Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice occupies a unique place in world culture. As the fictional, albeit iconic, character of Shylock has been interpreted as exotic outsider, social pariah, melodramatic villain and tragic victim, the play, which has been performed and read in dozens of languages, has served as a lens for examining ideas and images of the Jew at various historical moments. In the last two hundred years, many of the play's stage interpreters, spectators, readers and adapters have themselves been Jews, whose responses are often embedded in literary, theatrical and musical works. This volume examines the ever-expanding body of Jewish responses to Shakespeare's most Jewishly relevant play.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a vibrant theatrical culture took shape on New York City's Lower East Side. Original dramas, comedies, musicals, and vaudeville, along with sophisticated productions of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, were innovatively staged for crowds that rivaled the audiences on Broadway. Though these productions were in Yiddish and catered to Eastern European, Jewish audiences (the largest immigrant group in the city at the time), their artistic innovations, energetic style, and engagement with politics and the world around them came to influence all facets of the American stage. Vividly illustrated and with essays from leading historians and critics, this book recounts the heyday of "Yiddish Broadway" and its vital contribution to American Jewish life and crossover to the broader American culture. These performances grappled with Jewish nationalism, labor relations, women's rights, religious observance, acculturation, and assimilation. They reflected a range of genres, from tear-jerkers to experimental theater. The artists who came of age in this world include Stella Adler, Eddie Cantor, Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, Mel Brooks, and Joan Rivers. The story of New York's Yiddish theater is a tale of creativity and legacy and of immigrants who, in the process of becoming Americans, had an enormous impact on the country's cultural and artistic development.

Shoes are an integral part of Jewish material culture. Although they appear in some of the most foundational biblical stories, they are generally regarded as no more than lowly, albeit essential, accessories.

"Jews and Shoes" takes a fresh look at the makings and meanings of shoes, cobblers, and barefootedness in Jewish experience. The book shows how shoes convey theological, social, and economic concepts, and as such are intriguing subjects for inquiry within a wide range of cultural, artistic, and historic contexts.The book's multidisciplinary approach encompasses a wide range of contributions from disciplines as diverse as fashion, visual culture, history, anthropology, Bible and Talmud, and performance studies. "Jews and Shoes" will appeal to students, scholars and general readers alike who are interested to find out more about the practical and symbolic significance of shoes in Jewish culture since antiquity.

In his historic play ""The Melting Pot"", Israel Zangwill (1864-1926) introduced into our discourse a potent metaphor that for nearly a hundred years has served as a key definition of the United States. The play, enthusiastically espoused by President Theodore Roosevelt, to whom it was dedicated, offered a grand vision of America as a dynamic process of ethnic and racial amalgamation. By his own admission, ""The Melting Pot"" grew out of Zangwill's intense involvement in issues of Jewish immigration and resettlement and was grounded in his interpretation of Jewish history. Zangwill, Anglo Jewry's most renowned writer, began writing seriously for the stage in the late 1890s. At the time, the negative stereotype of the so-called Stage Jew was still deeply entrenched in the theatrical mainstream, so much so that Jewish playwrights writing for the English-language stage avoided altogether the portrayal of Jewish life. Zangwill shattered this silence in 1899 with the American premiere of ""Children of the Ghetto"" - his first full-length drama, and the first English-language play devoted in its entirety to the depiction of Jewish life in an authentic and positive fashion. The play's groundbreaking production drew tremendous attention and generated heated debates, but since the script was never published, the memory of the passions it generated dimmed, and its whereabouts eventually became unknown. After more than a century, theater historian Edna Nahshon has discovered the original manuscript of this milestone text, as well as that of another unpublished Zangwill play, ""The King of Schnorrers"", and the original version of ""The Melting Pot"". Nahshon brings these three works together in print for the first time in ""From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot"". Though written and produced over a period of twenty-five years and not conceived as a trilogy, the three plays are united in this volume by virtue of their shared Jewish subject matter. Read in historical sequence, they take us on a two-hundred-year journey that begins in eighteenth-century London, with its intra-jewish tensions farcically depicted in ""The King of Schnorrers"", then proceeds to the nineteenth-century London Ghetto struggling at a crossroads between tradition and modernity, as portrayed in ""Children of the Ghetto"", and finally reaches the shores of twentieth-century America, where the survivor of a Russian pogrom advocates intermarriage and delivers a messianic gospel of tolerance and racial fusion in ""The Melting Pot"". Edna Nahshon's in-depth introduction to this volume includes a biography of Israel Zangwill that especially pertains to these works and situates them within the Anglo-American theater of the time. The essays preceding each play provide rich and hitherto unknown information on the scripts, their stage productions, and their popular and critical reception. While some issues addressed in ""From the Ghetto to the Melting Pot"" are uniquely Jewish, others are universal and typical of the negotiation of self-presentation by ethnic and minority groups, particularly within the American experience.

The Artef (1925-1940) began as a radical Yiddish workers' theatre and developed into a major American Yiddish theatre company. It was among the acknowledged pillars of the Theatre of Social Consciousness, a movement that redefined the course for the American stage during the half century that followed.

In the 1920s and 1930s, New York was widely recognized as the world capital of the Yiddish theatre. The Artef was a principal theatrical institution during this so-called Golden Era. Established in 1925 as a proletarian theatrical organization affiliated with the Jewish section of the American communist movement, the Artef was hailed by Brooks Atkinson as one of the artistic ornaments in town. In 1934 the Artef moved to Broadway, where it continued to perform until its demise in 1940.

This work examines the history of Artef and analyzes the artistic, ideological, and organizational aspects of its work. The company's major productions are discussed, with a focus on the central issues raised by script, direction, and acting. The book attempts to demonstrate that radical politics often shaped and determined the evolution of the theatre, and that its artistic and organizational life must be seen within the context of the political and cultural movement of which it was a part. The work is divided into three major segments: Chapters I-IV discuss the ideological, social, and cultural forces that gave rise to the Artef, the crystallization of the organization, and the work of its acting studio, which in 1928 became the acting collective of the Artef; Chapters V-VIII cover the period of 1929-1934, the formative years of the Artef and their correspondence to communist Third Period doctrine; Chapters IX-XIII are devoted to the theatre's successful Broadway period, which paralleled the Communist Party's liberal Popular Front era. The last chapter discusses the efforts to revive the Artef, and its inevitable demise following the 1939 German-Russian Nonaggression Pact. This is a major work in Jewish Theatre Studies that will be of great use to scholars and other researchers involved with Jewish and Performance Theatre Studies as well as the history of the American Left.

Shoes are an integral part of Jewish material culture. Although they appear in some of the most foundational biblical stories, they are generally regarded as no more than lowly, albeit essential, accessories.

"Jews and Shoes" takes a fresh look at the makings and meanings of shoes, cobblers, and barefootedness in Jewish experience. The book shows how shoes convey theological, social, and economic concepts, and as such are intriguing subjects for inquiry within a wide range of cultural, artistic, and historic contexts.The book's multidisciplinary approach encompasses a wide range of contributions from disciplines as diverse as fashion, visual culture, history, anthropology, Bible and Talmud, and performance studies. "Jews and Shoes" will appeal to students, scholars and general readers alike who are interested to find out more about the practical and symbolic significance of shoes in Jewish culture since antiquity.