Research Methods
January 23, 2020
Interview: Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin on Their Film Score for The Ancient Law
Alicia Svigals and Donald Sosin on scoring a Weimar-era film about a backwoods Jewish boy whose talent leads him to show business success and possible romance with a well-placed Gentile woman.
November 6, 2019
Theatre: A Sketch
Jessica Kirzane’s translation and introduction of Miriam Karpilove’s “Theatre.”
July 5, 2018
Zylbercweig’s Leksikon and Selfridges’ Rump Steak: In Memoriam Harry Ariel
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.
February 27, 2018
The Yiddish Dramatic Repertoire: A User’s Guide
The narrator of Thomas Wolfe’s 1935 story “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” begins his snarky account of an encounter with a man exploring the borough by proclaiming, “Dere’s no guy livin’ dat knows Brooklyn t’roo an’ t’roo, because it’d take a guy a lifetime just to find his way aroun’ duh goddam town.” Replace “Brooklyn” with “the Yiddish […]
October 17, 2017
My Zylbercweig
Zalmen Zylbercweig blazed a path that all subsequent students of Yiddish theatre history follow…
October 9, 2017
Zalmen Zylbercweig, Shnorer-historian of the Yiddish Theatre
When Zalmen Zylbercweig, died in 1972, he was 77, and just about to finish Volume 7 of his Encyclopedia of Yiddish Theatre, which he had been working on for 54 years.