How Jewish People Built the American Theater

HOW ARE THINGS in Glocca Morra?” is a song from the 1947 musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” which is about, among other things, a leprechaun. Glocca Morra doesn’t exist, and if it did, it wouldn’t be in, say, Poland. The song is sung by a homesick Irish lass in the American South; like the show overall, it is the most goyish thing that ever happened on Broadway, unless that would be “Brigadoon,” which opened the same year, with its highland heather and men in kilts. That one’s about a town that awakens only once every hundred years, also not in Poland.

Or is it? Like the score for “Brigadoon,” by Lerner and Loewe, the score for “Finian’s Rainbow” was written by two Jews: E.Y. Harburg (né Isidore Hochberg; the “Y” stood for “Yipsel”) and Burton Lane (né Burton Levy). The show was produced, stage managed and for the most part designed by Jews. The musical director, dance arranger and press reps were Jews. In a city then home to more than two million Jews — even now, the most Jewish city in the world, by sheer numbers — so were a lot of the ticket buyers. (Twenty years later, the playwright and screenwriter William Goldman estimated that Jews made up half the Broadway audience.) Did they hear something familiar in the tune of “Glocca Morra,” even as the lyrics, saluting “Killybegs, Kilkerry and Kildare,” denied it?

Of course, many gentiles also appreciated the yearning-for-a-simpler-time song, which reached deep into American culture in those postwar years. Along with several other tunes from the show — “Old Devil Moon,” “Look to the Rainbow,” “If This Isn’t Love” — “Glocca Morra” was a popular hit, covered by Sammy Davis Jr., Julie Andrews, Connie Francis, Rosemary Clooney, the Tommy Dorsey band and, over time, some hundred others. Davis, a convert, was the most Jewish among them.

Or he was until the song was sung, around 1967, at my temple. For the edification of our suburban Philadelphia congregation, the rabbi’s wife put on annual shows that spoofed Broadway hits with Jewish-themed puns. “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” became “How Are Things in the Gemara?” — the Gemara being an ancient work of rabbinical commentary, and thus a boffo punchline in the synagogue stageatorium. “How Are Things in the Gemara?” was funny, it was lovely, it was filled with longing — and it was ours.

You couldn’t say that about most of what appeared on American stages in the 1940s, musical or otherwise, unless you knew the secret. Though Jews had been an integral part of mainstream theater for decades — creating, presenting, teaching and consuming it — and had found in it the ultimate and most enduring expression of their artistry, seldom was the product Jewish on the surface. The same year that “Finian’s Rainbow” and “Brigadoon” opened on Broadway, Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons” did, too. A morality play about an airplane parts manufacturer whose corner cutting leads to the death of 21 airmen, it is virtually Talmudic in its exquisite weighing of individual and communal responsibility. Everything about it is Jewish except the characters.

Nor is it a one-off. Like many Jewish playwrights of the period, Miller, barely a generation away from a Polish shtetl himself, erased the Jews if not the Jewishness from almost all his reputational works. The putatively gentile “Death of a Salesman,” which had its premiere two years after “All My Sons,” sounds to me, with its Yiddish cadence (“Take an aspirin. Should I get you an aspirin?”) and revolving arguments, like the fractious seders at my grandparents’ apartment. (I’ve never heard a non-Jew say “dast” for “dare” as the down-to-earth Charley does: “Nobody dast blame this man.”) And though “The Crucible” (1953) is set among Massachusetts Puritans and “A View From the Bridge” (1955) among Italian American dockworkers, they, too, feel rabbinical in their ethical wrangling. It wasn’t until the 1960s, with “After the Fall,” a fictionalized rehash of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe, and “Incident at Vichy,” a Holocaust drama, that Jews really showed up — unavoidably and somewhat self-consciously — in Miller’s plays.

