An Evening of Yiddish Theater in Translation: Celebrating Nahma Sandrow's 'Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance'

Lecture & Performance In Person (Post-event reception included): Admission: Free Zoom Livestream: Admission: Free Watch the video

Join YIVO for scenes of romance, political symbolism, and low comedy in Nahma Sandrow’s translations, performed by Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, Shane Baker, and Jakob von Eichel. The program reflects the variety and range of Yiddish theater repertory, which Sandrow's new book, Yiddish Plays for Reading and Performance, illustrates through three full plays and nine independent scenes, with directors’ notes. The author will introduce and narrate the program, putting the scenes in the context of Yiddish theater history and dramaturgy.

Purchase the book.

This event will take place in person with a wine reception to follow.

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About the Participants

Nahma Sandrow, a playwright and librettist, is Professor Emerita at City University of New York. Her books include Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater and God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation. Many of her translations have been produced professionally, and the award-winning shows she developed out of Yiddish material (Kuni-Leml, Vagabond Stars) enjoyed long off-Broadway runs before touring, receiving rave reviews in the New York Times and other major New York newspapers, as well as Variety and the Associated Press. She wrote the libretto for an opera based on I.B. Singer’s novel Enemies, A Love Story with composer Ben Moore, as well as other music theater pieces.

Yelena Shmulenson is perhaps best known as the icepick-wielding ‘Dora’ in the Coen brothers’ Oscar-nominated film A Serious Man (with Mr. Rickman). Other film and TV credits: Orange is the New Black (Inmate Boyle’, recurring), Blue Bloods, Madame Secretary, The Knick, Boardwalk Empire (as Mrs. Manny Horvitz’), Chicago Med, Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd, Romeo & Juliet in Yiddish, and Chinese Puzzle (w/Audrey Tautou). Stage credits include The Golem of Havana (LaMama/Miami New Drama), The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum (Fringe/tour), two seasons at the Ellis Island Theatre, Covers, Knock, Old New Year with The Lost & Found Project, Tevye Served Raw (NYC) etc. She has also been a Yiddish coach/translator for numerous projects, has won three Earphones Awards for her recorded books (in English), and is fluent in five languages.

Allen Lewis Rickman is a Yiddish theater historian and translator as well as an actor, writer, and director. Acting credits include the Coen brothers' Oscar-nominated A Serious Man, Barry Levinson's You Don't Know Jack (with Al Pacino), John Turturro's Fading Gigolo (with Woody Allen), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (as Red Skelton), recurring roles on Boardwalk Empire and Steven Spielberg’s Public Morals, Relatively Speaking on Broadway (with Marlo Thomas); and he has worked extensively Off Broadway, in regional theatre, and in Yiddish theatre. He co-adapted and directed the Drama Desk-nominated Yiddish Pirates of Penzance, and two other plays each for the Folksbiene and New Yiddish Rep. His translation of Zolotarevski’s Money, Love, and Shame! was produced in New York by the Target Margin company. Plays he’s written have been produced in France, Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Sweden, Romania, and the U.S.; his co-written farce Off the Hook was published in French in L’Avant-Scene Theatre, and his revue The Essence: A Yiddish Theater Dim Sum was published in the anthology Yiddishkeit, edited by the late Harvey Pekar.

Shane Baker is the best-loved Episcopalian on the Yiddish stage today. He has starred internationally as Vladimir in his own Yiddish translation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, most recently at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater in their first-ever Yiddish production. The New Yorker said of his translation that the play “may finally have found its mother tongue.” Shane serves as director of the Congress for Jewish Culture, a Yiddishist organization based in New York, producing over the pandemic period with critically acclaimed virtual presentations of Sh. Ansky's Der Dybbuk and Itzik Manger's Megillah Cycle. In 2020, he received the Adrienne Cooper Dreaming in Yiddish Award.

Jakob von Eichel was born in Toronto to a Canadian mother and a German father, and now lives in New York City with his Mexican wife, six-year-old daughter, and recently-arrived-son. He has played a swath of accented foreigners with a proclivity for violence on television (The Blacklist, Blindspot, Person of Interest, White Collar, Pan Am, The Americans, Madam Secretary, Elementary) and in film, along with the sassy costume designer on HBO's Doll & Em and a traumatized Spanish yuppie in Spanish Class. On stage he was in The Clearing at 59e59, Superior Donuts at Dorset Playhouse, and Fringe of Humanity at Access Theater.