For over a hundred years, Jewish women have been involved in the American theater as writers, actors, directors, designers and producers. The vitality of the Yiddish theater, the splendor of Broadway, the rich tapestry of the regional theater, and everything in between, all owe a debt to the Jewish women who have given of their talents, their energy, their drive, and their dreams.

Sylvia Blagman Syms was a gifted jazz singer who earned praise from Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra, and Duke Ellington. In 1949, she was discovered by Mae West, who became a significant teacher and influence on Syms’s intimate storytelling performing style. Sym’s went on to record fifteen major albums and tour the United States and World before dying of a heart attack. 

Anna Sokolow (1910-2000), an American dancer and choreographer of Russian-Jewish descent, danced with the early Martha Graham Company and created many international dance-theater works of social and political significance.

Award-winning director and screenwriter Joan Micklin Silver, born in 1935 in Omaha, Nebraska, wrote and directed the 1975 barrier-breaking independent film Hester Street, which sparked an interest in the lives of immigrant Jews. She also directed Crossing Delancey (1988), five other feature films, and several films for television.

Feisty and opinionated, Sylvia Sidney was quite the opposite of the waiflike victim of social oppression she played in Hollywood’s Depression Era films. While she disliked playing the victim, her vulnerability and working-class persona resonated with audiences. She earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, took on a comic role as the caseworker in Beetlejuice, and played a sympathetic grandmother in one of the first TV movies about AIDS, An Early Frost.

Irene Mayer Selznick was a producer and philanthropist in Hollywood and New York. She wrote in her memoir, A Private View (1983), that Act I was spent under the shadow of her father, the film executive Louis B. Mayer; Act II was marriage to David O. Selznick, producer of Gone With the Wind; and Act III consisted of her career as a Broadway producer. She is known for producing Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

In revues, nightclub acts, concert halls, and on television, Joan Rivers popularized and perfected a genre of comedy that challenged reigning social conventions. After breaking into Chicago’s comedy scene in 1961 at Second City, Rivers became known for her comedic routines, books, and the talk show for which she won an Emmy for in 1990.

A lively comic actress, Molly Picon brought Yiddish theater to a wider American audience. She acted in the first Yiddish play ever performed on Broadway and insisted on performing in Yiddish on a 1932 tour of Palestine. Filming on location in Poland, on the eve of World War II, Picon captured a view of shtetl life soon to be erased by the Holocaust.

Judith Malina was an actress, director, and producer who dedicated her life to creating avant-garde, politically charged theater works, and activism. She co-founded the experimental Living Theatre company with her husband; was involved in the antiwar movement, Women Strike for Peace, and the Industrial Workers of the World; and won many honors and awards for her acting and directing work. 

A brilliant actress and comedian, Judy Holliday won an Academy Award for her performance as the not-so-dumb blonde in Born Yesterday and performed thousands of times on Broadway. Holliday epitomized the duality of her American-Jewish heritage, as she was a successful performer who was investigated for subversive activities in the McCarthy Era due to antisemitic suspicions. 

Controversial both during and after her life, Lillian Hellman was one of the leading women of letters of mid-century America and a pioneer woman playwright. Hellman displayed courage not only in writing powerful plays like The Children’s Hour but also in her public refusal to name colleagues to the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Miriam Zohar is known as one of the leading ladies of Israeli theater, performing as a lead at the Habimah theater from 1951 until 1994. After a tumultuous war-torn childhood and immigration journey from Ukraine to Israel, Zohar rose to fame working under director Hy Kalus and won an Israel Prize for her noteworthy performances.

Ruth Ziv-Ayal, a director and choreographer, is a pioneer in Israeli experimental movement theater. Her early work was characterized by the use of everyday materials such as household tools, newspapers, and balls, while her later work expanded to use materials such as soil, sand, water, bread, and clothing.

Theater director and choreographer Rina Yerushalmi, one of Israel’s leading artists, is the founder and artistic director of the experimental Itim Theater Ensemble. Her unique theatrical language is based on visual images that present the classical texts in a new light, making them acute and relevant. Yerushalmi currently serves as Professor of Theater at Tel Aviv University.

Helene Weigel was an actress and director known for her maternal roles in Bertolt Brecht’s plays and her incredible kindness and generosity. Weigel married Brecht in 1922 and they fled Germany during the war, returning to East Germany after the war. Weigel was known for her strength, energy, diplomacy, and good humor as she managed an acting career and dealt with many challenges in her lifetime. 

Dora Wasserman created a place for Yiddish theater in Canada by founding a theater and adapting great works of Yiddish literature for the stage. After World War Two, Wasserman immigrated from the Soviet Union to Montreal, formed the Yiddish Drama Group, and produced plays and musicals. She was the first to demonstrate that a theater of diversity could survive and flourish in Canada, and she did so with an all-consuming selfless dedication to her art.

In 1989, Wendy Wasserstein won the Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles and was the first woman playwright to win a Tony Award. After graduating from the MFA program at the Yale School of Drama, in which she was the only woman, Wasserstein wrote countless dramas, three musicals, various comedy skits for television, and a series of essays published in the New Yorker, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar.