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This chapter outlines how the need for Austrian Jews to come to terms with their changed social status after World War I drove the creation of new cultural productions that provided potential answers—or, at the very least, an escape—for both Jewish and non-Jewish Austrians seeking an inclusive national cultural ideal. Max Reinhardt’s involvement in—and passion for—both the baroque Catholic Salzburg Festival and the Yiddish theater in Vienna points to the significant role of Austrian Jews as driving forces behind two seemingly oppositional forms of culture which both thrived at a time of deep social crisis. The fact that Reinhardt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal played major roles in creating the conservative Salzburg Festival revisits the overdetermined portrayal of Jews at the forefront of modernity in all aspects of European culture. But the fact that both Jews and non-Jews were avid enthusiasts of Yiddish theater in Vienna emphasizes the appeal of an explicitly Jewish theater to broad audiences in the city. Despite their differences, both forms of theater sparked intense, emotional reactions in audiences, using provincial and urban stages to reinvent mystical worlds of the past and create new ethical and cultural ideals with possibilities for future redemption.

This chapter examines how the music of the Yiddish theatre was preserved on gramophone records between 1904 and 1913. It describes how the gramophone brings to life the sounds and atmosphere of the popular Yiddish theatre in Galicia in the most vivid manner imaginable. It also talks about the record companies that focused on Gimpel's theatre in Lwów, such as Favorite, Beka, and the Gramophone Company that recorded about 800 titles of Yiddish theatre music. The chapter provides a very brief history of the theatre founded by Jakob Ber Gimpel and gives an overview of the recordings the theatre made in the decade preceding the First World War. It mentions the field recordings being made in rural Hungary by Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály.

Central to the chapter’s survey of emerging Jewish popular-music genres is the role of the city as a new cultural context for Jewish music making by the turn of the century. Immigrants from rural Eastern Europe, Jewish musicians entered all areas of the urban musical cultures of Vienna, Berlin, and other cities, where they performed for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences with enormous success. The city was also the site for mixing musical genres, creating new sounds in popular music and establishing new genres—for example, cabaret and Yiddish theater. The chapter analyzes numerous broadsides and hit songs such as Gustav Pick’s “Viennese Coachman’s Song.” Individual musicians, music publishers, and ensembles serve as a collective biography throughout the chapter.

Chapter 4 expands on the previous chapter’s discussion of Jessica, exploring how her character was interpreted by Yiddish writers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter addresses the ways in which Jewish writers used the biblical Dinah and Rachel inter-texts to develop Jessica’s character within Yiddish-language translations and adaptations of The Merchant of Venice, including Meyer Freid’s 1898 novella Der koyfmann fun Venedig, and Maurice Schwartz’s 1947 play Shayloks tochter. Through appeals to these biblical stories, Yiddish-language writers produced distinctively Judaic re-workings of Shakespeare’s comedy that emphasised Jessica’s unique subjectivity and relocated her – and the experience of young Jewish women situated at the margins of their communities -- at the play’s vital centre. This chapter discusses how these writers’ creative revisions to Jessica’s character echoed a series of concerns shared by nineteenth and twentieth-century Jewish writers, including Sholem Aleichem and Philip Roth, about the changing role and place of women within modern Jewish life.

This chapter claims that many recollections suggest Gershwin's early absorption of British popular music, an inheritance displayed in various scores. Gershwin rarely dwelled on his Jewish-Russian background, but remained interested in the Yiddish theater. Although Jewish Americans clearly contributed significantly to the development of popular music in the early twentieth century, this phenomenon remains subject to widely varying interpretations. In drawing on the nexus of Irving Berlin's popular songs, James Reese Europe's ragtime-jazz, and W. C. Handy's blues, the Castles looked ahead to Gershwin's own career. When Gershwin took a job plugging songs in 1914, he arrived not so much as a trailblazer but as someone eager to join in the excitement.

This chapter analyzes the functions of Yiddish theater in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp as a genre that traditionally incorporates different musical repertoires,. It traces the evolution in offerings by the Katset-Teater, which organized four programs in total; the Yidishe Arbeter-Bine, six theater productions; and various short-lived theater projects. The transitory state of Yiddish theater under these auspices between 1945 and 1948–it drew on prewar music traditions, recent music of the Holocaust, as well as concerns of the contemporary environment—documents the survivors’ pasts and presents by recreating lived experience while reflecting their changing emotional states. The performances of Yiddish theater thereby bore witness to both Jewish lives before and after liberation, thus rendering time itself transitory.

