2026-07-31 16:43 UTC
#JimCrow #ScottsboroBoys #Yiddish #history
"A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came
The 1935 Yiddish play ‘Mississippi,’ inspired by the Scottsboro Boys, is available to English readers for the first time.
In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice."
https://forward.com/culture/theater/842006/a-yiddish-theater-troupe-condemned-u-s-racism-then-the-nazis-came/
Replies (1)
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@morton@kolektiva.social 2026-07-31 17:31
@LevZadov@kolektiva.social Since the topic is Polish Jews, I feel compelled to speak up. Before the war, Płock was home to a sizable Jewish community. Most of them perished. Only physical traces remain. My friends are striving to save them from oblivion. Now, 19th-century tenement houses are being demolished, so before long, the old Jewish quarter will be gone. https://jewishplock.eu/en/the-sukkot-of-plock/