Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Pepi Littman, Yiddish Drag King

Forward Association

Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives.

The image of early 20th century itinerant member of the Broder Singers (and Yiddish drag king) Pepi ‘Peshe Khane’ Littman (1874-1930) seen here as ‘the griner bucher’ (the inexperienced bachelor) calls to mind the bawdy Yiddish saying: es zol dir dunern in boykh un blitsn in di hoyzn (may you have thunder in your belly and, — more importantly perhaps — lightning in your pants.)

Electricity was precisely what Pepi brought to the then nascent field of Yiddish women performers: either in drag as a young hasidic man costumed in a long black satin coat, high peaked silk yarmulka, white knee-socks and breeches, or as a dandy bachelor, sumptuously filling out a handsomely tailored three piece suit. Pepi was a charming transgressive star delivering original Yiddish lyrics and drawing fans from literary circles, including those based around the “grandfather” of Yiddish literature, Mendele Moykher Sforim.

Her famous oylem habo ditty brought sex to the staid and the holy in the shtetl where a rabbi decides to ‘help’ a barren woman conceive — so he can enjoy a piece of the ‘world to come.’ With Littman’s help it becomes a term for, well, lightning in your pants.

And she wore the pants too, as leader of one of the most popular travelling Yiddish acting troupes in Eastern Europe performing in the wine cellars, inns, restaurants and all manner of populist dives of Austrian Galicia, Romania, Russia and even Vienna. Blessed with a husky low voice, Pepi’s repetoire covered topical events as well and was in turns melancholic, ribald and satirical.

Although married, Littman’s theatrical career and her onstage wearing of pants almost exclusively, was outside the pale of acceptable social behavior for Jewish women of the era. Her pants-wearing shand has historical referents for women, on and off the stage and she’s in great company. As early as 1867 Annie Hindle was famously popular in NYC as the first male impersonator, and ‘the divine’ Sarah Bernhardt performed Hamlet in 1899.

Off the boards, women have had a long fight for the right to wear pants, something still seen as lewd, forbidden and even a punishable act in many religious practices, including Orthodox Judaism. A first citing of the female form in a pair of pants can be found in ancient Greece as early as 470 B.C. but it took until 1972’s Title IX for dresses to no longer be mandatory dress code for young women in American high schools. In 1919, when Pepi was on the road in Eastern Europe in drag, Lisa Capetillo in Puerto Rico was imprisoned for wearing pants publicly. It took the eventful year of 1969 for Republican Rep. Charlotte Reid to grace Congress with a pair. Hillary Rodham Clinton positively sizzles in the groundbreaking official White House portrait of a first lady in pants. Closer to home, NYC’s own Jewish lesbian political activist Yetta Kurland, a contemporary doppelgänger for Pepi, handsomely matches Littman’s dandy sartorial style.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.