By then they were showing up elsewhere, too, often in popular comedies and musicals that highbrow Jewish critics nevertheless despised. Robert Brustein called “Biloxi Blues,” among Neil Simon’s most Jewish works, “meretricious.” Cynthia Ozick described “Fiddler on the Roof,” the 1964 megahit based on Sholom Aleichem stories about impoverished Ukrainian Jews, as “romantic vulgarization” — and Philip Roth trumped her with “shtetl kitsch.” (Had either of them ever seen a musical before?) Miller could write Jewishly, but not about Jews; Simon could write about Jews, but not Jewishly. Damned either way, it seems, but no one said assimilation would be easy.

Well actually, in “Candide” (1956), Leonard Bernstein says just that. A character known as the Old Lady, passing herself off as Spanish though her father “spoke a High Middle Polish,” celebrates her chameleon skills in a song called “I Am Easily Assimilated.” The composer’s own lyrics: “These days, you have to be / In the majority.”

WHICH BRINGS US to the matter ofLenny’s nose, or rather Bradley Cooper’s embodiment of it in the Bernstein biopic “Maestro.”

Before the film’s release last month, Cooper’s prosthetic schnoz drew criticism from many Jews, alert to the re-emergence of a hateful caricature that had trailed them for centuries, often attached to actors. It wasn’t so long ago that gentiles playing Shylock in William Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” did so in “Jewface,” with a large and pendulous hook nose meant to telegraph animality and greed. (Shakespeare describes Shylock variously as a “wolf,” a “cur” and a “cutthroat dog.”) Whether the actor who originated the role in the 1590s wore a wax honker is unknown, but the stereotype was certainly familiar by then. In Christopher Marlowe’s nearly contemporaneous “The Jew of Malta,” the title character’s Moorish slave says, “Oh, brave master, I worship your nose for this.”

Even without the noses — and despite, in Shakespeare’s case, the mitigating poetry — both plays are viciously antisemitic. There’s a reason “The Merchant of Venice,” according to some historians, was the most produced Shakespeare play in Germany during the Third Reich. As the theater scholar Farah Karim-Cooper notes in her book “The Great White Bard” (2023), audiences are strongly influenced by disinformation onstage. In a 2010 study she cites, playgoers in Sweden, Germany and England were asked to evaluate the statement “The reason for antisemitism is the behavior of the Jews in history” both before and after seeing “Merchant.” One out of four found the statement “more correct” afterward. And Shylock was seen as a “typical” Jew by nearly a third.

That shouldn’t surprise us if we believe in the power of theater to confirm and even create opinions and feelings. Whether that power is used toward good ends or bad, the medium itself is unconcerned.

Jews do not have that luxury: The Anti-Defamation League reports that antisemitic incidents in the United States increased torecord levels last year; disturbing comments from public figures seemed to increase even more. Yet if Cooper’s prosthesis is too silly a hill to stand on in that context, violence against Jews, whether verbal or physical — from Kanye West’svitriol to the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh to therecent terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians by Hamas — has often seemed too complex for artists, with their tendency toward both-sides-ism, to face. (What about free speech? What about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians?) Especially in the theater, a supposed safe space for Jews, the response to historical, no less than imminent, threats has always been erratic and constrained.

Not because of a lack of overtly Jewish content. Indeed, the irony is that more shows than ever, both premieres and revivals, seem to be dealing with antisemitism, at least in the past. That they rarely get to the heart of the issue — the sometimes self-imposed (and sometimes viciously enforced) invisibility of Jewishness — is the result of a fear of offense or habit of disguise that evolved as a kind of protection for Jews both onstage and off. Any Roth novel will teach you, as my own childhood taught me, that you must assimilate to a certain degree to survive in an antisemitic world; I stopped talking about “Fiddler” when classmates started calling me “kike.” Yet assimilate too much and something integral to your nature dissolves; for me it would have been like killing my grandparents, as they often made sure to tell me.

Waffling over the expression of identity is probably inherent to all American minority experiences, but it is especially central to, and problematic for, Jewish art, which is often specifically about that waffling and takes its argumentative shape from it, too. But if this “see me/don’t see me” dichotomy has roots as deep as the history of Jews in the American theater, reflecting the age-old conflict of writing for everyone while still being seen for yourself, it was nonetheless shocking to hear, in 2023, what one Broadway insider told me: “Mostly we keep quiet because if we talk, they ship us on the trains.”

