs’ music to a secure place, custodians had already thrown out all but a dozen pieces saved by the congregation’s organist.

Liturgical music is usually transmitted orally, so it can’t be discarded, but it is threatened by the passage of time, which can transform its character and substance. Contemporary melodies might be incorporated into some liturgies, only to be abandoned decades later for tunes of more recent vintage. This is partly why the archive has sponsored audio and video recordings of prayer services and concerts from New Orleans to Seattle to Manhattan’s Upper West Side, effectively taking snapshots of a musical form in perpetual flux.

Most of Milken’s resources, however, have been devoted to its partnership with Naxos, which represents, Levin says, the “core of the archive.” The early releases, as might be expected, have been heavily weighted towards highbrow classical music. “What we have recorded is overwhelmingly European-influenced art music, which takes as its basis many ancient Judaic themes,” says artist and repertoire advisor Paul Schwendener. “The Americas benefited disproportionately from the German late classical modernist tradition, because so many were forced over in the 1930s and 1940s.”

Some of these recordings have been illuminating and moving. Darius Milhaud’s Service Sacré is an expansive setting of the Sabbath morning service with additional prayers for Friday evening. Others, such as a promising disk of music by Joseph Achron (1886-1943), the Vilnius-born composer who aimed to create a Jewish national art music, seem rather forgettable. Concert-goers have had their ears assaulted for centuries by musical depictions of a sumptuous banquet hosted by Belshazzar, the last king of Babylon depicted in the Book of Daniel. Do we really need yet another ear-splitting, bombastic setting of Belshazzar’s feast? A previously unrecorded epic work by Kurt Weill, The Eternal Road, is tantalizing but incomplete, since only excerpts have been recorded. Taken together, this first wave seems more like a collection of curiosities than essential musical expressions.

The CDs of prayers from the Colonial period and Yiddish theater masterpieces are another story, but these recordings are as problematic as they are remarkable. Take the Yiddish songs: production scores from the early 20th century, if written down at all, have been lost, so the project was faced with the challenge of reimagining a lost sound. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, performers from the Lower East Side made thousands of studio recordings, but Levin is mostly dismissive of their efforts. “There were no recordings with a full theater pit orchestra,” he explains. The recordings that exist “use maybe three to five instruments, one of which would be a tuba, which would never have appeared in a pit orchestra.” Patrick Russ, who was responsible for the archive’s Yiddish theater orchestrations, has gone even further, declaring that there were “no surviving examples of Yiddish theater music except as it evolved into Fiddler on the Roof.”

Not surprisingly, the Milken recording sounds nothing like an old 78. The vocals are exciting and virtuosic, the melodies irresistible—and yet they are backed up by an orchestra that sounds more at home in Vienna’s Grosser Musikvereinssaal than on Second Avenue. In fact, on the Milken recording, it is the Vienna Chamber Orchestra that performs this most idiomatic expression of America’s musical vernacular.

Thus the Yiddish theater project has left some musicologists unsatisfied. Lorin Sklamberg, a sound archivist at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and lead vocalist for the Klezmatics, provided the Milken project with some historic recordings for research and is disappointed with the results. “The orchestra isn’t visceral enough,” he says. “If you’re trying to evoke a certain style of playing, then go to the trouble of doing it. If you’re going to go to the trouble to record these songs, then take a little more time, ask people who would actually know the difference, and see how it affects them. These songs are done a disservice by the setting they’re put in.”

“I am sure that these songs never ever sounded like they sound in the archive now,” says Edwin Seroussi, a Milken board member and the director of the Jewish Music Research Center at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “They were performed in the past by musicians that were probably out of tune, who didn’t know how to read music, who improvised, so of course the impression was different. But it would be silly to record the songs in a poor manner just to say that this is an authentic historical reconstruction.”

The question of authenticity has always bedeviled period performances. Back in the 1980s, at the dawn of the early music revival, Berkeley musicologist Richard Taruskin provoked a storm of controversy by suggesting that “historically correct” performances were far better understood as expressions of modern taste. Whatever one thinks of his argument, it should be clear that the Milken effort to preserve American Jewish musical culture comes bundled with some unspoken assumptions. From its concentration on classical music to its glistening reconstruction of Yiddish theater works, the archive has a tendency to apologize for the earthy character of American Jewish creativity, to smooth it over and make it more palatable for Lincoln Center audiences.

Perhaps it would be better to stop thinking about the project as an archive at all. Most archives strive to preserve and maintain historical artifacts and documents, many of which are crumbling or incomplete. The Milken Archive, on the other hand, has a much broader aim—to reconstruct the past, to airbrush its imperfections, and to publicize its efforts. And it is guided by a philosophy that seems to come straight out of Gershwin’s “Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,” whose four highbrow violinists “may play low-brow in his privacy,” but take to the concert stage armed only with the works of Europe’s greatest classical composers. In short, it is an original creative project in its own right, inspired by the long and accomplished history of Jewish American composers of art music. By next year, when dozens more CDs will have been released, listeners and archivists will have a better idea of its historical significance.