Yiddish theater producer, director and star performer, Maurice Schwartz (1888-1960) began his career in 1905 at an amateur dramatic club in Brooklyn. He worked his way up the Yiddish theater ladder in regional theater until David Kessler (1860-1920),…

During his stay in Łódź [1908], Hirshbein together with the director Dovid Herman, announced the founding of "a literary-dramatic theater". Not finding enough popularity, however, Hirshbein returned to Odessa and, on the initiative of the poet Kh. N.…

Since its beginnings, the modern Yiddish theater generated "crossover actors," men and women who moved (in both directions) between the Yiddish-language stage and stages of other language. In the United States, however, the movement of Yiddish actors…

The Hebrew Actors’ Union (HAU) was the first theatrical union in the United States to protect actors from exploitation by managers, bar none. It was originally founded in New York City in 1888. During a December 1899 strike held by the actors at the…

Jacob Gordin(1853-1909) forged a new path for Yiddish theater by introducing realism in place of Hurwitz and Lateiner's crowd-pleasing operettas. Among the more popular of Gordin's dramas were his literary adaptations likeThe Jewish King Lear,about a…