This fear persists even though, as I’ve said, New York City stages have in the past year offered a bumper crop of plays and musicals that speak to the subject of antisemitism. Tom Stoppard’s semi-autobiographical “Leopoldstadt” dramatizes the results of the Nazi Anschluss on a Viennese Jewish family in the 1930s and after. “The Doctor,” a revamp of a 1912 Arthur Schnitzler play, starred Juliet Stevenson as Ruth Wolff, a prominent Jewish physician canceled by anti-Semites. The best scenes in the revival of “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window,” Lorraine Hansberry’s 1964 takedown of a hypocritical Greenwich Village Jew, feature Sidney’s casually antisemitic sister-in-law. The comedian Alex Edelman’s “Just for Us” recounts his infiltration of a white supremacist group in a misguided attempt at “outreach.” And things really went meta at the first preview of “Parade,” a revival of the 1998 musical about Leo Frank, the New York Jew lynched in Georgia in 1915. Outside the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, around a dozen protesters representing the Empire State Stormers (a neo-Nazi group affiliated with the so-called Goyim Defense League) yelled at playgoers and distributed fliers attacking Frank as a “Jewish child-murdering pedophile.”

Even so, the most pointed onstage treatment of antisemitism, connecting it to the nature of allyship and lip service within the theater itself, may have been the one that turned the subject into a joke. In “Gutenberg! The Musical!” — a satire in the guise of a backers’ audition for a horrible show about the inventor of the printing press — two aspiring Broadway writers pause their opening patter to announce somberly that since “every important musical has to tackle at least one incredibly serious issue,” theirs will be antisemitism. That’s the last you hear of it, except when a character called Antisemitic Flower Girl occasionally barks things like “I hate Jews” to big audience guffaws.

“Gutenberg! The Musical!” opened a few days after the Hamas attacks and, in the wake of the terrifying news, some Jewish actors, producers and writers began to feel that the real Broadway wasn’t doing much more than the satirical one in “Gutenberg.” Where was the clear response from their non-Jewish colleagues? Having rightly been asked to educate themselves and speak out about threats to other communities, Jews worried in anxious, private conversations why the same education and outspokenness seemed absent when it came to them. “When it’s time to say, ‘Are you here for us?’” one told me, “I fear that they are not.”

In these conversations, some Jews also wondered if they were partly responsible for the failure of others to see them as a marginalized group — or to see them at all. Had Jewish creatives participated in, and in essence condoned, the sidelining of Jewishness on Broadway, a street they basically built? Two of the three fine actors who starred in 2021 in “The Lehman Trilogy” — a multigenerational epic about the Jewish banking family — were gentiles. So is Oscar Isaac, the Sidney in “Sidney Brustein.” (Well, Isaac has some Jewish heritage on his father’s side, hence the “Isaac.”) Both shows were directed by Jews. Stevenson, who played Ruth Wolff in “The Doctor,” would not say what if any faith she practiced. (Nor would that show’s director, Robert Icke.) This list goes on, and is even more striking in film and television, well beyond the Roman Catholic Cooper. In casting Rachel Brosnahan as the title character on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — a comedian obviously modeled on the assertively Jewish Joan Rivers — its producers achieved a difficult double de-Jewification. (On Broadway, though, Brosnahan played Sidney Brustein’s gentile wife.) And did you ever see the nasal monstrosity that Alec Guinness (also Roman Catholic) wears as Fagin in the 1948 film “Oliver Twist,” three years after the liberation of Auschwitz? Where was his impeccable timing then?

As a critic, I’m supposed to be agnostic about such matters; if someone’s good, they’re good. Cooper, a graduate of the Actors Studio, is excellent and, if the nose helped him get there, nobody dast blame the man for that.