This chapter explores reviews of the Jewish theatre before the Second World War. Reviews allow a glimpse into Polish–Jewish relations as indirectly reflected in the views of Polish drama critics. They can be more revealing than the sources in which emotions are more rigidly controlled. In particular, the chapter looks at the reviews reprinted in the 1992 single-issue volume of Pamiętnik Teatralny devoted to the Polish Yiddish theatre. The paucity of material in itself is an indication of the most striking characteristic of Polish–Jewish relations during the sixty or so years these reviews cover: a gulf that separated the two ethnic groups, and the scant interest in the Polish community in bridging the gap. Among Catholic Poles, the lack of information about Jewish culture was almost total. The Jewish critic Jakub Appenszlak grieved that Polish reviewers kept avoiding Jewish theatre even when truly great art could be seen there.

This chapter uses the Yiddish film by Israel Beker Long is the Road (1948; Lang ist der Weg/Lang iz der Weg) to discuss Jewish survivors’ dislocation. As the film reveals, displacement bridges survivors’ past and current identities as they search for a future home. Long is the Roadwas the first feature film—and the first German—Jewish collaboration—to (re)present the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective, and the soundtrack by Lothar Brühne particularly sheds light on the various meanings sound and silence can have in the expression of displacement. References to the Kol Nidre prayer convey the trauma of the characters’ separation, and quotation of the popular song “A Yidishe mame” at the reunion of mother and son nostalgically echoes prewar Yiddish entertainment. In the film, Jewish survivors remember home through music and at the same time reimagine that home, which was effectively lost in the postwar period, while looking toward a better future in Israel.

This chapter examines the lack of continuous tradition of the art of the theatre in the history of Jewish culture. Theatre as art and institution was forbidden for Jews during most of their history, and although there were plays written in different times and places during the past centuries, no tradition of theatre evolved in Jewish culture until the middle of the nineteenth century. In view of this absence, the author discusses the genesis of Jewish theatre in Eastern Europe and in Eretz-Yisrael (The Land of Israel) since the late nineteenth century, encouraged by the Jewish Enlightenment movement, the emergence of Jewish nationalism, and the rebirth of Hebrew as a language of everyday life. Finally, the chapter traces the development of parallel strands of theatre that preceded the Israeli theatre and shadowed the emergence of the political infrastructure of the future State of Israel.

This chapter tells the story of Solomon Mikhoels, Russian theatre director, who aids Stalin in the war, and is then murdered by the KGB. The film using superb archive material is mostly seen through the eyes of his daughters. After showing the battles of the USSR against Hitler’s Germany in World War II, it details Stalin’s post war anti Semitism, his destruction of the Moscow’s Yiddish theatre, his secret purges of Jewish intellectuals and artists, and the devilish Doctors Plot concocted by Stalin.

On March 17, 1917, Gershwin quit Jerome Remick and turned his attention more decidedly toward operetta and musical comedy. His affinity for operetta—perhaps nurtured by his teacher Charles Hambitzer, whose operettas he admired—dated back to his boyhood fondness for Yiddish musical theater and Gilbert and Sullivan. However, the popular theater music which most impressed Gershwin was that of Jerome Kern, who was not only an outstanding composer but the prime force in the development of American musical comedy. In February 1918, Max Dreyfus offered Gershwin a salaried position as a staff composer. Gershwin essentially remained with the company T.B. Harms and then Chappell for the rest of his life. In 1927, Harms began publishing Gershwin's music under a subsidiary, the New World Music Company.

This chapter focuses on Arenstein's life and career in the early twentieth century. It describes events such as his decision to change his name from Itzig Arenstein to Ira B. Arnstein and his first large-scale work, a “biblical opera” based on the story of David. In May 1925, at the 1,100-seat Aeolian Hall, Arnstein conducted a cast and chorus of fifty, accompanied by string quartet, organ, and piano, in a Sunday evening concert performance of his work in progress, The Song of David. The success of the concert presentation led to a series of assignments for the Yiddish Art Theatre, providing incidental music and songs for plays by Shalom Asch and Harry Sackler, and a score for Maurice Schwartz's first photoplay, Broken Hearts.