Voicing Yiddish, Performing America: Molly Picon Between Second Avenue andAbstract: Broadway, Talk by Marida Rizzuti at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026.

The paper examines Molly Picon as a key figure in shaping a performative and sonic Jewishness capable of crossing cultural spaces, languages, and media, following the dual movement evoked in the title: voicing Yiddish and performing America. Picon stands out as one of the few performers able to carry the vocality of Yiddish—its talk-sing rhythms, emotional inflections, and characteristic gesturality—from the stages of Second Avenue into the Broadway musical repertoire without diminishing its Yiddishkeit.Through an analysis of en travesti roles, musical numbers, and comic routines deeply rooted in Yiddish theatrical traditions, the paper shows how Picon crafts a performance mode that brings diasporic culture into dialogue with the conventions of American show business. Her voice functions not merely as a technical instrument but as a device of cultural translation:

through strategic shifts between Yiddish and English, the calibrated use of idiomatic expressions, and a vocal timbre that preserves the “sweet gutturality” of Yiddish, Picon makes Jewishness audible even within strongly assimilated contexts. The paper also highlights how she renders Yiddishkeit legible to English-speaking audiences. Her appearances in Broadway musicals and audiovisual media never relinquish her Yiddish sonic habitus; instead, they refashion it within new formats, contributing to the emergence of a hybrid aesthetic that would shape later representations of Jewishness in film and television culture. Picon thus embodies a model of artistic and identity mediation in which the Yiddish voice becomes an American performance while remaining, at every moment, both.

Marida Rizzuti is adjunct lecturer for History of Film Music at the Department of Humanities, University of Turin. She founded and currently chairs the research group Galassia Musical (GalMus), within the Italian Society of Musicology. Her fields of study are history of Musical and Film Musical, Yiddish theatre, theories of adaptation, and musical emigration between Germany and the United States (1933-1950). She is the author of volumes on Kurt Weill, Molly Picon and the Musical in Classic Cinema. In 2023, she edited, with Naomi Graber, the volume The Works of Kurt Weill. Transformations and Reconfigurations in 20th-Century Music (Brepols).