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. In Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage, Joel Berkowitz knowledgeably and intelligently constructs the history of this unique theatrical culture. The Jewish King Lear of 1892 was a sensation. The year 1893 saw the beginning of a bevy of Yiddish versions of Hamlet; that year also saw the first Yiddish production of Othello. Romeo and Juliet inspired a wide variety of treatments. The Merchant of Venice was 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.

Born of an Anglican mother and a Jewish father who disdained religion, Kaplan knew little of her Judaic roots and less about her famed great-grandfather until beginning her research, more than twenty years ago. Shedding new light on Gordin and his world, Kaplan describes the commune he founded and led in Russia, his meteoric rise among Jewish New York’s literati, the birth of such masterworks as Mirele Efros and The Jewish King Lear, and his seething feud with Abraham Cahan, powerful editor of the Daily Forward. Writing in a graceful and engaging style, she recaptures the Golden Age and colorful actors of Yiddish Theater from 1891-1910. Most significantly she discovers the emotional truth about the man himself, a tireless reformer who left a vital legacy to the theater and Jewish life worldwide.

The Jewish King Lear, written by the Russian-Jewish writer Jacob Gordin, was first performed on the New York stage in 1892, during the height of a massive emigration of Jews from eastern Europe to America. This book presents the original play to the English-speaking reader for the first time in its history, along with substantive essays on the play’s literary and social context, Gordin’s life and influence on Yiddish theater, and the anomalous position of Yiddish culture vis-�-vis the treasures of the Western literary tradition. Gordin’s play was not a literal translation of Shakespeare’s play, but a modern evocation in which a Jewish merchant, rather than a king, plans to divide his fortune among his three daughters. Created to resonate with an audience of Jews making their way in America, Gordin’s King Lear reflects his confidence in rational secularism and ends on a note of joyful celebration.

The worldwide commemorations of the three-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's death were held amid the global upheaval of the First World War. As empires battled for world domination and nations sought self-determination, diverse communities vied to claim Shakespeare as their own, to underpin their sense of collective identity and cohesion. Unearthing previously unknown Tercentenary events in Europe, the British Empire, and the USA, Monika Smialkowska demonstrates that the 1916 Shakespeare commemorators did not speak with one unified voice. Tributes by marginalised social, ethnic, and racial groups often challenged the homogenising narratives of the official celebrations. Rather than the traditionally patriotic Bard, used to support totalising versions of national or imperial identity, this study reveals Shakespeare as a site of debate and contestation, in which diverse voices – local and global, nationalist and universalist, militant and pacifist – combined and clashed in a fascinating, open-ended dialogue.

Jacob Gordin was the first major playwright of the "Golden Age" of New York's Yiddish theater, which was not just entertainment but also a public forum, a force for education and acculturation, and a battleground for ideologies and artistic credos. Gordin, like his audience, was a Russian émigré. His most successful and scandalous dramas--The Jewish King Lear, The Kreutzer Sonata, and Khasye the Orphan--were based on works by Lev Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, and reflected a profoundly Jewish means of using literature to salvage a lost land. Gordin's life and his plays held out the tantalizing possibility that by changing the story of one's past, one could write one's own future. Through a detailed examination of Gordin's career in Russia, Barbara Henry dismantles the fictive radical background he invented for himself. In doing so, she illuminates the continuities among his Russian fiction and journalism, his work as a controversial Jewish religious reformer, and his Yiddish plays.

This book explores responses to The Merchant of Venice by Jewish writers, critics, theater artists, thinkers, religious leaders and institutions.

