From Berlin to the Bowery: A Blonde Starlet in Yiddish Theater

How did a non-Jewish, blonde Hollywood actress from Germany get her start in the New York Yiddish theater? The Yiddish theater in prewar United States and Europe was a cultural nexus, where Eastern European Jews, German-speaking Jews, and German-speaking non-Jews gathered. Germany played a key role in the success of the famous Yiddish Vilna troupe. The Yiddish theater later provided jobs for German refugee and immigrant actors in New York and Warsaw. Through photographic evidence, this class speaks to a network representative of a larger phenomenon of German and Yiddish cultural exchanges across the arts.

Nick Block is Associate Professor of the Practice at Boston College in German Studies and Jewish Studies. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in Germanic Languages and Literature and Judaic Studies. His current manuscript entitled Schlepping Culture: The Jewish Renaissance between German and Yiddish, 1880-1940 details the transnational cultural transfers between German and Yiddish modernism. His broader research interests engage with German-Jewish intellectual history and German literature after Auschwitz.

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