YIDDISH THEATER, GEORGE GERSHWIN, AND THE BIRTH OF AN AMERICAN SOUND: The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is promoting this virtual event.

As a teenager, George Gershwin attended Yiddish theater regularly. “Khantshe in Amerike,” by family friend Joseph Rumshinsky, featured a working-class woman asserting her rights and her desires. But, not only did the show include a Suffragette Parade — it has also been described as the first Yiddish musical to incorporate American rhythm. This lecture by scholar Ronald Robboy will explore the idea that Gershwin’s internalization of Black Americans’ music was influenced by his early immersion in Yiddish theater.

Ronald Robboy is a musician and independent scholar based in San Diego, where he was a professional cellist for many years and, beginning in the 1970s, an early West Coast experimentalist in the klezmer revival. He has written and lectured extensively on Yiddish theater music, and in 1998 was named Senior Researcher for Michael Tilson Thomas’s Thomashefsky Project. Robboy is leading YIVO Institute’s reconstruction of the score to composer Joseph Rumshinsky’s operetta Khantshe in Amerike (1912), to be performed in New York at the Center for Jewish History in May 2026.

This virtual event is from 1 to 2 p.m. Register at https://yivo.org/George-Gershwin