Author: casm_admin

by Paula Ansaldo, University of Buenos Aires

During the twentieth century, the city of Buenos Aires was one of the main centers of Jewish culture and theatre. The great Yiddish theatre began to flourish in the 1930s when Buenos Aires was established as a Jewish theater city of international relevance. During the interwar period, a large population of Yiddish-speaking Jews settled in Buenos Aires, escaping from European hard living conditions and anti-Semitism. As a result, a rich Yiddish cultural life began to grow, and the city became an attractive destination for intellectuals and artists.

At the same time, by the 1930s, the audiences of the Yiddish theatre in the US were already declining, so the actors and actresses decided to go touring to other countries where the Jewish communities were still eager to see theatre in Yiddish, as it was the case of Argentina. The southern hemisphere had an extra advantage: it benefited from the season’s opposition. This allowed that during the summer break the actors could go to work in Argentina, without the need to completely leaving their own companies. That way, they were able to do two winter seasons: one in the US and another one in South America, one based in New York, and the other one based in Buenos Aires, from where they also traveled to other Argentinean cities, such as Rosario, Córdoba, and Santa Fe, and to the Jewish colonies, as Moisesville and Basabilbaso. They also tour other Latin American cities, such as Montevideo, Santiago de Chile, Sao Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro. This way, many American Yiddish theatre directors and actors, came to Argentina and their work had a profound impact on Buenos Aires’ theatre scene.

Between 1930 and 1950, the golden age of Jewish theatre in Buenos Aires, four theatres presented plays in Yiddish regularly: the Soleil and the Excelsior (in the Abasto), the Mitre (in Villa Crespo), and the Ombú (which is where the AMIA is today). In addition to the theatres, some cafes also presented Yiddish vaudeville numbers, such as the Cristal and the Internacional, creating a wide Yiddish theatre scene. The shows were held from Tuesday to Sunday, even with two or three performances on the same day during weekends. The season normally lasted from April to November. And the theatres had always a full house.

The Commercial Theatre in Buenos Aires was organized by a star system. The impresarios brought stars from abroad to lead their companies and completed the cast with local actors and actresses. Thanks to this guest star system, many renowned artists arrived in Argentina and were considered outstanding visits even outside the Jewish theatre community. This happened especially in the case of the actors Jacob Ben-Ami, Maurice Schwartz, and Joseph Buloff, whose repertoire and acting style were completely different from the type of plays (like operettas, melodramas, and light comedies) that prevailed in the theatres of the period, Jewish and non-Jewish also. Anyone who looks into Argentinean newspapers will probably be surprised by the way the theatre reviewers wrote about these Jewish actors. In most cases, the critics didn’t even mention that they were performing in Yiddish. Instead, they focused on their acting skills and abilities, and referred to them as figures of universal theatre, regardless of the language they were using on stage. Many sources show that the critics and actors of the non-Jewish theatre went to see Yiddish plays and were admires of these Jewish actors. The actress Silvia Parodi, for example, says about Ben Ami:

Ben Ami has the gift of making himself understood without the need for language. (…) even without understanding a letter of the text, it’s enough to contemplate his face to feel all the passions and feelings reflected. Silence, attitudes, gestures, say so much that there is no need for more to understand him and admire him.

Therefore, the Jewish theatre was seen by the Argentinean community as a significant phenomenon, especially when the actors brought repertoire that was unknown in the Buenos Aires theatre scene. This was the case of Joseph Buloff’s Death of a Salesman/Toyt fun a seylsman, which premiered in Buenos Aires in 1949 in Soleil Theatre. This was the first time that the Argentinean public saw an Arthur Miller’s play. The show was such a success among Jewish and non-Jewish audiences that in 1950, the prominent actor Narciso Ibañez Menta premiered a Spanish version of the play. This is an emblematic case that shows how the Yiddish Theatre operated as a modernizing force that deeply influenced the theatre scene of Buenos Aires. Its itinerancy enabled, through the use of Yiddish language, the arrival of radical theatrical ideas, modern aesthetics and new repertoires that had not yet been translated to Spanish and neither developed in Buenos Aires’ theatres. 

For these reasons, my time researching at the Dorot Jewish Divison at the NYPL help me to gain a better understanding of the transnational Yiddish theatre network and the connections established between Argentinean and American Yiddish theatre. NYPL materials regarding Joseph Buloff and Ben-Ami allowed me to improve my understanding of their artistic conceptions and how their artistic background, acting style, and repertoire influenced and shaped the Jewish theatre of Buenos Aires.

