The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

"We Had to Forge Our Link Ourselves": A New Generation of Yiddish Theatre

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Motl Didner, associate artistic director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, speaks about the mixed blessing of working in the Yiddish theater without having been trained by its native participants: on the one hand, his actors lack the native voice, but on the other, they are not "bogged down by nostalgia" and therefore free to reinvent and experiment as artists.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Motl Didner.

This excerpt is in English.

Motl Didner was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1973.