Musical Theatre

In February 2019, Josh Horowitz was sent the manuscript of Henekh Kon’s piano and vocal score of the only known pre-Holocaust Yiddish opera, Bas-Sheve.

In the spring of 1904, New York witnessed the unlikely spectacle of a musical-dramatic adaptation of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal—in Yiddish.

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.

You didn’t need to be the Great Gatsby to have a good time in the Roaring Twenties.

History belonged to the opera writers. First Goldfaden, and later Hurwitz and Lateiner and their followers, owned the franchise on Jewish history.