How did the Yiddish Theater differ from the plays and musicals that appeared uptown on Broadway?
The Yiddish Theater differed from its uptown counterparts in many ways. It addressed local problems, for one thing—the difficulties of living in poverty, the prejudice of the Old World and the pressures of the New—if you assimilated, were you really a Jew? And if you were insular and spoke only with your own, didn’t you run the risk of creating an American counterpart to the Russian ghetto? In addition, the early audiences were nowhere near as sophisticated as the Broadway attendees, and playwrights and actors had to bear this in mind. There was actually a Yiddish production of Hamlet that so pleased the onlookers that they cried, “Author! Author!” at the curtain, expecting the Bard to take a bow. Q: Despite the popularity of these productions on the Lower East Side, the pioneers of the Yiddish Theater—Abraham Goldfaden, Boris Thomashefsky, Jacob Adler—faced incredible obstacles to establish and to maintain their companies. What inspired them to keep producing plays in Yiddish? A: Adle
