performed in Europe and America, but rarely, if ever, did anyone send him royalties. His health deteriorated – a 1903 letter refers to asthma and spitting up blood – and he was running out of money. In 1903, he wrote Jacob Dinesohn from Paris, authorising him to sell his remaining possessions in Romania, clothes and all. This gave him the money to head once more to New York in 1904. New York City In America, he again tried his hand at journalism, but a brief stint as editor of the New Yorker Yiddishe Ilustrirte Zaitung resulted only in getting the paper suspended and landing himself a rather large fine. On March 31, 1905, he recited poetry at a benefit performance at Cooper Union to raise a pension for Yiddish poet Eliakum Zunser, even worse off than himself because he had found himself unable to write since coming to America in 1889. Shortly afterwards, he met a group of young people who had a Hebrew language association at the Dr. Herzl Zion Club, and wrote a Hebrew-language play David ba-Milchama (David in the War), which they performed in March 1906, the first Hebrew-language play to be performed in America. Repeat performances in March 1907 and April 1908 drew successively larger crowds. He also wrote the spoken portions of Ben Ami, loosely based on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda. After Goldfaden's former bit player Jacob Adler — by now the owner of a prominent New York Yiddish theatre — optioned and ignored it, even accusing Goldfaden of being "senile," it premiered successfully at rival Boris Thomashefsky's People's theatre December 25, 1907, with music by H. Friedzel and lyrics by Mogulescu, who was by this time an international star. Goldfaden died in New York City in 1908. A contemporary account in The New York Times estimated that 75,000 people turned out for his funeral, joining the procession from the People's theatre on Bowery to Washington Cemetery in Brooklyn; in recent scholarship the number of mourners has been given as 30,000. In a follow-up article The New York Times called him "both a poet and a prophet," and noted that "there was more evidence of genuine sympathy with and admiration for the man and his work than is likely to be manifested at the funeral of any poet now writing in the English language in this country." In November 2009, Goldfaden was the subject of