Yiddish theatre consists of stage works in Yiddish, a fusion of German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic elements. It began with humorous and satirical plays performed during the religious holiday of Purim, featuring biblical characters and themes, blending religious narratives with contemporary social commentary.

The Orthodox and Hasidic Jews were opposed to it. Besides the mingling of men and women in public, and the use of music and dance outside of sacred contexts, two criticisms were that Yiddish was being promoted to the detriment of “proper” Hebrew, and that satire against Hasidim and others might not be understood as satire, and might make Jews look ridiculous.

Yiddish theatre during this period was characterized by its diversity of genres: melodramas, comedies, musicals, and adaptations of classical works. Playwrights such as Jacob Gordin, Sholem Aleichem, and Peretz Hirschbein explored themes of Jewish identity, family dynamics, social justice, and the challenges of modernity. Their works offered audiences both entertainment and a mirror of their own lives. Jewish culture mixed with the outside world by putting itself on display, and by importing theatrical repertoire from other cultures.

In March of 1881, the Tsar of Russia, Alexander II, was killed by a bomb in St. Petersburg because a lot of people were suffering in the Russian Empire. His son, Tsar Alexander III, was his successor and he needed somebody to blame. He chose to blame the Jews – who were a useful scapegoat – because they were a religious and ethnic minority. Within 6 weeks, organized riots against Jewish communities broke out across 200 towns in the Russian Empire. They are called pogroms. They continued for 40 years. Sometimes the state organized them. Sometimes they were spontaneous.

The state policy punishing Jews was enacted with the aim of eradicating the population from the Russian Empire. Pogroms began being enacted against the Jewish population. Pogroms began as early as 1821 in Odesa. A pogrom consisted of a group of non-Jews who would march into the Jewish part of town, beat up Jews, rape the women, and commit murder before burning down Jewish homes and businesses. This sort of violence was encouraged by an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign organized by the government and the Russian Orthodox Church.

One famous pogrom was in Kishinev, Ukraine. An anti-Semitic newspaper had insinuated that Jews had killed two Christian children for their blood to celebrate Passover. This pogrom was led by a Russian Orthodox priest, who marched his congregation against the Jews following Easter Sunday services, resulting in the death of 49 Jews. Between 1903 and 1907, more than 50,000 Jews were murdered. News of these pogroms got out of Russia, and in the United States, many US Jews began to fund Russian Jews to come to the United States to escape this sort of violence. There were also economic reasons for Jews to emigrate from the Russian Empire. Both before and after the death of Tsar Alexander II, there were laws which prevented them from integrating into Russian society. There were laws against Jews owning land. There were laws against Jews having free movement outside of a designated area within the Russian Empire. There were laws against Jews working certain jobs, or getting certain levels of education.

In response to this, Jews often became merchants, tradesmen, and tailors. Many Jews left because they wanted to escape military service. All men over 20 could be drafted. And if they were drafted, that meant years of active service in the army, and another nine years of reserve duty. Many Jews in Russia during the start of World War I sought to gain credibility by signing up, only to be blamed for early defeats against the Russians. Jews, like the Japanese and some Italians in the United States during World War II, were often relocated because they were seen as untrustworthy. This experience led many more Jews to flee to the United States. These Jews who were leaving the Russian Empire between 1880 and 1924 were escaping terrorism, economic discrimination and war. The result was the same. Jews started leaving in every direction. The country that took the most of them was the United States.

From the late 19th century until World War II, Yiddish theatre spread to large Jewish centers such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Odesa, Berlin, London, and Paris. Buenos Aires experienced a “golden age” of Yiddish theatre in the 1930s and 1950s.

It flourished in the United States in New York City, Chicago, and other American cities.

There were 19 amateur Yiddish-language theatrical troupes in and around Warsaw in the 1830s. In 1838, the five-act drama Moses was performed. There was also a traveling group in Galitsya in South Poland and in Western Ukraine.

