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7 standout items from a new exhibit celebrating Yiddish New York
(New York Jewish Week) — New York City has no shortage of collections preserving the Yiddish culture that flourished here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are Yiddish theater collections at the New York Public Library and the Museum of the City of New York. Columbia University has extensive Yiddish holdings.
And then there is the granddaddy (or should we say zayde) of them all, the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, the largest collection of Yiddish-language works in the world.
The Jewish Theological Seminary, meanwhile, is better known for its vast holdings of Hebrew manuscripts and books, Jewish marriage contracts, rare maps, legal documents and other Judiaca.
A new exhibit, however, is drawing attention to some of the Yiddish treasures in the JTS library, especially those reflecting the political and cultural ferment of the 2 million Eastern European Jews who arrived and thrived in New York between 1880 and 1924.
“It’s about the lives of Yiddish speakers and the legacy that lives beyond them,” said David Kraemer, librarian and professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at JTS, referring to the title of the exhibit: “Living Yiddish in New York.” He curated the exhibit along with guest curator Annabel Cohen, a PhD student in Modern Jewish History at the seminary, and Naomi Steinberger, director of Library Services at JTS.
The exhibit, whose scope ends before the Holocaust and the post-war boom in Yiddish among the city’s Hasidic Jews, opens April 20 and runs through August 10.
Kraemer gave us a tour of the exhibit this week; here’s a look at seven standout items and what they say about New Yorkers who lived and dreamed in Yiddish.
The allure of America
Sh. L. Hurvits (trans.) “Binyamin Franklins lebns bashraybung un di bafrayung fun amerike” (Benjamin Franklin’s life and the liberation of America). Warsaw, 1901. (JTSA)
A Yiddish-language biography of Benjamin Franklin, printed in Warsaw in 1901, is the only item in the exhibit that was created overseas. “The Yiddish-speaking communities of Eastern Europe imagined America as ‘di goldene medine’ — the golden land. It held for them a promise and part of the promise emerged from the fact that they knew something about American founding principles,” said Kraemer. Right next to the Franklin biography is an anonymous poem gently mocking that notion as dreams gave way to reality.
Becoming Americans
Alexander Harkavy, “Der Amerikanisher lerer” (The American teacher of the English language and American institutions). New York: J. Katzenelenbogen, 1897. (JTSA)
The linguist and philanthropist Alexander Harkavy, himself a Russian-Jewish immigrant, created a series of educational guides to help Jewish immigrants acclimate in their new homes, including this Yiddish-English phrasebook in 1897. The Workmen’s Circle, meanwhile, created a vegetarian cookbook for immigrants in 1926, part of a wide effort connecting healthy eating with progressive politics.
Old World meets New
Postcard: “In der heym iz er geven a shuster, in nyu york paskent er shale” (At home he was a cobbler, in New York he’s an expert in Jewish law). New York: Der groyse kundes. (JTSA)
The exhibit includes blown-up images taken from postcards in the JTS collection suggesting the changes ahead for new immigrants. In one cartoon, created in 1908, an immigrant who was a respected rabbi back in Europe is reduced to peddling in the United States. In the image above, however, the joke is reversed: “At home he was a cobbler, in New York he’s an expert in Jewish law.” In a religious desert like America, the cartoon suggests, even an average Jewish education makes you a sage.
That’s entertainment!
Left: Sheet music for “Der kleyner milioner” (The little millionaire), undated. New York: Trio Press Inc. Right: Sheet music for “Mamenyu,” or “Mother Dear,” mourning the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire victims. New York: Hebrew Publishing Co., 1911. (JTSA)
“The Yiddish theater culture in New York was extraordinary,” said Kraemer. At its height, the “Yiddish Rialto” – the theater district located primarily on Manhattan’s Second Avenue, but extending to Avenue B, between Houston Street and East 14th Street in the East Village — could boast as many as 30 performances a night. The exhibit includes sheet music for popular songs, from a ditty about “The Little Millionaire” to a song composed in mourning for the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, which caused the deaths of 146 garment workers in 1911.
Getting organized
“Konstitushon fun Hoshter Sosayti” (Constitution of the Hoshter Society). New York. Sloane Print Co., 1929. (JTSA)
Immigrants organized a huge network of mutual aid societies, affinity clubs for Jews from the same towns in Europe (landsmanschaften) and political clubs. Jews from Hoshcha in Ukraine organized a “Hoshter Society” and wrote up this “constitution” for members. “They learned from the American model: you create an organization, you write a constitution,” said Kraemer.
Getting radical
Der hamer (The Hammer). New York: Freiheit, May 1926. (JTSA)
A number of items in the exhibit demonstrate the leftist politics of many of the Yiddish-speaking immigrants. “This reflects the worlds that they came from, where these same ideas were obviously fermenting very powerfully at the time,” said Kraemer. “It also reflects the composition of the community. Many of them were very, very impoverished and living under difficult conditions. And as workers living in impoverished conditions, they were attracted to socialism, even to communism.” “The Hammer,” above, published in May 1926, was the monthly magazine of the communist daily Di Morgn Freiheit.
Teach your children
Nokhem Vaysman, “Di balade fun undzer kemp” (The Ballad of our Camp). New York: Union Square Press Inc., c. 1926. (JTSA)
Even as parents were succeeding in assimilating, many didn’t want their Americanized children to forget Yiddish language and culture. Yiddish publishers and educators responded with publications, Yiddish schools, camps and resources, like this children’s songbook created in 1926 for Jewish campers by a teacher at the Workmen’s Circle and the International Workers’ Order Yiddish schools.
“Living Yiddish in New York” runs April 20–Aug. 10 at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 3080 Broadway. Register here for guided exhibit tours being held in May, June and July.
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The post 7 standout items from a new exhibit celebrating Yiddish New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
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UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
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War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”