To understand Yiddish Theater it is probably best to go back in time, back to Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century. During the 1800s, traveling bands of performers and jesters were becoming common in Eastern Europe. In Romania Abraham Goldfaden launched the first professional Yiddish performing troupe in 1876.

But… changing political and social ideas were making life intolerable for the Jews who lived there. Jews began a mass exodus and created a tidal wave of immigration to the United States. New York quickly became the center of Eastern European Jewish culture in America.

Actors, singers, composers and dancers from Yiddish theater were among the Jews who arrived in the USA seeking a better life. Many sought jobs in New York’s developing vaudeville scene. And for the Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side Yiddish theater became a haven. Many Yiddish-speaking immigrants found that their journey to a “new life” was not an easy one. It turned out that the streets were not paved with gold and homesickness made them long for the old, the familiar, and the lost. Yiddish theater offered a temporary respite from hard daily realities and offered a few hours of nostalgic return to the old country minus the persecution and pogroms.

Yiddish musical comedies and dramas dealt with real-life issues, stories about the “old country”; Biblical stories; adaptations of plays written in English, and skits about life in America. The music in these plays became so popular that between 1894 and 1942 approximately 50,000 records were produced. Radio stations featuring Yiddish culture and music were popular with Yiddish-speaking audiences across America.

The recordings in this collection were produced between 1901 and 1922, at the height Yiddish Theater’s popularity.  The JSA has created the following six digitized collections from original 78 rpm recordings. It highlights the talents of four stars of Yiddish Musical Comedy: Clara Gold, Gus Goldstein, Anna Hoffmann and Jacob Jacobs.