But as a coreligionist of Bernstein and Miller and Simon and Rivers and Wolff and the Lehmans, as well as of the Brusteins both Robert and Sidney, I find myself forced, after a season that kept foisting ideas of doomed Jewishness on us — and with a new season continuing to do so with the Holocaust-themed “Harmony,” “Prayer for the French Republic” and “Cabaret” — to question that agnosticism. Who, after all, is all this trauma for? Must the cultural place for endangered minorities always be reduced to their danger only? I have seen too many plays use the Holocaust as a dramatic accelerant or a free pass to pathos.

Jews already know their trauma too well. Others seem to enjoy it or, worse, think of it as a moral vitamin. And though I’m not categorically opposed to the educational function of theater, what troubles me is what isn’t getting said. The theater, which for many Jews was a major way of becoming American in the first place, seems unable to acknowledge that the danger that American Jews face is not just historical, and not just onstage.

“Have we assimilated too much for people to even see us?” one Broadway producer asked me in the week after the Hamas attacks.

I, too, can’t help thinking about the mixed blessing of assimilation, both a goal and a trap. How is it that Jews, in successive waves and for different reasons, keep getting erased from the theatrical culture they did so much to create? Stranger still, they often seem to be holding the eraser — and the scalpel. The nose Cooper put on is the one Jews have spent a century taking off.

IN 1923, LEE Strasberg, a 21-year-old New York City high school dropout with an interest in theater but a job as a bookkeeper in a wigmaker’s shop, saw Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theater perform at Jolson’s Fifty-Ninth Street Theater.

Known for its emphasis on the inner life of characters and the rigorous discipline demanded of actors to reproduce it, the Russian troupe, founded in 1898, was presenting six plays in repertory, including “The Lower Depths,” “The Three Sisters” and “Tsar Fyodor Ivanovich.” Grim stuff, but the dropout, Strasberg, sat rapt at every performance.

Though the plays were performed in Russian, a language Strasberg didn’t understand, the subtle artistry of the actors — so different from the operatic histrionics typical of the time — seemed to reach out from the stage and offer a lifeline. His had not been a particularly happy or fulfilling life to date. Born Israel Strassberg on a Polish shtetl, and known by the diminutive Srulke, he came to America in 1909 and lived meanly with his family on the Lower East Side. The death of his beloved older brother Zalmon during the influenza pandemic of 1918 nearly undid him; it was Zalmon who had encouraged his interest in Yiddish culture. Srulke performed in local Yiddish-language productions, saw professional plays when he could and embarked on a course of his own wide reading. But the realities of the stage did not match the ideals of his imagination until his encounter with the work of the man who, by any other standards, would have seemed his antipodal foil.

Stanislavsky, the Art Theater’s co-director and most famous teacher, was born in 1863 to a landed Christian family, manufacturers of gold and silver thread. His education was enriched by his access to great art and by his exposure to a semi-mystical Eastern Orthodox sect known as the Old Believers. So when later writing of the actor’s “soul” in his seminal mid-20th-century books “An Actor Prepares” and “Building a Character,” it was no metaphor for sensitivity. Rather, as the cultural historian and critic Isaac Butler told me, Stanislavsky believed that people who aspired to work in the theater “were called to a literally holy task.”

How an ideal of acting proposed by a rich, cosmopolitan Christian came to be interpreted, promoted and glorified in the United States primarily by poor, tenement-raised Jews is the mystery at the center of Butler’s book “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act” (2022). Part of the answer, he says, is the “shall-we-say comfort with debate at sometimes very loud volumes” that is almost a Jewish article of faith. And part of it, at least in the case of Strasberg and his founding colleagues Harold Clurman and Stella Adler, was an “almost Talmudic level of scholarship.”

