How ‘Hester Street’ made its way to the stage
Joan Micklin Silver’s classic film debuts as a play at Theater J
Joan Micklin Silver’s classic film debuts as a play at Theater J
Read this article in Yiddish. Transatlantic Russian Jewishness: Ideological Voyages of the Yiddish Daily Forverts in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Gennady Estraikh Academic Studies Press, $119, 354 pp In the history of American journalism, the Forverts is a genuine outlier. Over the course of the first half of the last century, the…
Editor’s Note: This High Holiday season we’re reflecting on our most meaningful stories of 5778, and their connection to core Jewish values. Over the past year, our journalism strengthened – and sometimes shook – the Jewish community. Here’s the first article of a series of eight we’ll be highlighting during these Days of Awe. More…
It’s 1947, and Abraham Cahan is sitting in his office at 175 East Broadway, listening to the radio broadcasts from London. Trumpets blare, crowds cheer on the grainy recording: Across the Atlantic, a jubilant Britain celebrates the nuptials of Princess Elizabeth to Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. “Half a million people stood in the streets…
The Leo Frank case, a century old now, seems like an unlikely subject for a musical. Nonetheless, in “Parade” Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Alfred Uhry and composer Jason Robert Brown took on the story of the northern Jew who was accused of murdering Mary Phagan, one of the young employees of the Atlanta pencil factory…
The day after the Forverts published an article marking the eruption of a massive meat strike that began on May 15, 1902, the paper’s editor-in-chief, Abraham Cahan, wrote an editorial praising the women “who participated in the fight against the blood-soaked tyranny of a gang of meat thieves…” He wrote, “Whether or not these women’s…
Forward founding editor Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novel about the immigrant experience, “Yekl,” is set for a new adaptation. The book was brought into the late 20th century by the 1975 film “Hester Street,” which made a star out of Carol Kane; now, playwright Sharyn Rothstein will adapt that film for the stage. As The New…
● A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York By Liana Finck Ecco, 128 pages, $17.99 The advice column known as “A Bintel Brief,” meaning “a bundle of letters,” was the brainchild of Abraham Cahan, the founder of the Forverts, the original Yiddish-language incarnation of this very publication. In 1906, when the paper…
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