This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish theater, the performing art done everywhere from small indie venues to Broadway, in Yiddish, English, and other languages.
Theater
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Culture Beneath Black Hats and Shtreimels
It used to be that if you saw a Hasid in a movie or a TV show, he (and it was nearly always a “he”) was there as a visual signifier of urban diversity and little more. Hasidim appeared only in crowd scenes, or in montages intent on showing the multicultural essence of the American…
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News Sidney Lumet, 86, Prolific Director of Gritty, Realist Films That Captured the City
APPRECIATION Just after Sidney Lumet passed away, I received numerous e-mails from film students who fondly recalled his visits with them at Columbia University. A few remembered the emotional wallop of seeing “The Pawnbroker” for the first time, in my American film history course. Others praised Lumet’s humility and candor after a preview of “Night…
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Culture Conducting Crowds to the Beat of His Grandparents
Michael Tilson Thomas’s grandmom had trunks in her basement. A lot of our grandmothers had stuff stacked away. But our grandmoms were not Bessie Thomashefsky. “When I used to go visit my grandmother at her apartment in Hollywood, she had trunks in her basement and that was a special treat,” said Tilson Thomas, music director…
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Culture Metamorphoses: The Sources and Journeys of a Tune
Listen to a clip from “Di Tsvey Brider” (“The Two Brothers”) from “New Worlds: A Celebration of I.L. Peretz” produced by Folksbiene. From an original score by Dmitri Slepovitch, recorded with the musicians Dmitri Slepovitch, Matt Temkin, and the voices of Shane Baker and Mikhl Baran. ‘A melody lives and dies and it is forgotten,”…
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Culture My Father’s House; My Mother Tongue
On April 7, the eve of Passover, Israeli television did something unprecedented: It aired a film in which the entire dialogue was in Yiddish. Director Dani Rosenberg’s movie, “Beit Avi” — literally, “My Father’s House”; known in English as “Homeland” — is a 40-minute drama about a young Holocaust refugee who comes to Israel in…
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News Theatrical Translations
It’s a funny thing, the way a young artist’s raw vitality is often forgotten in posterity, obscured by the seemingly tamer, more popularly appealing self that emerged later. Seven decades after “Our Town” was a Broadway hit, for example, almost no one remembers Thornton Wilder as an experimental dramatist, though he once was one. These…
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News Theater Company Reimagines Yiddish Stage
In 1946, a fictional memoir of a resistance fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto appeared in a Yiddish newspaper in Argentina. Titled “Yosl Rakover Talks to God,” the piece described the destruction of Jewish Warsaw in such sensitive detail that it was translated into a multitude of languages, propelling its Lithuanian-born author, Zvi Kolitz, into the…
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News Cabaret Act Revives Music of Warsaw
On a frigid January evening in New York City, Rebecca Joy Fletcher and Stephen Mo Hanan performed their two-person act, “Kleynkunst!: Warsaw’s Brave and Brilliant Yiddish Cabaret,” before a full house at Helen’s Restaurant, Cabaret & Piano Lounge in Chelsea, as part of a five-day-long European cabaret festival called Kabarett Fête. The title of Fletcher’s…
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