One of my favorite characters. Gunkel, from Hanoch Levin's Labor Of Life.

 Photo Source: George Xenos   Review: Backstage Shane Bertram Baker's one-man show, written with director Allen Lewis Rickman, may claim to be a guide for gentiles, but it really instructs his primarily Jewish audience on how a Missouri goy came to be fluent in Yiddish performance and language. Supposedly he's about to accept the Young Yiddish Vaudevillian of the Year award (the YYY). It's a bit like Monty Python, if the Pythons reminisced not about music hall but Yiddish, and it makes...

Drama Desk nominations for: Best Revival Best Actor   THE FORWARD Yiddish Breathes New Life Into 'Death of a Salesman' Ezra GlinterOctober 16, 2015 Is “Death of a Salesman” a Jewish play? Is Willy Loman, its main character, Jewish? The question has been asked almost since “Salesman” was first produced, in 1949. Loman’s precarious life was the fate of many Jews in the 20th century, and playwright Arthur Miller — whose centenary is being celebrated this month — was the son and grandson of...

KIRKUS REVIEW A remarkable testament to faith in the face of suffering. Zvi Kolitz is a Lithuanian Jew who left Europe in 1940 for Jerusalem, where he built a life as a daring Zionist freedom fighter. Just over a year after WWII ended, he wrote a gut-wrenching short story, —Yosl Rakover Talks to God,— the last confessions of a fictional Jewish man who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. The story ran in Di Yiddishe Tsaytung, a Jewish paper in Buenos Aires, on September 25, 1946. Later, Kolitz moved to...

Jewwis Telegraphic Agency A classic play sounds more American when it is performed in Yiddish. Go figure. BY ANDREW SILOW-CARROLL DECEMBER 5, 2017 12:19 PM Actors appearing in "Awake and Sing!" from left to right: Ronit Asheri, Moshe Lobel, Lea Kalisch, David Mandelbaum and Eli Rosen. (Pedro Hernandez NEW YORK (JTA) — Everything I love about the playwright and screenwriter Clifford Odets is found in the opening line of his 1935 play “Awake and Sing!”: “Where’s advancement down the place?” The...

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The 'Godot' We've All Been Waiting For On a recent Friday evening, I was sitting in Manhattan’s Castillo Theatre, on West 42nd Street, waiting to see a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” As the house lights went down, and the stage lights went up, the play’s minimalist set came into view: a low mound and a bare tree that looked more like a metal sculpture than like a living thing. On the mound sat David Mandelbaum as the rundown Estragon, wearing a misshapen hat and a pair of...

Review: In ‘God of Vengeance,’ a Nice Jewish Family Lives Above a Brothel By Charles Isherwood Dec. 29, 2016 Questions of guilt and retribution gnaw ceaselessly at the heart of Yankl (Shane Baker), the central character in Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance,” which is being given a timely revival by the New Yiddish Rep at LaMaMa. A pious Orthodox Jew, Yankl makes his living in what remains a highly unorthodox profession: He owns a brothel that sits below the apartment in which his family lives....