Yiddish theater enabled Jewish immigrants to the U.S. to tell the Jewish story in a new way. Its formative heroes were actors, directors, and producers rolled into one, whose very different attitudes toward Jewish identity made the Yiddish stage a kaleidoscope fracturing and reshaping American Judaism

The Yiddish theater is usually seen as a step away from Jewish tradition, even a secular substitute. In many cases, this artform was characterized by open rebellion against religious mores in favor of Western values. Avrom Goldfadn founded the first Yiddish acting company in Romania in 1876, writing much of Yiddish theater’s early repertoire. Goldfadn’s early comedies maintain an Enlightenment approach to Judaism. In the classics Shmendrick and Two Kuni Lemls, to name two, the title characters are religious imbeciles, while the heroes are secular, educated, charismatic, and good-looking. 

This anti-religious attitude only sharpened in Jacob Gordin’s plays. The most influential and esteemed dramatist after Goldfadn, Gordin had headed the Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood in Russia, which sought to reform Judaism in a more Christian style, abolishing the place of the Talmud. 

In 1891, the sect was outlawed and Gordin fled Russia for America. His first Yiddish play, Siberia, was produced that year. Its most loathsome character, a traitorous informer, is also its most religious; the less observant figures are much better people, and the protagonist and role model is a non-Jew. In Gordin’s first hit, The Jewish King Lear (1892), the tragic monarch’s two religious daughters and their husbands are ungrateful hypocrites who shirk their moral duty to him. The faithful daughter is by contrast secular, as is her well-educated spouse. Another Gordin hero was Elisha ben Avuya, the Talmud’s famed apostate. 

 

 

Actors Call the Tune

Tellingly, many commentators on Yiddish theater – from Bernard Gorin, its first historian, to prominent members of the Yiddish press – were part of the Russian intelligentsia. This movement reviled religion as a primitive force perpetuating suppression and stagnation. Jewish journalists such as Abraham (Abe) Cahan and Louis Miller therefore emphasized Yiddish theater’s revolt against organized religion. In practice, however, these productions appealed not to the intellectual elite but to the masses, who flocked to see the actors they loved.

In the late 19th century, Yiddish theater audiences were small, so they’d soon seen each new play, necessitating constant additions to the repertoire. Neither writers nor actors could keep up. 

As a result, works like the melodramas and operettas of Joseph Lateiner and Moyshe Hurwitz were only half finished. Equipped with nothing but a plot and basic text, the actors improvised the rest. Even when given complete scripts, they liked to ad-lib as circumstances arose. In any case, the crowds came mostly to see their favorite performers, irrespective of what they actually said. Indeed, at the turn of the 20th century, when New York had become the epicenter of Yiddish entertainment, its stars were carried home from the theater on fans’ shoulders. It was an actors’ theater, similar to the commedia dell’arte of the Italian Renaissance, whose players had improvised their parts in stereotyped roles.

American audiences were almost all eastern Europeans who’d immigrated to the U.S. to escape hunger and persecution, not intellectuals throwing off the shackles of religion. They missed the close-knit communities they’d left behind, and Yiddish theater to some extent held their new circle together. In Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Syracuse University Press, 1996), Nahma Sandrow describes how the theater partly replaced the synagogue.

 

First Couples

As Yiddish theater in New York centered on its most celebrated actors, their extensive autobiographical output sheds much light on its character. Many serialized their memoirs in Yiddish papers such as Forverts (Forward), Di varhayt (The Truth), and Der tog (The Day). (See “Progress or Truth?” elsewhere in this issue, p. 40.)

Authors included the two “royal couples” of the Yiddish stage, Jacob and Sara Adler and Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky. 

Leading men Adler and Thomashefsky were rivals, as were their fans. Thomashefsky was a populist, playing to his audience’s sentiments, while Adler was more of an elitist, aiming to reach a more sophisticated crowd and create a Yiddish theater patterned after the Russian one he so loved. In 1901, Adler decided to perform Othello. As was then standard practice, he announced his intentions on stage at the end of another play, boasting that he’d be first to do Shakespeare in Yiddish. One couldn’t expect anything similar from Boris Thomashefsky, he added, whose productions were lowbrow and vulgar. Shortly afterward, Thomashefsky set his sights on Hamlet. Both tragedies were well-received, and more Shakespeare adaptations followed.