Periods

DAVID LEARNED ABOUT the Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof from his husband’s non-Jewish aunt, who lives on the Upper West Side. Auntie Kay, as we call her, has the pulse on Jewish New York like no one else, even though she’s not Jewish. He then emailed his culture-maven colleague in New York, Rebecca Kobrin, to see […]

Fifteen years ago, I played violin in the pit orchestra for a high school production of Fiddler on the Roof in Sheldon, Iowa, a town whose five thousand residents were overwhelmingly white, Christian, and politically conservative. As the only Jew in at least a fifty-mile radius, I wondered how the show would resonate with the audience, most of whom […]

Before there was Fiddler, there was Tevye.

In this tale of Łódź and London, David Mazower remembers the Yiddish actor Harry Ariel and a life-changing association with theatre historian Zalmen Zylbercweig.

During the interwar period in Poland, producers of literary and avant-garde Yiddish theatre invited visual artists to play key roles in realizing their creative visions.

The play’s melodramatic plot was fleshed out with attractive costumes, a dynamic set design, and songs by Leonard Cohen, performed cabaret-style by a female singer.