Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage

Collects leading scholars’ insight on the plays, production, music, audiences, and political and aesthetic concerns of modern Yiddish theater.

Both scholarly and entertaining, Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage is a collection of essays whose variety not only makes the volume fun for browsing but also expands understanding of the history and nature of Yiddish theater. Here's a small sampling of the thirteen chapters, each of which is a genuine contribution to the field: how the repertory of a single art theater in Warsaw in the 1920s explored the controversial definition of 'Jewish' art; how 'youth gangs' on the Lower East Side defended the honor of matinee idols; how a Russian revolutionary who called himself 'Ivan' turned from reforming czarist society to reforming Yiddish literary drama; how the witty lyrics of an Argentinean singer-songwriter amused cabaret audiences in a mixture of Spanish and Yiddish; how twentieth-century revivals of a popular nineteenth-century operetta revealed Israeli attitudes to diaspora culture. All the authors provide impressively thorough notes and bibliographies, as well as useful appendices. An intelligent introduction by the editors, elucidating both history and historiography, puts all the essays into context.--Nahma Sandrow "author of Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Theater in Translation ", This is a remarkable collection of essays on a subject that has received scant attention for the better part of a century. Here is Yiddish theater in all its diversity, from its origins to its peak, shund and art, from Europe to the Americas and Israel, its history told by its established and emerging scholars. This is a major contribution to a field that is finally, and thankfully, coming into its own.--Michael Steinlauf "Gratz College and theater editor, YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe "

Joel Berkowitz is the director of the Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies and a professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He is the author of Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, editor of Yiddish Theatre: New Approaches, and co-editor of Landmark Yiddish Plays: A Critical Anthology.Barbara Henry is associate professor of Russian literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and an affiliate of the Jewish studies program at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her study Rewriting Russia: Jacob Gordin's Yiddish Drama was published by the University of Washington Press in 2011.