The Role of Yiddish Popular Theater (Shund) in the Jewish American Experience
Haley Karchmer
Digital Humanities Capstone
Spring 2022
Research Question: How is Yiddish popular theater (Shund) characterized, and what role did it play in the Jewish American experience in the 20th century?
Introduction
Yiddish theater was the most popular American Jewish cultural staple for half a century, expressing the stories of the old world and reflecting on the realities of the present world in which so many émigrés found themselves (Milken Archive of Jewish Music).
Nearly three and a half million Jews immigrated to America between 1881 and 1925, primarily from Eastern Europe to the Northeast coast (Wecker). Amid this massive migration movement, the Yiddish popular theater prospered, producing a large volume of entertainment consumed by millions of Jews. It was a mix of comedy, farce, and melodrama, and performances usually included singing and dancing. It was performed on simple stages with simple props and backdrops and was constructed around the leading actor (Steinlauf). This mass-appealing entertainment was often delegitimized by Jewish intellectuals as ‘shund’ (trash), a term that encompasses “primitive, plagiarized, vulgar, and worthless art” (Abeliovich). German Ashkenazi Jew Theodor Adorno, a Jewish intellectual, relentlessly critiqued popular music and believed that high brow music culture was being challenged by it, and this was largely the fault of the invention of the radio. Adorno saw popular culture as the death of culture, criticizing it as having toxic effects on the social process. As a result, a valuable component of modern popular culture has been overlooked. The goal of this project is to reveal how this delegitimized artistic ‘lowbrow’ theater was a critical element of the fashioning of modernist culture, as “the Yiddish popular theatre played a crucial role in transporting cultural styles, ideas, and products.” (Abeliovich) According to the Dybbuk project, “Yiddish popular theater is a preeminent ethnographic and historical source for examining the sensual and experiential dimensions of theatre, and the theatrical and cultural exchange of minorities with mainstream culture.”
In her book Possessed Voices: Aural Remains from Modernist Hebrew Theater, Ruthie Abeliovich argues that said ‘low brow’ theater is culturally important and complex. Just because it was made quickly and does not appear as stylistically complex, she argues that it does complex things for the culture. She states that recorded performances are “a treasure repository providing Jewish immigrants, refugees, and survivors of anti-semitic atrocities in Europe, with a venue for lamenting the decline of their home communities, and for creating a memory continuum that reconnects their diasporic past to their migratory present” (Abeliovich). The data agrees, and it is first evident by its sheer prevalence in the archive.
In this project, I attempt to explore the layers of shund’s role in the American Jewish experience as I navigate through the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert and Molly Freedman Jewish Sound Archive. I seek to challenge Adorno’s negative criticism of popular music and allow the data to speak for itself and reveal that shund, or “popular music” had cultural utility for Jews living in America in the 20th century.