But bigger than both was the Yiddish theater: a keepsake of home, and yet also a means of acculturation for the 2.5 million Jews who arrived in the United States between 1881 and 1924. The tradition of popular drama (and especially comedy) was one of the few forms of cultural expression they could bring with them on boats besides their recipes and religion. And if in the old country the Yiddish theater looked mostly inward, addressing its own communities, in the new country, especially in New York, where most Jews settled, it began to move outward, drawing even non-Yiddish-speaking audiences to a parallel Broadway along Second Avenue. In the district’s many theaters they might see the Yiddish shocker “The Dybbuk” (1920) or translations of the works of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen that had not yet appeared in the city in English.

That was the world in which Strasberg, Clurman and Adler grew up. (Both of Adler’s parents were Yiddish theater stars — her father, Jacob Adler, was a renowned Shylock in 1903.) For them, the theater was a form that united intellectual rigor with expressive potential but also offered a path into the mainstream, or at least a louche branch of it. At a time when only a few industries (including banking and the garment trade) were open to Jews, it was a way for them to commodify their intelligence. The problem was that, with its pandering and bellowing, the Yiddish version was no longer enough.

Seeing the Moscow Art Theater perform in the early 1920s amounted to a conversion experience for all three; learning how actors could experience real feelings onstage, in detail and in depth, became their life’s goal.

But because, like most converts, they were zealots, it wasn’t just a conversion experience for them. Through their later roles as founders and leaders of the Group Theater, the Actors Studio and other schools and programs, they turned Stanislavsky’s system into the Method — and the Method into the prevailing style of American acting. Embedding their own observation and experience within Stanislavsky’s, along with the best of Yiddish theater and a generous dollop of Freud, they converted the American theater to Judaism.

Perhaps it was the embedding — a kind of secret coding — that made it an influential yet ultimately unstable conversion, schismatic and contradictory. Strasberg would break away from Clurman, Clurman would marry and divorce Adler, Adler would disown Strasberg and start her own school; their friend Sanford Meisner would develop a splinter Method, and so would the fifth of the foundational figures, Bobby Lewis (né Lewkowitz). In whatever configurations, they and their colleagues, most of whom were likewise Jewish, trained and helped make stars of generations of students, most of whom were not. Adler begat Marlon Brando; Strasberg, James Dean; Meisner, Robert Duvall; Lewis, Meryl Streep.

Clurman most famously begat Clifford Odets, urging the young Group Theater actor to write plays, and directing one of his earliest — “Awake and Sing!” — in 1935. “Awake and Sing!” was among the first plays on Broadway (and for ages among the last) to deal frankly with poor Jewish characters, the kind that most of the cast, including Adler, Meisner and a 21-year-old who was born Jacob Garfinkle, but now called Jules Garfield, knew deeply because that’s what they were, too. Odets even gave them unreconstructed Jewish names. Adler, though only 34, played Bessie Berger, the matriarch of an impoverished Bronx family terrified of eviction. Meisner played Sam Feinschreiber, an immigrant boarder. And Garfield played Ralph Berger, Bessie’s idealistic son.

“Awake and Sing!” was a sensation and a breakthrough, proof of concept for the Group’s Americanized Method. Its title seemed to be, as well, an exhortation to proclaim Jewishness loudly as integral to the culture. But Broadway did not seriously take up the call, and Hollywood utterly ignored it. (“Awake and Sing!” wasn’t filmed until a version was made for television in 1972.) What the studios wanted was the talent, without their Jewish baggage. So when Jules Garfield quickly became a movie star, he did so under the name John. He soon joined Adler, who had gone to Hollywood earlier in 1937, changing her name to Ardler and getting a nose job.

NOBODY DAST BLAME them, either. Jews are not responsible for antisemitism, even the kind they internalize in trying to avoid the external kind. Adler and Garfield weighed the conflict between pride and practicality, between pronouncing their Jewishness and getting a job, and landed, as thousands of others did, on the side of paying the rent. That this clash of values and exigencies was in fact the theme of “Awake and Sing!” — in which Bessie forces her pregnant daughter into a loveless marriage with Feinschreiber — wouldn’t have been lost on them.

