Brush Up on Your Yiddish History Plays

In this excerpt from Rosa’s oral history, she shares her memories performing on stage at Teatro IFT, and the theatre’s eventual transition from Yiddish to a Spanish-language repertoire.

Sholem Asch belongs to those Yiddish authors who often defy rather than obey the conventions of Yiddish culture and Jewish sensibilities.

One of the last remnants of the Second Avenue Yiddish Theatre District will be demolished to give way for a “boutique” office building.

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 […]

Shimen Dzigan and Isroel Schumacher’s professional artistic career began as actors in the experimental Yiddish theatre “Ararat,” in Łódź .

There’s something about the popular entertainment of the 1880s-1930s that draws people to fool around with creative ways of making it contemporary.

Pinski came to prominence as a Yiddish writer and playwright, yet his connection to German theatre and cultural life was strong.

Why is it that I love the theatre so much? Because my parents, in Poland, went to the theatre a lot.

Zalmen Zylbercweig blazed a path that all subsequent students of Yiddish theatre history follow…

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.