Taking a Stand

When Yiddish theater arrived in New York City in 1882, the opening night of Koldunye (The Witch) was met not with applause, but with a riot. The problem wasn’t the quality of the show, but the fact that it never actually went on. The producers had sold out the house, charging as much as $5 a ticket. It’s not surprising that some decided to get their money’s worth in entertainment, tearing up the theater before finally leaving.

Luckily, the troupe’s young leading man, Boris Thomashefsky, was not to be deterred by a single night of violence. Thomashefsky went on to became incredibly famous, even infamous. As Yiddish theater historian Nahma Sandrow writes, “For several decades respectable people worried about Thomashefsky’s luscious calves … which were destroying the modesty of American Jewish womanhood.” It’s fitting that his career on the American Yiddish stage was inaugurated with scandal.

Of course, theater riots were not unknown in New York. In 1849, 22 people died in the Astor Place riot. Fans of the American actor Edwin Forrest clashed with those of the British William Macready when the two actors staged competing Macbeths. Far from being merely overheated fans, the Astor Place riot was an expression of class resentment. Over at the Folger Shakespeare blog, theater historian Bruce McConachie writes that Macready was denounced as “a symbol of aristocratic oppression” and thus the battle of the two Macbeths was really about “class antagonism.” In other words, all the world’s a stage, and a riot is never just a riot.

Indeed, the Koldunye riot also hinged on resentment between classes, here, the players being the more established “German” Jews of New York against the newly arrived Eastern Europeans. This was 1882, quite literally at the dawn of the great waves of migration that would bring millions of zhargon-speaking Ostjuden to the United States, a problem the uptown Jews took upon themselves to solve. And in those early days, their solution was simple. They summoned Thomashefsky and producer Frank Wolf to a meeting, telling them to get real jobs and stop bringing the wrong kind of attention to Jews. And if they didn’t follow orders, they hinted, deportation was also an option. What the German Jewish Committee didn’t understand was that the show not going on was not an option.

Thomashefsky’s company had engaged a certain Mrs. Krantsfeld to play the role of Mirele. According to Sandrow in her Yiddish theater history Vagabond Stars, when Krantsfeld didn’t make her curtain call, Thomashefsky and his producer rushed to her apartment on Division Street, not far from the theater at Turn Hall (on Fourth Street between Second and Third avenues). As it turned out (at least, according to Thomashefsky), the German Jewish Committee (which had also turned up with a megaphone to shame patrons on opening night), had bribed Krantsfeld to stay home and ruin the show. Though they were able to finally convince her to return to the theater, it was too late. The only people left in the theater “were brawling and overturning chairs,” writes Sandrow, “the place was a shambles” and the show “was definitely over.” Luckily for everyone else, the show was just beginning for Yiddish theater in America.

The Koldunye riot speaks to a clash between values and epochs, not just Western and Eastern European Jews. On the one hand, you have the German Jewish Committee as representatives of a pre-Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) mode of Jewish life, one where the wealthy and powerful take responsibility for the Jewish community as a whole. In Eastern Europe, before the emancipation of individual Jews, it was the Jewish kehile (community) that was granted rights and privileges. Individual rights flowed from the kehile. And if the ruling powers committed an injustice, for example, unfairly imprisoning a kehile member, it was almost unthinkable that individual kehile members would react with violence. If the kehile needed to negotiate with the ruling powers, it was often done by a shtadlan, or intercessor, someone who spoke the language of the rulers and who could command respect in their courts. According to the YIVO Encyclopedia, “in addition to using logical reasoning and implementing legal writs, shtadlonim were also known to employ other means of persuasion including emotional appeals, profusive begging, and the distribution of cash or gifts.”

But in the New World, the kehile as such no longer existed. Self-appointed shtadlonim lacked systematic power over other Jews, something Thomashefsky and Wolf intuitively knew. Individual powerful Jews may or may not have been able to follow through on a threat of deportation, but the traditional leverage of kherem (excommunication) had disappeared with emancipation. In this new setting, Jews were more likely to take advantage of new forms of collective action and less fearful of collective retribution. And where they were traditionally more likely to be the targets of mob violence, now they were freer to speak directly to the powers that be, to give voice to what was once unspeakable.

A radical change of context can be a catalyst to violence, even among those still most acclimated to the ways of the kehile. In May 1943 a group of Mir Yeshiva men rioted in the office of the Jewish communal authorities in Shanghai. Starting in the late 1930s, some 20,000 Jews had found an unlikely wartime refuge in Shanghai. The refugees were mostly German and Austrian, but among them were 800 members of the Mir Yeshiva, a story that is quite miraculous on its own.

After the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, the Jews were forced into a ghetto, a move greeted with immense bitterness by the community. The Japanese orders were being implemented by something called SACRA, an aid committee made up of the preexisting Russian Jewish residents of Shanghai. Upon being told they would have to move to the Salvation Army compound, the men of the yeshiva arrived at the SACRA office and tore it up. It was an astonishing show of defiance, as SACRA represented the Japanese authorities. The Japanese officials in charge of the Shanghai ghetto took sadistic pleasure in torturing the Jewish refugees. And in those days, a prison sentence could very well be fatal, given the incidence of typhus and other diseases. (Sound familiar?) Believing that theirs was a higher cause, the men risked it all, destroying the furniture and smashing the windows of the SACRA office. Miraculously, they escaped unscathed, and even got their accommodations upgraded!

