Mississippi: A Yiddish Play about the Scottsboro Affair, with Alyssa Quint

Please register for this free online program, offered in partnership with the Workers Circle / Arbeter Ring of Northern California and KlezCalifornia.

In their English translation of the Yiddish play Mississippi, Ellen Perecman and Alyssa Quint have undertaken a work of cultural salvage. Penned in 1935 by Polish-Jewish playwright Leib Malach, the play was performed on the Warsaw stage by the experimental Yiddish theatre company Yung Teatr (“Young Theater”) led by legendary director and drama theoretician Mikhl Weichert. Malach and Weichert were keen to depict a dramatic episode from contemporary life that reflected their humanistic and leftist political ideas as well as avant-garde theatrical practices.

Mississippi is a fictionalized retelling of the Scottsboro Affair, which began with the wrongful arrest of nine African American youths in Alabama in 1931. The play demonstrates how important it was to Yiddish writers of the 1920s and 1930s to grapple with the persecution of Black people in America. In her introductory essay, Quint treats the political aspirations that animated Malach and Weichert, and the vulnerability felt by European Jewry that it saw reflected in the experience of Black Americans.

Alyssa Quint is a Visiting Fellow at Yeshiva University and Associate Editor at Tablet Magazine. She is the author of The Rise of the Modern Yiddish Theater, a finalist for both the National Jewish Book Award and the Jordan Schnitzer Award. She is also the editor of Women on the Yiddish Stage and of the forthcoming Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis: a Critical Edition. She is a contributing editor of the online Digital Yiddish Theater Project and a curator of a number of exhibits at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, where she served as senior scholar for many years.