At the entrance to “New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway,” an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, there’s a wall-sized reproduction of a 1905 photo showing the 1700-seat Grand Theatre, the first venue built expressly for Yiddish productions. A well-dressed crowd in starched collars and derby hats mills…
A version of this post appeared in Yiddish here. A large crowd filled the main auditorium at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan on January 11 to see a memorial program in honor of the life and work of the Yiddish actress Mina Bern. During the concert a dozen singers, actors and musicians performed…
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 Yiddish theatre diva Sonia Nadolsky depicts a stiff, haughty looking woman who could easily play everyone’s favorite serpent-tongued bubbie —the Dowager Countess of Grantham on television’s Downton Abbey. According…
Photo: Simon Annand/JW3 The second act of David Schneider’s new play, “Making Stalin Laugh,” opens in 1935, the year the Moscow State Yiddish Theater decided to mount a production of “King Lear” with its legendary director Solomon Mikhoels as the lead. Lear, Mikhoels tells the cast as the party apparatchiki watch over his rehearsal, is…
Forward Association Lucy Gherman had a long and winding career in Yiddish theater but it was likely her role as the long-suffering mother in the Yiddish film “A Brivele Der Mamen” (“A Letter to Mother”) that made her known for the ages. (She is pictured in the photo above, second from left, in a still…
On the 60th anniversary of “Waiting For Godot,” Samuel Beckett’s existential comic-tragedy will be staged in Yiddish for the first time. It’s an idea that is both obvious, and ground-breaking, casting a new light on the masterpiece. The play will run from September 20 to October 13 at the Castillo Theatre in Manhattan (543 W….
“The Megile of Itzik Manger” and the National Yiddish Theatre seem like a perfect partnership: love and marriage, horse and carriage, Purim shpiel and the Folksbiene. Manger is considered one of the most important Yiddish poets and playwrights, and “The Megile” is one of several plays in which he put his own stamp on a…
When my parents landed in New York in 1947 they were assigned a case worker. I’m not sure who did the assigning, but I remember my father saying how puzzled he was. “Case” was German for cheese, and he didn’t understand why he needed a cheese worker. My parents didn’t tell many stories about their…
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