By making fresh connections among intersecting categories of Shakespearean performance, publicity, and reception, Kinsley’s study reassesses what it meant to produce, perform, and enjoy Shakespeare ...in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and the implications of this material for how we understand key questions of nationality, ethnicity, and race during this period. By laying Black and blackface performances alongside those of immigrants performing Shakespeare in their native tongues, Kinsley develops the argument that the notion of race, no less than the meaning of performing Shakespeare or being American, was by no means fixed. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s contrast between repertoire and archive, Kinsley challenges us to concern ourselves less with the fixed data points that archival sources help us to establish and more with the larger canvas of connections we can make between this set of Shakespearean performances and the social forces that shaped them and were in turn shaped by them.
The professional Yiddish theatre started in 1876 in Eastern Europe; with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, masses of Eastern European Jews began moving westward, and New ...York-Manhattan's Bowery and Second Avenue-soon became the world's center of Yiddish theatre. At first the Yiddish repertoire revolved around comedies, operettas, and melodramas, but by the early 1890s America's Yiddish actors were wild about Shakespeare. InShakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage,Joel Berkowitz knowledgeably and intelligently constructs the history of this unique theatrical culture.
The Jewish King Learof 1892 was a sensation. The year 1893 saw the beginning of a bevy of Yiddish versions ofHamlet;that year also saw the first Yiddish production ofOthello.
Romeo and Julietinspired a wide variety of treatments.The Merchant of Venicewas the first Shakespeare play published in Yiddish, and Jacob Adler received rave reviews as Shylock on Broadway in both 1903 and 1905. Berkowitz focuses on these five plays in his five chapters. His introduction provides an orientation to the Yiddish theatre district in New York as well as the larger picture of Shakespearean production and the American theatre scene, and his conclusion summarizes the significance of Shakespeare's plays in Yiddish culture.
Landmark Yiddish Plays Joel Berkowitz, Jeremy Dauber / Joel Berkowitz, Jeremy Dauber
2010, 2006
eBook
Offering snapshots of a pivotal era in which the Jews of Europe made the transition from a traditional to a more modern world, the Yiddish plays translated and collected here wrestle with issues that ...continue to concern us today: changing gender roles, generational conflict, class divisions, and religious persecution. In their introduction to the volume, Joel Berkowitz and Jeremy Dauber place the plays in the context of the development of modern drama and Yiddish drama and examine their treatment of social, political, and religious issues. The many ways in which the plays address these issues make them transcend their own time, exciting a new generation of readers and theatergoers.
The Yiddish theatre Hunter, Marcella; Berkowitz, Joel
2008., 20080306, 2007, 2008-03-06
eBook
This book considers Yiddish theatre from a number of aspects: its historical development, its popular and critical reception, and the practice and consequences of state censorship. Its coverage ...ranges from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century and extends to locations as diverse as Cracow, London, Moscow, New York, St Petersburg, Vienna, and Warsaw. Yiddish Theatre not only presents a wide-ranging study of the field but also helps illustrate the significance of Yiddish theatre as a vital form of expression in the Jewish world: it has not only provided entertainment for audiences on six continents, but has also highlighted the social, political, religious, and economic concerns that Jews considered of vital interest. Yiddish Theatre is a valuable resource for scholars, university students, and general readers interested both in Yiddish theatre specifically and related fields such as Jewish literature and culture, east European history and culture, and European and American theatre. The book contains an extensive bibliography of sources relating to all aspects of Yiddish theatre.
While Yiddish theater is best known as popular entertainment, it has been shaped by its creators’ responses to changing social and political conditions. Inventing the Modern Yiddish Stage: Essays in ...Drama, Performance, and Show Business showcases the diversity of modern Yiddish theater by focusing on the relentless and far-ranging capacity of its performers, producers, critics, and audiences for self-invention. Editors Joel Berkowitz and Barbara Henry have assembled essays from leading scholars that trace the roots of modern Yiddish drama and performance in nineteenth-century Eastern Europe and span a century and a half and three continents, beyond the heyday of a Yiddish stage that was nearly eradicated by the Holocaust, to its post-war life in Western Europe and Israel.
Each chapter takes its own distinct approach to its subject and is accompanied by an appendix consisting of primary material, much of it available in English translation for the first time, to enrich readers’ appreciation of the issues explored and also to serve as supplementary classroom texts. Chapters explore Yiddish theater across geography—from Poland and Russia to France, the United States, Argentina, and Israel and Palestine. Readers will spend time with notable individuals and troupes; meet creators, critics, and audiences; sample different dramatic genres; and learn about issues that preoccupied both artists and audiences. The final section presents an extensive bibliography of book-length works and scholarly articles on Yiddish drama and theater, the most comprehensive resource of its kind available.
Collectively these essays illuminate the modern Yiddish stage as a phenomenon that was constantly reinventing itself and simultaneously examining and questioning that very process. Scholars of Jewish performance and those interested in theater history will appreciate this wide-ranging volume.
...one theater took notice of our words and the second stood firm: I don't want to!(67) A few days later, the newspaper threw up its hands at such intransigence. ...the debate over the Beilis plays ...goes to the heart of one of the most fundamental aesthetic questions, for which we can trace a line back through the history of theater criticism: what is appropriate subject matter for drama? ...Thomashefsky was performing his Beilis play in midweek -- not generally the practice with new plays. ...there was a motive: to "teach Adler respect" for having pulled out of the theater trust.
