Shakespeare on the American Yiddish Stage

“Berkowitz’s close study of Shakespeare adaptations demonstrates the creative adaptiveness of Jewish playwrights, performers, and audiences to America. This book of theatre history and cultural history is as entertaining as the plays it describes.”—Ruth Wisse, Martin Peretz Professor of Yiddish Literature and professor of comparative literature, Harvard University

“Berkowitz’s revealing study lovingly and meticulously recreates a fascinating moment when Yiddish theatre tried to ‘improve’ itself by appropriating Shakespeare and his considerable reputation—and in the process created a newly enriched kind of Shakespeare, brimming over with pathos, melodrama, unabashed theatricality, and yiddishkeit.”—Harley Erdman, author of Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity, 1860–1920

“This work is a contribution to American immigrant cultural history, an invaluable study of the development of modern secular Jewish culture, and an impressive addition to the growth and uses of theatre in establishing modern theatrical practices in non-Western societies.”—Seth L. Wolitz, Gale Chair of Jewish Studies, University of Texas at Austin

“Berkowitz begins this cogent and entertaining book with a historical introduction that traces the medieval origins of Yiddish drama in Purim plays, wedding jesters, and secular entertainers at inns. He goes on to show the development of a lively Yiddish theater in 1870s Eastern Europe, a theater that followed Jewish immigrants westward. . . . Highly recommended for collections supporting Jewsigh studies, American studies, and Shakespeare.”—Choice