The Transformative Yiddish Theater Giving Our Past A Future Yiddish Theater for the next generation 917 670-1631 דער נייער יידישער רעפערטואַר־טעאַטער   מאמע–לשון איז א מחיה

New Yiddish Rep is proud to have been awarded The All Stars Project's Community Recognition Award "for outstanding community-building through creative, multi-faceted cultural programs."

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Future of Yiddish culture and Yiddish theater For New Yiddish Rep by Prof. Seth Wolitz

The Jews of Eastern Europe produced the first secular Jewish culture in the 3000 year old Jewish journey. They accomplished this feat mainly in Yiddish, the normal language of Jewish daily life for one thousand years. As religious practice weakened, its inheritance, especially its ethics, subtly suffused the growing secular mode of modern Jewish existence and secular Yiddish culture emerged to flourish between 1850 and 1980. Calamitously, the Tremendum, the Holocaust [or Shoah] destroyed most of the native speakers in its unique flowering. Since 1945,the determined survivors, given new circumstances, helped diffuse Yiddish culture into new linguistic settings in which Jewish life regrouped and continues. One of the apogees of secular Yiddish culture, its theatre, re-emerged and courageously pressed Jewish artistic continuity after such cataclysmic realities. New Yiddish Rep focuses on this nexus where the Yiddish language culture in its performative expression joins the new reality of Yiddish infused theatrical expressions in other non-Jewish languages birthing a new Jewish culture. New Yiddish Rep, committed to the rebuilding of Jewish secular culture, eschews nostalgia. By focusing on theatrical works in Yiddish that are still esthetically valid for today, the troupe proffers fresh interpretations of the long Eastern European Jewish experience. At the same time, by initiating new plays written in non-Jewish languages by Jews New Yiddish Rep stages the on-going Jewish experience infused with the inherited ethical Yiddishkayt that pulses through both the classics and the new plays. New Yiddish Rep emphasizes the creative energies of the Jewish people despite unpleasant set backs by presenting fresh interpretations of the great ethical questions of human existence in their diasporic Jewish condition. The alternation of Yiddish plays and Jewish plays in English or translated into English for an attentive audience aware of its Jewish identity and condition, a liminal one caught between the past and the future, makes New Yiddish Rep a major reflector of modern Jewish life today. Yiddish theater, truly secular Jewish theater, emerged with the musical plays of Abraham Goldfaden in the 1870's when this young Eastern European Jew, a new mix of traditional Judaism and modern secular education decided to produce plays for Jews, an astounding event for the Rabbis considered theater blasphemous and goyish. But Jews were enchanted by the shock of seeing themselves mirrored on stage and in an esthetic format describing their private and social lives and introducing songs and even dances from their folkic existence. Yiddish theater was the secular alternative to the synagogue where Jews could gather and feel their presence as a people. The language, Yiddish, bound them with each other and presented them with the wonderment that they were a living people with a new instrument for expressing their reality: theater, an esthetic space outside the realm of traditional Judaism. The Yiddish theater exploded with success and spread all over Eastern Europe and found its fullest and greatest expression in New York City where the Yiddish speakers from every part of Eastern Europe entered the Second Avenue Yiddish theaters. Yiddish theater helped create the modern Jewish people by uniting them in their language, culture and history: The role that contemporary Jewish theater doggedly continues to perform today!