Yiddish Musical Theater in the United States
Jewish women on stage in America took on a variety of musical roles and performed all kinds of songs, including religious hymns and liturgical chants. Female performers were regularly featured on Yiddish theater posters and commercial sheet music, reflecting the preponderance of central female characters in the Yiddish stage repertoire. In its heyday, the Yiddish stage mirrored American Jewish life. Family matters had particular importance in that area of immigrant accommodation and acculturation to American life, and the nobility of motherhood was celebrated in legions of stories and songs. An amazing range of women’s woes were highlighted, discussed, and often resolved across the footlights, presenting the reality that immigrant women faced to an extent not paralleled in the English-language theatrical world during those years.
European Antecedents
From 1876 to the early 1880s, operettas, plays that combined spoken dialogue, music, songs, and dances on a light topic or theme, became popular in Jewish communities in Russia, Romania, Austria, and Poland. Beginning with some of his earliest productions, Avrom Goldfaden, the self-styled “father” of Yiddish theater, devised operettas for his troupes of singer-actors and instrumentalists. As this new genre of theater became more popular, it gradually began to feature women playing the female roles instead of young boys. By the 1880s, as the center of gravity for Yiddish theater shifted westward, Yiddish operettas and their artists began to immigrate to America.
Migration to America
view largerOpera singer Sophie Braslau.
Institution: Library of Congress
view largerCourtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society. view details
view largerCourtesy of a private collection. view details
view largerActress and theater director, Celia Adler (1889-1979).
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Mirroring American Jewish Life on Stage
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view largerActress Jennie Goldstein.
Courtesy of the American Jewish Historical Society. view details -
view largerFor more than eighty years Molly Picon charmed the public and helped keep the Yiddish theater alive. Best known for her potrayals of "the adorable waif" (often a boy) in Yiddish plays, she also acted, sang and danced her way through English plays, and appeared on film, television and on Broadway.
Institution: American Jewish Historical Society
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Green, Stanley. Encyclopaedia of the Musical Theatre. New York: Dodd Mead, 1976.
Heskes, Irene. The Music of Abraham Goldfaden: Father of the Yiddish Theater. New York: Tara Publications, 1990.
Heskes, Irene. Passport to Jewish Music: Its History, Traditions, and Culture. New York: Tara Publications, 1994.
Heskes, Irene. Yiddish American Popular Songs, 1895 to 1950. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1992.
Landis, Joseph C., ed. Memoirs of the Yiddish Stage. Flushing, NY: Queens College Press, 1984.
Lifson, David S., trans. and ed. Epic and Folk Plays of the Yiddish Theatre. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975.
Sanders, Ronald. The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Sandrow, Nahma. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
Rosenfeld, Lulla Adler. Bright Star of Exile: Jacob Adler and the Yiddish Theatre. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1977. Rev. ed., The Yiddish Theatre and Jacob P. Adler. New York: Shapolsky Publishers, 1988.
Slobin, Mark. Tenement Songs: The Popular Music of the Jewish Immigrants. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
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