For Adler and so many others, Hollywood was the loveless marriage. Even with name and nose changes, most of the great Jewish stage stars of the era had middling film careers. The anticipated trade-off failed in an industry that, led by the Jewish studio heads, was paranoid, or perhaps just accurate and spineless, about American prejudice. William Fox, Louis B. Mayer, Jack Warner and the rest rarely made movies with juicy Jewish roles; when they did, they seemed to go to perverse lengths not to cast Jews in them. In “Marjorie Morningstar” (1958), about a Jewish woman who changes her name from Morgenstern to further her showbiz dreams, Marjorie is played by the Russian Orthodox Natalie Wood. And when “The Diary of Anne Frank” was made into a movie in 1959, an unknown non-Jew named Millie Perkins got the role, which Audrey Hepburn of all people had already declined. On Broadway four years earlier, the play had starred Susan Strasberg — Lee’s daughter.

At least on New York stages, to which Adler, reclaiming her name, returned around 1943, you might have expected the Method machine, as it churned out actors, playwrights and directors for decades, to give rise to an abundance of Jewish theatrical content. It didn’t.

Assimilation, easy or not, is never just a reaching toward something; it’s a turning away from something else. When the something you are turning away from includes poverty, parochialism and disdain, the urge to represent more than one’s own inheritance, or simply to bury it, may be even stronger. For many Jewish actors, especially in the wake of the Holocaust, it must have seemed safer to stake a claim in the larger world rather than the vulnerable little sector they happened to emerge from. And as artists their goal was surely to play Shakespeare and Ibsen in English, not just Sholom Aleichem in Yiddish.

Jews were neither the first nor certainly the last minority to anguish over that conflict between representing and transcending identity. Should Black actors, as a matter of pride, limit themselves to characters specifically written as Black? (The great Black playwright August Wilson thought so.) If gay or trans actors made analogous choices, they might not work at all.

That’s changing, slowly. But even as it does, the move to expand the canon, and to open the existing one to people formerly excluded from it, finds itself at odds with a movement to limit access to certain roles. The prohibition against blackface is being extended to more and more “faces.” As of now, those faces are asymmetrical: A Black actor can play a Jew — Adrian Lester played Emanuel Lehman — but not vice versa. There are inarguable political reasons for that asymmetry. Yet should we ever achieve a just society, will we require exact matches between playwright and story, actor and character, critic and production, production and audience, as if making theater were an organ transplant? And what would that mean for the many Black Jews and others whose mix of backgrounds doesn’t fit neatly into casting categories?

We are in what may be the opening years of an identitarian sea change, as various artists focus more overtly and exclusively on ever finer slices of themselves, speaking first to those in precise demographic alignment and only secondarily, if at all, to interested others. (As the chief theater critic for The New York Times, I have been asked not to review certain plays that creative teams apparently felt I, as a white man, could not appreciate.) This is the reverse angle on the ideal that Jews brought to the American stage. For one thing, Jews couldn’t afford to speak only to themselves as they moved uptown from Second Avenue: They may have made up a big part of the audience but only a tiny portion — 2.5 percent — of the U.S. population.

Beyond those commercial considerations are aesthetic and even spiritual ones. Strasberg’s version of the Method calls on actors to develop the habit of emotional recall so they can reach into the lives of characters who may at first seem unfamiliar but upon sympathetic examination reveal likenesses. Radical connectedness is the underlying message: We intersect everyone. This was a necessary skill for Jews (and other outsiders) even beyond the theater. (I am myself, but I am also you.) To confuse that with a rigid inhabitation of one’s own identity is to make a mistake like that of some actors who, misinterpreting the Method, over-inhabit the identity of their characters.

Well, whatever works. But the history of Jews in the American theater has largely been based on the necessity of opening up and looking beyond, instead of suffocating in, the small space of the self. Jewish playwrights have written from within other identities not only to avoid being pigeonholed but also to exercise the muscle of sympathy. Miller’s plays may not have featured many Jewish characters, but Jews in the audience knew how to hear between the lines of the Lomans or, for that matter, the Macbeths, just as Black people have long read themselves into white stories and gay people into straight ones. The details are merely grappling hooks that let us climb into the universal. In so doing, we learn to map the coordinates of our inner dramas against the ones onstage to approximate a fuller truth that neither alone is sufficient to reach. Without triangulation, the world is flat.