In New York, the old forms of Jewish association dissolved and reformed according to the needs of the day. It almost goes without saying today, Jews were so active in the organized labor movement that Jews gave the labor movement a Jewish flavor, and the labor movement profoundly influenced Jewish American life. As Marjorie Ingall so eloquently described for Tablet last year, when women took to the streets to protest the devastatingly high price of kosher meat in 1902, it was framed as a strike. Jewish housewives “threw meat into the streets and stomped on it, broke windows, and yanked packages of beef out of customers’ hands.” In a thoroughly American fusion of traditional Jewish values and radical labor organizing practices, the women marched in the street and protested in shul.

Though Jewish women were laborers from the beginning of the great waves of Eastern European immigration, the socialist Yiddish movement didn’t always conceive of them as such. In an 1894 article in di Arbeter Tsaytung, (the Workers Newspaper) (translated by Tony Michels and appearing in his Jewish Radicals: A Documentary History) there is an announcement of a new program of the Cloak Makers union. “Everybody knows that the greatest enemies of strikes are often the wives of the strikers themselves.” The wives achieve what the bosses and Pinkertons cannot: swaying their husbands from the picket line. Thus the plan to bring the wives to an evening of “moral instruction” at which “500 wives of strikers listened with great attentiveness to the speeches,” after which they swore to support the strike “until the bosses give in to the union’s demands.”

One can only imagine what the wives themselves actually thought of the evening’s “moral instruction.” If Jewish women went on to be some of the most effective, and bold, activists it was not due to an evening of chastisement. Rather, it was their experience as laborers in the public sphere that shaped their later activism as mothers and household managers. As historian Annelise Orleck writes in her article “We Are That Mythical Thing Called the Public: Militant Housewives During the Great Depression,” “housewives’ rebellions of the 1930s” were rooted “in a long tradition of Jewish immigrant women’s agitation around subsistence issues.” Women who came of age around the meat riots of the early century didn’t lose their radicalism when they became mothers. The direness of the Great Depression indeed amplified it.

As Orleck tells us: “In New York City neighborhoods, organized bands of Jewish housewives fiercely resisted eviction, arguing that they were merely doing their jobs by defending their homes and those of their neighbors. Barricading themselves in apartments, they made speeches from tenement windows, wielded kettles of boiling water, and threatened to scald anyone who attempted to move furniture out on to the street.” Their organization and willingness to take bold action was “rooted in women organizers’ own experiences in trade unions.”

Today, some 28 million people may face eviction soon and we are still debating all the old questions. Who should be protesting and what are the most effective methods? Is it right to risk exposure to disease to make your voice heard? As a Jew, and a person on the edge of financial ruin, I wonder every day, who are my allies and where do I belong? How could I have prepared for this? The stakes haven’t been this high in decades, but it remains to be seen if we can summon the vision, and the boldness, the moment demands.

READ: Two books, one brand new and one coming out this winter, go in-depth on the Jewish women who took to the streets for justice: Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild and The Great Kosher Meat War of 1902: Immigrant Housewives and the Riots That Shook New York City by Scott Seligman.

ALSO: Following on from my November column on Brendan McGeever’s new book on the Bolshevik confrontation with anti-Semitism, you can hear Brendan himself on a new BBC program called Pogroms and Prejudice … The new London International Klezmer Experience (LIKE) will be going live online, July 26-29. Festival director Ilana Cravitz says: “There’s no minimum standard for participation, no geographical limits, and you don’t even need to play an instrument! As well as plenty of music, the festival includes Yiddish language, dancing, film, and professional skills classes. While some sessions are geared to participation at certain levels, we really mean it when we say ‘access all areas.’” Hoo-vah! … Did you know that New York City was home to a short-lived Yiddish theater museum in the 1920s? Me neither. A fantastic new online exhibit at YIVO called A Tale of Two Museums tells the long forgotten story of the not one, but two Yiddish theaters that opened in 1926: one in New York and one in Warsaw … Every Wednesday and Sunday singer-composer Polina Shepherd leads her “Sing With Me” sessions for Russian and Yiddish song. Also on Wednesdays and Sundays, immediately after the sessions, Shepherd is co-organizing and co-leading “Yiddish Song: Step Forverts,” a “unique international gathering of Yiddish song activists” featuring newly composed songs and conversation … Sometimes you read something that just blows apart everything you think you know about the American Jewish experience. Henry Sapoznik’s latest article was one of those moments for me. His “How a Century-Old Recording Revealed the Lost World of African-American Cantors” is the first in a new series about the synthesis of Eastern European Jewish and African American life and culture, all converging in one long-lost recording. The only thing I want to see now is an HBO prestige drama about a Black, Yiddish-speaking khazn in Harlem … Starting July 27, my brilliant friend, scholar of the Bund and Russian Jewish history, Josh Meyers, will be giving a class called Jews and Revolutions exploring “the ways that revolutionary thinkers understood Jews and Jewish identity …” Almost no one knows more about 20th-century American klezmer than my friend and teacher, Hankus Netsky. Tune in on July 30 to hear him talk on Klezmer: Music and Community in Twentieth-Century Philadelphia … On Aug. 4 the Brooklyn Library will be holding a virtual reading of The Very Hungry Caterpillar in Yiddish.