Archive: Arts & Entertainment

Yiddish theater grabs you by the kishkes (guts) and doesn't let go. Now the tradition that inspired Broadway is coming to Ithaca, with all the humor, pathos and meaning of its long history. The first-ever Yiddish Theater Festival in the Fingerlakes stars New York City's renowned New Yiddish Rep (NYR) and includes four events over three nights, Sept. 8-10, highlighted by a performance of NYR's internationally acclaimed "Waiting for Godot." (All Yiddish performances are accompanied by English supertitles.)

"Yiddish theater has a unique ability to both move an audience and make them laugh, even in the midst of sadness," says Jonathan Boyarin, director of Cornell's Jewish Studies Program and Festival organizer. "Yiddish continues to have a profound impact on American popular culture and the extraordinary New Yiddish Rep company performances show why."

The Festival kicks off Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 6 pm with a screening at Cornell Cinema of 'Jewish Luck,' a classic silent Yiddish film, starring the great Soviet Yiddish actor Solomon Mikhoels, with original piano accompaniment by the renowned Steve Sterner. The 1920s film is based on Sholem Aleichem's stories featuring a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes.

The film will be followed by a live performance of David Mandelbaum's one-man adaptation of 'Yosl Rakover Speaks to G-d,' the story of a pious Jew challenging God during the final days of the Warsaw Ghetto. Mandelbaum is the artistic director and co-founder of New Yiddish Rep; he has been producing and acting in experimental theater in New York for more than 35 years. No tickets are required for the film or Mandelbaum's performance.

On Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 pm the venue shifts to Ithaca College's Hoerner Theater in the Dillingham Center for 'The Essence: A Yiddish Theatre Dim Sum,' New Yiddish Rep's mostly-English revue of scenes, sketches, songs and oddball diversions from classic Yiddish theatre, performed with breakneck stamina and comic zeal. (Two of the performers, Allen Rickman and Yelena Shmulenson, starred in the Yiddish opening scene of the Coen brothers' "A Serious Man.")

"To see the play performed in Yiddish shifts our understanding of the play's minimalism and existentialism," adds Boyarin, Cornell's Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies and Professor of Anthropology. "In a sense, Yiddish is the play's native language."

v11i33