The first professional Yiddish Theatre group was founded in Romania in 1876, and later in Hungary by a Ukrainian Jew, Abraham Goldfaden, a renowned poet and composer who lived from 1840 to 1908. His music was written for the masses. He combined the sounds of cantorial singing with lively Ukrainian folk dances and French operetta style. Goldfaden’s plays ultimately formed the repertoire of Yiddish theatre, and he is known as the founding father of Yiddish theatre.

The first professional Yiddish theatre performance was in 1878 in Odesa, Ukraine, which became the capital of Yiddish theatre.

The Yiddish Chamber Theatre was founded in St. Petersburg in 1919, and soon moved to Moscow, where it became the Moscow State Jewish Theatre, with which the artist Marc Chagall was involved. Beginning in 1925, branches were established in Kharkiv, Minsk, Kyiv, Odesa, Vinnytsia and Zhytomyr. The Birobidzhan State Yiddish Theatre was founded in 1934. State Yiddish Theatres were also established in Lviv, Ternopil, Bialystok, Grodno, Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, and Kishinev.

The Russian Jewish Operatic Company was established in London in the 1880s, featuring Friedrich Schiller’s plays such as The Robbers and The Jewish King Lear.

Poland had as many as 400 Yiddish theatrical companies. The first performance of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk was in Warsaw in 1920, and is considered the crown jewel of the Jewish theatre. Puppet and marionette theatre attained great significance with satirical shows on contemporary social issues. There was a flourishing Yiddish film industry there until the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

Between 1881 and 1924, around 2.5 million Eastern European Jews arrived at the Port of New York. Most did not go anywhere else. They heard rumors of the United States being a land of freedom and equality where they wouldn’t be discriminated against for being Jewish. This led to about 2.5 million Jews leaving Russia by the end of World War I, with most of them coming to the United States.

The journey to the United States was daunting. First they had to get from Russia to the great port cities of Western and Central Europe. Then they got on boats, some of which had previously been used to transport cattle, and they traveled in steerage below deck without fresh air.

The immigrants who arrived after 1886 got to see the Statue of Liberty as they pulled into New York Harbor. And those who arrived after 1903 got to see the Statue of Liberty marked with the words of the famous Jewish American poet Emma Lazareth. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these the homeless, the tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

The country and city that these Jewish immigrants entered were far less accepting of them than that poem suggested. While the Jews arriving in the United States settled all over the country, most stayed in New York City, with the vast majority moving to the Lower East Side.

In 1902, the philanthropist Harry Fischel built the 1st theatre for Yiddish performances in NYC, the Grand Theatre, including the plays of Ibsen, Tolstoy, and even Shaw before they played on Broadway. Professional companies soon developed and flourished, and between 1890 and 1940, there were over 200 Yiddish theatres and touring groups in the United States.

They went to one neighborhood, the Lower East Side. This neighborhood in Lower Manhattan produced the largest Jewish community on Earth. It held that community for 44 years, and then it disappeared within one generation. In 1910, more than 400,000 Jews lived in roughly 1.5 square miles of this neighborhood. That is the highest population density ever recorded in American history. The Lower East Side was bounded by Houston Street to the north, the Bowery to the west, Catherine Street to the south, and the East River to the east. It covered about 1.5 square miles, already crowded with five and six-story tenements built for an earlier wave of German and Irish immigrants.

By 1910, 400,000 Jews lived inside those 1.5 square miles. The densest blocks on Hester, Orchard, and Rivington recorded over 1,000 residents per acre. The only comparable density anywhere in the world was the slums of Bombay. A four-room apartment on Eldridge Street typically housed three families, 10 to 15 people with one toilet in the hallway, and no bathroom on the floor. What they built inside those 1.5 square miles was remarkable. Maybe the most remarkable cultural production in American immigrant history. Second Avenue became a cultural capital, and was the heart of immigrant nightlife. For a nickel or a dime, sweatshop workers could sit in a velvet seat and hear their displacement, their struggles, and their triumphs as music and theatre.