The official journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference Theatre History Studies (THS) is a peer-reviewed journal of theatre history and scholarship published annually since 1981 by the Mid-America Theatre Conference (MATC), a regional body devoted to theatre scholarship and practice. The conference encompasses the states of Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. The purpose of the conference is to unite persons and organizations within the region with an interest in theatre and to promote the growth and development of all forms of theatre. THS is a member of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and is included in the MLA Directory of Periodicals. THS is indexed in Humanities Index, Humanities Abstracts, Book Review Index, MLA International Bibliography, International Bibliography of Theatre, Arts & Humanities Citation Index, IBZ International Bibliography of Periodical Literature, and IBR International Bibliography of Book Reviews. Full texts of essays appear in the databases of both Humanities Abstracts Full Text and SIRS. Along with book reviews on the latest publications from established and emerging voices in the field, this issue of Theatre History Studies contains three sections with fourteen essays total. In the general section, three essays offer an array of insights, methods, and provocations. In the special section on care, contributors capture their experience as scholars, humans, and citizens in 2022. In Part III, the 2022 Robert A. Schanke Research Award-winning paper by Heidi L. Nees asks historians to rethink Western constructions of time. Taken together, volume 42 captures how this journal serves theatre historians as scholars and laborers as they work to attend and tend to their field. CONTRIBUTORS Cheryl Black / Shelby Brewster / Matthieu Chapman / Meredith Conti / Zach Dailey / Michael DeWhatley / Whit Emerson / Katherine Gillen / Miles P. Grier / Patricia Herrera / Lisa Jackson-Schebetta / Nancy Jones / Joshua Kelly / Felicia Hardison Londré / Bret McCandless / Marci R. McMahon/ Tom Mitchell / Sherrice Mojgani / John Murillo III / Heidi L. Nees / Jessica N. Pabón-Colón / Kara Raphaeli / Leticia L. Ridley / Cynthia Running-Johnson / Alexandra Swanson / Catherine Peckinpaugh Vrtis / Shane Wood / Christine Woodworth / Robert O. Yates

Shakespeare's Comedies of Love is a tribute to Alexander Leggatt, a critic who has shaped the way the world understands Shakespeare and his comedies.

While it is common knowledge that Jews were prominent in literature, music, cinema, and science in pre-1933 Germany, the fascinating story of Jewish co-creation of modern German theatre is less often discussed. Yet for a brief time, during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, Jewish artists and intellectuals moved away from a segregated Jewish theatre to work within canonic German theatre and performance venues, claiming the right to be part of the very fabric of German culture. Their involvement, especially in the theatre capital of Berlin, was of a major magnitude both numerically and in terms of power and influence. The essays in this stimulating collection etch onto the conventional view of modern German theatre the history and conflicts of its Jewish participants in the last third of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries and illuminate the influence of Jewish ethnicity in the creation of the modernist German theatre. The nontraditional forms and themes known as modernism date roughly from German unification in 1871 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. This is also the period when Jews acquired full legal and trade equality, which enabled their ownership and directorship of theatre and performance venues. The extraordinary artistic innovations that Germans and Jews co-created during the relatively short period of this era of creativity reached across the old assumptions, traditions, and prejudices that had separated people as the modern arts sought to reformulate human relations from the foundations to the pinnacles of society. The essayists, writing from a variety of perspectives, carve out historical overviews of the role of theatre in the constitution of Jewish identity in Germany, the position of Jewish theatre artists in the cultural vortex of imperial Berlin, the role played by theatre in German Jewish cultural education, and the impact of Yiddish theatre on German and Austrian Jews and on German theatre. They view German Jewish theatre activity through Jewish philosophical and critical perspectives and examine two important genres within which Jewish artists were particularly prominent: the Cabaret and Expressionist theatre. Finally, they provide close-ups of the Jewish artists Alexander Granach, Shimon Finkel, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner. By probing the interplay between “Jewish” and “German” cultural and cognitive identities based in the field of theatre and performance and querying the effect of theatre on Jewish self-understanding, they add to the richness of intercultural understanding as well as to the complex history of theatre and performance in Germany.

In this book, Elisabeth H. Kinsley weaves the stories of racially and ethnically distinct Shakespeare theatre scenes in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Manhattan into a single cultural history, revealing how these communities interacted with one another and how their work influenced ideas about race and belonging in the United States during a time of unprecedented immigration. As Progressive Era reformers touted the works of Shakespeare as an “antidote” to the linguistic and cultural mixing of American society, and some reformers attempted to use the Bard’s plays to “Americanize” immigrant groups on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, immigrants from across Europe appropriated Shakespeare for their own ends. Kinsley uses archival material such as reform-era handbooks, theatre posters, playbills, programs, sheet music, and reviews to demonstrate how, in addition to being a source of cultural capital, authority, and resistance for these communities, Shakespeare’s plays were also a site of cultural exchange. Performances of Shakespeare occasioned nuanced social encounters between New York’s empowered and marginalized groups and influenced sociocultural ideas about what Shakespeare, race, and national belonging should and could mean for Americans. Timely and immensely readable, this book explains how ideas about cultural belonging formed and transformed within a particular human community at a time of heightened demographic change. Kinsley’s work will be welcomed by anyone interested in the formation of national identity, immigrant communities, and the history of the theatre scene in New York and the rest of the United States.