The Yiddish Theater Republic of Sounds and the Performance of Listening

This chapter focuses on modes of listening generated by the Yiddish theater during the outset of the twentieth century. Departing from Moyshe Hurwitz’s four-act opera Yetsies mitsraim (The Exodus from Egypt), it examines the ways whereby listening in and to the Yiddish theater evolved against the backdrop of two simultaneous processes: the invention of sound technology and the Jewish mass migration movement from eastern Europe to the United States. Aiming to understand sound as recorded, aired, and actively listened to by audiences in historically and culturally specific formations, three central performances of listening are traced that reflect perceptual facets of the experience of displacement: theatrical listening, acousmatic listening, and peripatetic listening. These sensory and emotive formations translated, intervened in, and altered the ruptured migratory experience into audiovisual modes of attention, enabling its listeners to practice and negotiate their shifting social reality. Thus, listening in and to Yiddish theater functioned as a cornerstone in the actual and imaginative configurations of the Jewish migratory collective after the turn of the century.