Songwriters created their songs so they could be easily sold as sheet music. Families gathered around their home pianos to sing nostalgic songs. This massive sheet music market didn’t just preserve tradition; it turned Yiddish Theatre music into a highly profitable industry that caught the attention of mainstream American entertainment.

The neighborhood had five Yiddish-language newspapers!!! The Jewish Daily Forward, the Jewish Morning Journal, the Jewish Daily News, The Day, and The Truth. Combined daily circulation was more than 600,000. The Forverts alone hit over 200,000 at its peak, more than the New York Times! The Forverts ran a famous letters column called A Bintel Brief, Yiddish for “a bundle of letters”. Immigrants wrote in, describing every kind of problem. The editor published the letters and the responses. That archive is the most detailed first-person record of working-class immigrant life in American history. 40 years of letters.

Synagogues opened at a rate of more than one per year. 300 operated at peak. Most were single-room storefronts run by immigrants from one specific village. The Eldridge Street Synagogue, opened in 1887, sat 800 and held 2,000 on the high holidays.

When the U.S. entered World War I, there were 22 Yiddish theatres and two Yiddish vaudeville houses in New York City alone. There were original plays, musicals, and even translations of Hamlet. Richard Wagner’s Parsifal was performed in Yiddish in 1904, staged by Boris Thomashefsky at the People’s Theatre. Yiddish theatre in America served as a bridge between the Old World and the New, helping immigrants preserve their cultural heritage while adapting to their new surroundings. It addressed issues of poverty and inequality. It also played a role in the labor movement, with many plays advocating for workers’ rights and social reform. Works like The Jewish King Lear by Jacob Gordin highlighted generational conflicts, and the struggle to maintain Jewish identity and traditions in a changing world was a recurring theme, such as Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman, which later inspired the creation of Fiddler on the Roof.

Comedy was a central element of Yiddish theatre, providing relief from the hardships of daily life. Satirical plays often poked fun at societal norms and political figures, using humor as a tool for critique.

Whole families came together. They initially moved into tenements, which were poor and crowded housing. Bathrooms were often shared between apartments with two per floor and you needed to get a number to use it. Sweatshops were often located within tenement buildings where child labor was common. People from a single town in the Russian Empire would go to live in a single tenement building. On the Lower East Side, there were Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish theatres, Jewish restaurants, and other institutions that made Jews feel at home.

While not to the degree that they were discriminated against in Europe, or to the degree that African-Americans or other ethnic minorities faced in the United States, there was a great deal of hostility towards the arrival of Jews from Eastern Europe. The newest immigrant group was viewed by whites as both competition and criminals.The New York Sun in 1895 wrote about the Jews, “The hatred with which they are regarded ought to be a warning to them. The people of this country won’t be starved and driven to the wall by Jews who are guilty of all crimes, tricks, and wiles that have hitherto been unknown and unthought of by civilized humanity”.

Prominent figures like Henry Ford distributed Russian propaganda against the Jews. Stereotypes about the Jews proliferated, as they were banned from many hotels, country clubs, jobs, and ads and signs read “Christians only” or “No Jews, no dogs”.

The Germans and Sephardic Jews who were here earlier considered the newcomers to be uncivilized. They didn’t want their children marrying these Eastern European Jews. There was a desire by wealthy Jews, who had been in the United States for some time, to help assimilate these new Jews because there was a fear that the reputation of all Jews would be hurt by these unassimilated new arrivals.

Lillian Wald founded the Henry Street Settlement, which was a cultural and educational center that helped newly arrived Jews integrate into US society. Many of the tenement buildings, where many of these newly arrived Jewish immigrants lived and worked, were owned by Jews.

