Classical Yiddish Theater

Classical Yiddish theater was born in 1876 in Iași, Romania, when Avrom Goldfadn founded the first professional Yiddish-language troupe. Blending music, melodrama, and comedy, it rapidly flourished in Eastern Europe and then in the United States, where mass immigration created a large audience, notably around New York's "Yiddish Theatre District." Authors such as Sholem Aleichem, Jacob Gordin, and S. Ansky, whose play The Dybbuk became emblematic, contributed to elevating the repertoire. This theater was both a popular entertainment and a mirror of the social transformations of the Ashkenazic Jewish world, caught between tradition and modernity. Struck by the Shoah in Europe and by linguistic assimilation in America, it declined in the twentieth century but remains a cultural heritage that is studied and occasionally revived.

Sources & resources

• The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe ↗
• Encyclopaedia Judaica — 2e éd., Keter/Macmillan