Theatre History Podcast # 5
Joel Berkowitz on the Yiddish Theatre's Past (and Present)
One of the main reasons that theatre's so thrilling and vital is that, unlike movies or TV shows, it involves a live performance that happens right before our eyes. However, that same quality also makes it almost impossible to recapture that live experience, and it can make studying the history of the theatre difficult.
This podcast will try to help listeners understand and learn more about theatre history across a myriad of time periods and cultures. It features interviews with academics, artists, and others who are working to rediscover forgotten stories from the theatrical past and to create new art and scholarship from them.
The Yiddish theatre was rich and complex, spanning continents and contributing to the rise of Broadway. Joel Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee talks about its origins and history, as well as the many ways in which the Yiddish theatre continues to thrive in the twenty-first century.
Links:
- Check out the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project at yiddishstage.org
- Read about the Museum of the City of New York’s (now closed) exhibition on Yiddish theatre here.
- Watch scenes and hear music from the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s production of The Golden Bride (Die Goldene Kale).
You can subscribe to this series via Apple iTunes or RSS Feed or just click on the link below to listen:
This podcast aims to introduce listeners to the artists, scholars, and archivists who are working to bring the history of performance to life. We hope that, by listening to this show, you’ll learn about exciting new performances, fascinating books, and valuable repositories of knowledge, all of which will help you better understand theatre’s history.
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