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
The Latest
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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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News Film Captures Stage Legend
Filmmaker Dan Katzir is the last person anyone would expect to fall in love with Yiddish. Growing up in a prominent Israeli family with strong Zionist beliefs — his great-great-uncle was former Israeli prime minister Moshe Sharet, and his great-uncle was former Israeli president Efraim Katzir — he had been brought up to be averse…
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