Stardust Lost

Writer Kanfer traces the meteoric rise, precipitous fall, and lasting mark of Yiddish theater on American theater, film, and culture in general. The venues in New York City have all gone. So have the performers and their immigrant audiences. But here they live again as Kanfer meticulously unravels the history of Jewish theater. He begins with the drama of the Old Testament and moves to the cultural explosions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the oppressions of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and the pogroms of czarist Russia. Fleeing anti-Semitic edicts, the Jews of Eastern Europe…