It was a wave of earlier Jews that ran most of the garment industry. The garment industry was central to the existence of Jews in New York City during this time period. The garment industry that built the American middle class was, in 1910, almost entirely Jewish in both management and labor. They worked 11 to 15 hours every day, often 7 days a week. This was an industry that was highly dependent on female workers. Many of these young Jewish women wanted to be paid their true value, and watched as Jewish factory owners would leave work and go uptown to their mansions, leaving them to return to their unsanitary settlements on the Lower East Side. Many hated these conditions and turned to radical politics. They came to the United States to be treated fairly, and what did they get? Starvation wages, not more than $2 a day. Unsafe working conditions, crazy long hours, women garment workers organized for safety regulations in the workplace, higher wages and shorter hours. They were hoping for a 56-hour work week. They wanted overtime pay, and they wanted the ability to unionize.

At a meeting in 1909, Clara Lemlitch stepped up to the podium and said in Yiddish, “I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now.” Her words were quickly translated into Italian and English. And the place exploded with excitement. Jewish women led the largest strike in American history up to that point: “The 1909 uprising of the 20,000″. They walked off shirtwaist factory jobs for 13 weeks in the middle of winter. They won the first major union contract in American garment manufacturing.

About 20,000 garment workers went on strike in 1909. The owners brought in people to replace these workers. They hired prostitutes to pick fights with workers on the picket line. They paid off cops and paid people to beat up women protesters. The strikers used this all to their advantage, however, knowing that the images and depictions would cause outrage. The wives and daughters of the nation’s elite joined them on the picket line, and things began to change. Cops acted differently around rich women than they did around poor women. Eventually, many of the factories folded and gave in to the demands for increased safety, increased benefits, and the allowance of union organization.

One of the city’s largest garment factories was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Unlike many of their competitors, they did not give in to the women’s demands. Women returned to work in the 10-story building near Washington Square Park. 18 months later, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 garment workers. Most were Jewish and Italian immigrant women under 23 years old.

It was a Saturday in March when a cigarette on the eighth floor of the building set a pile of fabric on fire. The eighth floor operator called up to the 10th floor, where the executives were, so that the owners could get out of the building through the roof. However, nobody alerted the women on the ninth floor. As the fire continued, the Fire Dept. arrived, but their ladders only went up to the sixth floor. Women pushed for the elevators, which eventually broke down. The fire escapes gave way, and numerous people hurtled to their death. Girls jumped together from the ninth floor to escape the blaze. Overall, 146 workers died. Almost all of these were young Jewish women and some Italian women. The youngest was only 14 years old.

The owners of the factory were tried for manslaughter. The owners had the opportunity to install water sprinklers, but had declined, likely to save money, and because it wasn’t required by law. Unfortunately, the owners were acquitted. Poor Jewish workers living on the Lower East Side realized this wasn’t the Russian Empire oppressing them anymore. It was greed that had cost these young women their lives. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire led to major workplace safety reforms. Through their involvement in unions and government, Jews played an active role in passing workplace safety regulations and compensation laws. The fire produced the modern American workplace safety system. Every fire exit in every commercial building you have ever walked into exists because of that fire and the women who died in it.

A small, but influential minority of Jews turned to crime. Jewish gangs and gangsters – like Italians, Irish, and Chinese – saw an opportunity to get out of the slums through a life of crime.

While the Lower East Side continued to be the cultural center of the Jewish immigrants, other Jewish communities began sprouting up throughout New York City, such as Harlem’s Little Russia. The underdeveloped Bronx became home to large Jewish communities as well. With the construction of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903, the Jews of the Lower East Side could walk across the bridge and enter Williamsburg, which became a large community of Eastern European Jews.

Many of them sought to maintain their identity, but still fit into American society. New forms of Judaism – like reformed Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism – allowed them to do so.

