The Moscow Yiddish Theater

“Professor Benjamin Harshav’s exemplary book is a major contribution to learning and indeed teaching modern East European Yiddish culture through the rich prism of the Moscow Yiddish State Theater, one of its short-lived but immensely influential and lasting highlights.”—Dov-Ber Kerler, Indiana University 

~Dov-Ber Kerler

"Carefully curated and beautifully translated, this collection of manifestos, essays, plays, memoirs, programs, and criticism brings to life—with an immediacy that only primary sources can provide—the otherwise ephemeral performances of the brilliant Moscow Yiddish Art Theater and the contentious world in which they were created, experienced, debated, and remembered."—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University

~Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

"Benjamin Harshav has produced an indispensable work for scholars and general readers. The Moscow Yiddish Theater, his restoration through essays and documents of a vital, energetic and haunted lost world, is a compelling tribute to the culture it describes."—Jonathan Wilson, author of Marc Chagall

~Jonathan Wilson

"Benjamin and Barbara Harshav have assembled a remarkable treasure-trove about a unique Yiddish, cultural institution—a revolutionary, unorthodox theater—a compendium of historic photographs, rare brochures and program notes, two short pieced by Sholem Aleichem, distinguished, archival documents, prominent eyewitness diaries and short essays in Yiddish, Russian, Hebrew, French, German, English, Spanish, and Catalan by such luminaries as Stanislavky, Vakhtangov, Gorky, Chagall, Chaliapin, Toller, Mikhoels, Ben Gurion, Granovsky, and Yehoash. They include an extensive bibliography, a glossary of names, notes and commentaries. Written for the mayvinem and the serious scholar, it captures this innovative unorthodox stage art, and is a delightful read for everyone."—Edward Asner

~Edward Asner

"At last, in their own words! The colorful voices and vibrant players of the Moscow Yiddish Theater come to life in this invaluable contribution to the study of modern Jewish culture. Combining rare first-hand accounts with original source material and meticulous scholarship, Harshav's work lays the foundation for a new appreciation of the Yiddish theater—born of the modernist moment in its Jewish incarnation, home to Marc Chagall and Sholem Aleichem, and the lesser-known figures of Sh. Mikhoels and Abram Efros. This is a welcome and engrossing collection, much of which appears here for the first time in English translation."—Barbara Mann, author of A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space

~Barbara Mann

"A valuable and imaginatively presented work, with a plethora of fascinating first-hand source documents."—Curt Leviant, Jewish Standard

~Curt Leviant, Jewish Standard