Paula Ansaldo is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Buenos Aires. In the fall of 2019 she was a Fordham-NYPL Fellow in Jewish Studies. On October 3, 2019 she delivered her talk about ” “A history of the Jewish Theater in Buenos Aires: from the star system to the Idisher Folks Teater (1930-1960),” which can be viewed below.

by Nina Valbousquet

In a picket line of right-wing demonstrators in New York City, a man held a protest sign “We Christians need more father Coughlin”. The picture struck me when I discovered it on the frontpage of The Voice for Human Rights of September 1939, while consulting the journal at the Dorot Jewish Division of the New York Public Library. The frontpage offers a snapshot of two contrasting realities of Christian America and antisemitism. On one side, the picture encapsulates the activism of Charles Coughlin’s pro-fascist militant Christian Front, which in 1938-1939 unleashed an unprecedented level of street and political anti-Jewish hatred in the United States. On the other side, the cover title of the Voice, “Catholics Expose ‘Christian Front’”, demonstrates resistance to antisemitism and to the instrumentalization of Christian values by right-wing hatemongers. 

Antisemitism was a divisive topic among American Catholics at the end of the 1930s. Anti-Jewish vitriol seduced some sectors of American Catholicism while outraging others. In the second half of the 1930s, the repercussions of the Great Depression, the political backlashes of the New Deal, and the worsening of the international situation fostered tensions and resentment toward religious and ethnic minorities and immigrants. The propagation of antisemitic myths about both the “Jewish bank” and “Judeo-Communism” reached a new level of mass diffusion. The rise of domestic anti-Jewish agitations included a “tide of Catholic antisemitism” (Father Gregory Feige) empowered by the inflammatory propaganda of Father Coughlin. Christian antisemites accused “international Jews” of taking part in communist and anticlerical movements in Spain, Mexico, the Soviet Union and France, and blamed American Jews for being complicit with their anti-Christian coreligionists. Jewish refugees in America were labelled communists, radicals, and atheists, all plotting to destroy a Christian White America from within. Coughlin, the “Radio Priest”, capitalized on nativist prejudices and stirred up populist fears against Jewish refugees. 

In spring 2019, thanks to the support of the NYPL-Fordham fellowship in Jewish studies, I was able to examine more closely this historical subject and conduct research at the Dorot division on primary sources pertaining not only to Christian antisemitism in New York City, but also to Jewish-Catholic collaborations in the fight against bigotry. Alongside rare copies of The Voice and the American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, I looked at Social Justice, Coughlin’s weekly based in Detroit. Social Justice’s use of religion and Christianity remained a political expediency to serve a right-wing and nativist agenda. Among other “fake news,” Coughlin published in his weekly the notorious antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, from July to November 1938. An article of December 5, 1938 blamed “Judeo-Communism” for the persecutions of Jews in Germany: “German Jews are today suffering persecution because for 15 years after the Great War Germany was prostrated by Communism, headed by Jews under direction of Moscow.” Thus, Social Justice made the diffusion of anti-Jewish sentiments in American seem understandable and legitimate: “Anti-Semitism is spreading in America because the people sense a closely interwoven relationship between Communism and Jewry. […] It is the duty of American Christians to aid their Jewish fellow-citizens in shaking off Communism before it is too late.” The distinction between communist and religious Jews, and between foreign and American Jews was actually a subterfuge to demonize all Jews while claiming that the publication was not antisemitic. Coughlin’s fallacious arguments drew on typical mechanisms of antisemitism such as conflation, generalization, collective guilt, and conspiracy theories.

An examination of Commonweal, a Catholic weekly of liberal stamp based in NYC, which I was able to consult at Fordham Walsh library, provides a completely different picture. On November 18, 1938, a few days after Kristallnacht, Commonweal published a cartoon and several articles making a plea for European Jewish refugees and asking for the end of the strict immigration quotas that had been implemented in the United States since 1924. Although the cartoon includes stereotypical physical features, its logic of analogy reminds me of current images that have been circulating on social media portraying the Holy Family as refugees from the Middle-East. 

These few examples demonstrate that it is especially timely to further investigate the historical shapes of antisemitism in the United States and to consider both its religious and secular components. While a NYPL-Fordham fellow, I also taught a seminar on antisemitism at Rose Hill campus. Even though at the beginning of the semester not all students were aware of some common antisemitic tropes, they grew increasingly equipped to critically decipher the construction of stereotypes, prejudices, and hate-speech. While most of them knew already about the history of Nazism, they seemed more astonished to discover the roots of a domestic history of antisemitism. Particularly helpful in this regard was the in-class discussion of the Pittsburg shooting and of Jaclyn Granick and Britt Tevis’ article (The Washington Post, October 28, 2018). Learning about the history of anti-refugee sentiments and of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society, students were able to grasp better the intersectionality of prejudices and discriminations in the United States and to revise assumptions of American exceptionalism. One of my takeaways from this intense and stimulating semester is surely that much remains to be taught and researched about the entanglement between antisemitism, nativism, and populism in American history. 

Nina Valbousquet was a Fordham-NYPL Fellow in Jewish Studies in spring 2019. While at Fordham she also taught a values seminar on antisemitism.