TENTATIVE PROGRAM SCHEDULE:

Friday, April 21

5:30 p.m. — Check in

6:00 p.m. — Shabbos dinner

7:30 p.m. — Lecture 1: "The Seat of Scoffers: Jewish Theater as Cultural Frontier"

Why was there no professional Jewish theater prior to the 1870s? Why were rabbis and communal authorities so opposed to it for so long? What finally got it started? An introduction to the historical and cultural dynamics that shaped early Yiddish theater, including its beginnings in amateur Purim plays and traveling troubadours.

Saturday, April 22

10:00 a.m. — Coffee and nosh

10:30 a.m. — Lecture 2: "Big, Bold, & Musical: Avrom Goldfaden’s Visionary Yiddish Stage"

More than any other figure, Avrom Goldfaden, known as the “Father of Yiddish Theater,” was responsible for its transformation from amateur pastime to a thriving professional stage tradition. We’ll look at the astonishing breadth of Goldfaden’s work over the course of his career, from farces like The Two Kuni Lemls to massive biblical operettas like Bar Kokhba and Shulamis. 

12:00 p.m. — Lunch

2:00 p.m. — Workshop: Learn Classic Yiddish Theater Songs

3:15 p.m. — Tour the Yiddish Book Center's exhibits and book repositories

4:30 p.m. — Lecture 3: "A Golden Age in the Golden Land: Yiddish Theater in America"

Between 1881 and 1910, 1.5 million Jews came to the United States from Eastern Europe. One of the first to arrive was a twelve-year-old with a beautiful voice named Boris Thomashefsky. Despite his young age, Thomashefsky became New York’s first Yiddish theater producer and one of its first and greatest stars. Today’s talk will consider the extraordinary success of Yiddish theater in America and its most fascinating personalities, including the Thomshefskys, the Adlers, and Molly Picon, and the myriad intrigues, feuds, and affairs that kept them in the public eye for decades.

6:00 p.m. — Dinner

7:30 p.m. — Film: Grine Felder (Green Fields) USA, 1937, 97 minutes, Yiddish with English subtitles

Sunday, April 23

9:30 a.m. — Coffee and nosh

10:30 a.m. — Lecture 4: "Nomadic Chutzpah: The Vilna Troupe, Yiddish Theater, and the Avant-Garde"

An international entertainment conglomerate renowned across five continents. Actors who tour sixty cities a year performing in a single language. An iconic brand instantly recognizable across the globe for its distinctive style, repertoire, and logo. Is this Disney or Cirque du Soleil? The next viral internet sensation? In fact, it was the Vilna Troupe (1915-36), an experimental Yiddish theatre company founded by a motley group of teenaged amateurs, impoverished war refugees, and out-of-work Russian actors who banded together to revolutionize the Yiddish stage during the First World War. Subsisting on rations of a single boiled potato per day and routinely fainting from hunger during rehearsals, these performers would nevertheless come to achieve a most unlikely success. This lecture will tell their story, with a particular focus on their iconic 1920 world premiere production of The Dybbuk.

12:00 p.m. — End of program

The lectures in this weekend program will be filmed and presented in future online courses offered by the Yiddish Book Center. 

COST:

$300 for Yiddish Book Center members; $350 for nonmembers. Join or renew your membership now to take advantage of the member discount. Then return here to continue the registration process.

Cancellation Policy: Cancellations by April 14, 2017, will be refunded, minus a $30 administration fee per registered participant. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide a refund for cancellations after April 14.

COURSE READING:

Professor Caplan recommends that participants read two Yiddish plays (in English translation) before the start of the program: The Dybbuk by S. Ansky and The Two Kuni-Lemls by Avrom Goldfaden.

The Goldfaden play will be sent to registered participants as a PDF. The Dybbuk can be purchased at the Yiddish Book Center's online store.

HOTEL INFORMATION:

Due to various university events happening in the Amherst area, hotels tend to fill up quickly, so we encourage you to make arrangements for accommodations as soon as possible. The local Holiday Inn Express (413-582-0002) and Econo Lodge (413-582-7077) are offering our participants discounted rates, pending availability at the time you call.

Please contact these hotels directly and mention that you are part of our event and would like the "Yiddish Book Center rate." If they have availability, they will give you the discounted rate. You can also book online to receive the discounted rate. Click here to book at the Holiday Inn Express. Click here to book at the Econo Lodge.

FACULTY BIO:

Debra Caplan is an assistant professor of theater at Baruch College, CUNY. She began studying Yiddish as an intern at the Yiddish Book Center in 2004 and now holds a PhD in Yiddish from Harvard University. Debra is a historian of Yiddish theater and drama, and her research focuses on Jewish theatrical travel and global artistic networks. Her work has appeared in Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Comparative Drama, New England Theatre Journal, Aschkenas, American Theatre Magazine, and Pakn Treger, where she is a frequent contributor. She is co-founder of the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project (yiddishstage.org), an international consortium of fifteen scholars and librarians dedicated to applying digital tools to the study of Yiddish theater and drama. Debra is also a dramaturg, director, and theater translator who has worked with Target Margin Theater, the New Yiddish Rep, and the Folksbiene. Her first book, Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy, is forthcoming from University of Michigan Press. 

Questions? Contact Education Coordinator Sylvia Peterson at education@yiddishbookcenter.org or 413-256-4900, ext. 143.