Yiddish Theater, George Gershwin, and the Birth of an American Sound
Scholar Ronald Robboy argues that Gershwin's Yiddish theater immersion shaped how he absorbed Black American music — upending the standard story of America's most celebrated popular composer.
Why we picked this
The claim here is genuinely revisionist: that Gershwin's absorption of Black American musical forms was mediated through his Yiddish theater years. If Robboy's argument holds, it rewrites the origins of the twentieth century's most influential American musical vocabulary.
George Gershwin is widely credited with synthesizing jazz, blues, and Broadway — but the story of how he actually absorbed Black American music is usually told as direct influence, largely bypassing the immigrant cultural world in which the young Gershwin was immersed. Scholar Ronald Robboy offers a different account: that Gershwin’s years as a regular attendee at Yiddish theater, particularly the 1922 production Khantshe in Amerike by Joseph Rumshinsky, shaped his ear in ways that mediated and accelerated his engagement with African American musical forms.
The Rumshinsky production Robboy focuses on was itself hybrid: a show featuring “a working-class woman asserting her rights and her desires” that incorporated American rhythm elements into its Yiddish theatrical vocabulary. Robboy’s argument is that Gershwin’s “internalization of Black Americans’ music was influenced by his early immersion in Yiddish theater” — that the Lower East Side was not a barrier but a bridge in the formation of what we now call American popular music.
The lecture is free and virtual, hosted by YIVO. It contributes to a growing scholarly conversation about the triangular relationships between Jewish immigrant, African American, and mainstream American cultures in the early twentieth century — a conversation with implications not only for music history but for how we understand the ethnic and racial formation of American cultural identity itself.