Education was considered to be the best way to make it. More Jews above the age of 16 continued their education than any other ethnic group in New York City. Male education was emphasized. Hunter and City College were 44% and 73% Jewish, respectively. To prevent Jewish dominance at the nation’s elite schools, many instituted a Jewish quota system, making sure only a certain number of Jews could come in each year.

Still, Jews found a way into mainstream society. Many Jewish immigrants celebrated Christmas because it was seen as the American thing to do. Jews also wrote Christmas songs, including I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Nazism and Hitler were not just a foreign threat. Fascism was very popular in the United States. As the Nazis began passing anti-Jewish laws that undermined the social and economic rights of German Jews, most Americans thought the Jews were at least partially responsible for the Great Depression.

After the Johnson Reed Act of 1924, it was very difficult for many Jews to get into the United States. With this law in place, Franklin Roosevelt and the State Department did not allow Jews in as refugees during the Holocaust. Many Jews, including the refugees of the MS St. Louis, were rejected when they tried to flee Nazi Germany. A State Department official telegraphed the passengers, telling them that they must await their turns on the waiting list and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States.” The passengers of the St. Louis were sent back to Europe. 254 of them died in the Holocaust.

Over 100,000 survivors of the Holocaust immigrated to the United States and are a part of the 1.7 million Jews who live in New York City and the metro area today.

The popularity of Yiddish theatre in America began to decline after World War II, as assimilation and the Holocaust drastically reduced the number of Yiddish speakers. Many of the surviving Yiddish speakers emigrated to Israel and assimilated into the Hebrew-language culture, since Yiddish was looked down upon and Zionists promoted Hebrew as a language of Jewish unity. Yet, in Israel, Yiddish theatre found a new audience among Holocaust survivors and their descendants.

The Yiddishpiel Theatre company, founded in 1987 is still producing and performing new plays in Tel Aviv. The longest-running Yiddish production in Israel was Itzik Manger’s Songs of the Megillah.

Stalin ordered the assassination of the director of the Moscow Yiddish Theatre, Solomon Mikhoels in 1948. The following year, all the Soviet State Yiddish Theatres were closed down, and many people associated with them were arrested.

Thankfully, there are efforts to preserve and revive Yiddish theatre. In New York City, Organizations like the Folksbiene (The People’s Stage) Theatre, founded in 1915, incorporate English subtitles and modern interpretations. A Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof (Fidler Afn Dakh) by Folksbiene was a huge success in 2018 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Yiddish theatre companies, such as the New Yiddish Rep, founded in New York City in 2007, are breathing new life into classic works, creating original productions, and using English subtitles. It has produced shows for a younger audience, and Yiddish versions of Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, God of Vengeance, and the Yiddish King Lear.

The 1987 musical, On Second Avenue, was revived in 2005, and was nominated for two Drama Desk Awards.

One of Alan Menken’s first musicals, Dear Worthy Editor, is based on the letters-to-the-editor of The Jewish Daily Forward newspaper. It features the struggles of Eastern-European Jewish immigrants as they tried to assimilate while holding onto their culture.

The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre of Montreal has been active since 1958. After the 2nd World War, Yiddish theatre enjoyed great popularity in Sweden. Since 2000, Yiddish has been recognized in Sweden as an official minority language.

In Melbourne, Australia, the Kadimah Jewish Cultural Centre and Library has been operating for over 110 years. It presents new plays in Yiddish, new interpretations of Yiddish classical plays and music, and has a large library of digital content.

The Ester Rachel and Ida Kaminska Jewish Theatre in Warsaw, and the State Jewish Theatre in Bucharest perform plays in Yiddish, with simultaneous translations into Polish and Romanian, respectively.

Yiddish theatre has inspired generations of playwrights, actors, and directors. The works of Yiddish theatre have also been adapted into films, TV shows, and musicals.

The legacy of Yiddish theatre reminds us of the enduring power of storytelling and the importance of preserving Jewish cultural heritage. Yiddish theatre is a testament to the resilience and boundless creativity of the Jewish people.