THAT’S OUR METHOD. Try to understand everyone. Keep quiet about ourselves. Don’t startle the gentiles.

I say “our,” but there are many kinds of Jews. “How Are Things in the Gemara?” would be no joke to some of them; my temple’s punchline is their holy text. I grew up in a different Jewish tradition, one that was slightly embarrassed about the old country and the old ways. (None of my immigrant grandparents ever wanted to see Eastern Europe again.) Though maintaining a pro forma adherence to Conservative Jewish ritual, we took the interstate to almost total assimilation via its service road, culture. Theater, often as not on Friday night, became our substitute orthodoxy: similarly argumentative, often musical and scholarly, if you were so inclined. I became a critic over whitefish salad.

But however airily we defined our Judaism — like many of us, I call myself a “cultural Jew,” with “cultural” doing at least double duty — we were haunted by the fear that others, when the time came, would omit the adjective and treat us accordingly. What, to the world, was a Jew anyway, having cut off his sidecurls and tossed his fur hat? Certainly not anything worthy of protection as a persistently endangered minority, or even worth seeing, having worked so hard to make himself invisible.

What awakened me to the reality behind that fear was, naturally, “Fiddler on the Roof,” which I saw during the Philadelphia stop of its first national tour, in 1969. I was 10. As the show’s Jews were forced, on three days’ notice, to pack up their belongings and leave their shtetl, I understood that this was more or less my grandparents’ story, the one they whispered about, or flipped into Yiddish, so as not to distress the kinder. Kitsch notwithstanding, I cried all the way home.

It wasn’t just their story that set me bawling. For me, “Fiddler” was a warning that the triumphs of American Jewry as I knew it — Bernstein! Miller! — could be knocked to pieces in no time. I’m sure Stoppard would be horrified to know that, for all its plush sophistication, what shook me at “Leopoldstadt” was precisely the same thing. His Viennese Jews are extremely cultured and yet extremely discreet. They are close with gentiles who share their love for painting, music, literature and, yes, theater (Schnitzler is a plot point) but, in the end, have few friends when the Nazis come knocking. Their lives are dismantled, in minutes not days, and most of them die in the Holocaust.

If “Leopoldstadt” stopped there, I wouldn’t have mixed feelings about it. But after the deportations it jumps to 1955, when Leo, a callow 24-year-old Brit much like young Stoppard — though Stoppard was born Czech, not Austrian — belatedly allows himself to learn the truth of what happened to most of his family. The play ends with a list of the death camps and the relatives who died in them or otherwise in the wake of the Anschluss. Each name is a cudgel pulverizing Leo’s blithe assimilation until he and most of the audience (the show was a hit) are a pile of rubble: “Hermine. Auschwitz. Heini. Auschwitz.” How dare a Jew not center historical trauma at all times!

To its portrait of the perils of complacency, this final scene thus adds a portrait of the egotism of survival. In each case the Jews are somehow to blame. Both the murdered Viennese and the living Stoppard stand-in apparently should have known better. Nor is that perverse idea confined to “Leopoldstadt.” Assimilation is not merely a danger but a moral failing in most contemporary theatrical portraits of Jews. The Lehmans lose their empire as they lose their religion. Ruth Wolff, in “The Doctor,” finds that being a cultural Jew offers her no protection from anti-Semites. (She, not they, is the author of her downfall.) On the other hand, in “Parade,” Leo Frank is carefully established as a hubristic outsider not only to Atlanta’s gentiles but also to its gracious, Southern-fried Jews. If only he’d been more likable! There’s no winning in these plays — but to be fair, there’s no winning in most plays. That’s what makes them plays.

