Why Do Jewish People Live In Greek Theatre

In addition to literature and music, Jewish people were also productive in the theatre. According to Shoef, Jewish theatre emerged in the late 19th cenury (67). In 1876, the first Jewish theatre performance took place in a coffee shop in the Rumanian town of Iasi, performed by Abraham Goldfaden's group of joke-tellers (ibid.). The town was sheltering Jewish refugees who eventually “needed a communal meeting place other then [sic] the conventional synagogue – a place where they could share their nostalgia, fears, and uncertainties about the future” (ibid.). In 1883, however, Russian authorities banned Yiddish theatre, fearing that it would cause a revolution (Blech 8). Therefore, theatre had to move westwards, to major European cities and to …show more content…
Abraham Goldfaden, who lived from 1868 to 1908, “is considered the father of Yiddish theatre” (ibid.). He wrote comedies entitled Shmendrik and Kuni Lemel; titles which became well-known words in other languages and marked the beginning of the adoption of many Yiddish words into other languages (ibid.). In his plays, Goldfaden combined jokes, dialogues, a unifying plot and Yiddish (Shoef 68). Boris Thomashefsky lived from 1868 to 1939 and became known as a Yiddish actor and pioneer of Yiddish theatre in the United States (Blech 9). He made translations of classic plays, for example Shakespeare's Hamlet, popular and built the National Theater in New York in 1912 (ibid.). Maurice Schwartz was an equally as good Yiddish actor as Thomashefsky who founded the Jewish Art Theater in 1918 (ibid.). Schwartz and his company toured North and South America as well as Europe, Israel, and South Africa (ibid.), which shows how far-reaching the success of Yiddish theatre was. Some Yiddish actors even turned to performances in English and became successful in Hollywood (ibid.). The success of Yiddish theatre is explained by Shoef through its role as a maintainer of Jewish cultural identity in times when society became more secular, thus, open to theatre, and when demographic changes of Eastern European Jews moving westwards disintegrated the Jewish society (69). Therefore, Yiddish theatre “was characterized by a nostalgic tendency, as it tried to commemorate the Jewish way of life in the traditional East European village (the Stetl) as it began to disappear” (ibid.). Despite it not entirely belonging to the field of theatre, but because it is also performed in front of an audience, it can briefly be mentioned that Jewish people made up 80 percent of twentieth-century humorists in America (Blech