Still, it does seem especially glaring that Jews are unlikely to be Jewish onstage unless they are endangered — literally or, as in “The Doctor,” professionally. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that what felt like the fullest theatrical representation of Jewishness among the recent crop of Jewish shows was Edelman’s “Just for Us”: 85 minutes of stand-up about some ineffectual Queens bigots he dismisses as “Nerf Nazis.” The jokes are the delivery system for an ancient anxiety but also the mark of victory over it. (His visit leaves the Nerf Nazis in confused disarray.) So even though he provides his full name — David Yosef Shimon ben Elazar Reuven Alexander Halevi Edelman — for laughs, he is serious (as he toldThe Times) about exploring the place of Jews on the “spectrum of whiteness without having a conversation about victimhood.”

Comedy may be best placed to have that conversation — and certainly, from Woody Allen and Rivers on, comedians have been having it. A jokefest like “Spamalot,” first seen on Broadway in 2005 and revived this season, can say what others can’t: “You just don’t succeed on Broadway / if you don’t have any Jews.” That’s true offstage, anyway. But perhaps most troubling in the prevailing conversation about Jewishness in the theater is that it’s exclusively concerned with what happens onstage. In fussing over noses and casting, looking to preserve our place on the playbill, we are defending the wrong thing. What Jews need most in the theater today is an enhanced and reciprocal culture of allyship, one acknowledging that Jewish plays and Jewish success do not nullify centuries of monstrous mistreatment or disqualify us from the list of targeted minorities. Our art is safe; it’s we who are not.

The Jewish contribution to the creation of the American theater was built on the acknowledgment of a larger humanity alive within each of us, available to some, with natural empathy and rigorous training. Not perfectly so: Though the gentile members of the cast of “The Lehman Trilogy” were excellent, they didn’t sound very Jewish to a Jew. Likewise, in seeking to dramatize universal conflicts (racism, despotism, violence, pride) by passing them through the lens of specific exoticized cultures, the Jewish gods of the golden age of the American musical — George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers among them — often sacrificed accuracy and sensitivity to power and gorgeousness. See: “Porgy and Bess” (1935), “Show Boat” (1927) and “The King and I” (1951). The Irish no doubt resent the leprechaun in “Finian’s Rainbow,” too, and the Scots the heather in “Brigadoon.”

But surely this doesn’t mean we should discourage artists from attempting the greatest thing theater can do: to create liminal spaces that allow us to cross over into new understandings of otherness. Of all people, Jews should recognize the necessity of that. After all, the American theatrical canon — starting in the 1920s for musicals and the 1960s for plays — is disproportionately the work of our tiny minority. For the decades in which the theater remained an important cultural catalyst, “American” and “Jewish” were thus nearly synonymous, not just on Broadway but also in high school dramatic clubs and community Melody Barns. Of course, some of that was because Jews were the gatekeepers, but it was a gate that swung both ways. Jewishness had to become American surreptitiously or by mere osmosis.

Having thrived on the practice, even when erring, we should now treasure it in others and let them err, too. If in some new golden age of theater we want anyone to play everyone — that’s certainly my dream — we have to begin to be happy with it now. For me, the best thing about last year’s Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” starring Wendell Pierce, wasn’t that it had been finally made Jewish — it hadn’t — but that it had been finally made Black.

If that’s erasure, it’s a complicated, uplifting kind, consistent with Jewish values and habits and the history of Jews in the theater. Why else did Strasberg and Adler and the others create the Method but to open American culture to a people and a vision it had not yet fully welcomed? That their effort proved more influential than they dreamed, teaching the world how to act and creating a new kind of drama to act in, is not a mark of its failure but its success. We can celebrate that success in the names of Broadway theaters: the Friedman, the Jacobs, the Schoenfeld, the Hirschfeld, the Gershwin, the Simon, the Rodgers, the Sondheim. But having given so much to the world, we should let the world take it. And not to worry, we won’t disappear in the process. Brigadoon will still be a shtetl when it wakes up another hundred years hence, and “Glocca Morra” will always be Jewish when you sing it.

Source: Theater - nytimes.com