Windsor stage without luck. “Gordin successfully challenged Lateiner and Hurwitz in 1891–1892 when he entered the Yiddish theatre with an avowed purpose of reforming Yiddish drama.” Rather than “pandering to the public's taste for cheap shund (trash) plays, he sought to secure goodwill of the East Side’s intelligentsia with literature and increasingly incorporated the concepts of “true art” and “serious drama” into their public image.” Professional companies soon developed and flourished, so that between 1890 and 1940, there were over 200 Yiddish theaters or touring Yiddish theatre troupes in the United States. At many times, a dozen Yiddish theatre groups existed in New York City alone, with the Yiddish Theater District, sometimes referred to as the "Jewish Rialto", centered on Second Avenue in what is now the East Village, but was then considered part of the Jewish Lower East Side, which often rivaled Broadway in scale and quality. At the time the U.S. entered World War I, there were 22 Yiddish theaters and two Yiddish vaudeville houses in New York City alone. Original plays, musicals, and even translations of Hamlet and Richard Wagner's operas were performed, both in the United States and Eastern Europe during this period. Yiddish theatre is said to have two artistic golden ages, the first in the realistic plays produced in New York City in the late 19th century, and the second in the political and artistic plays written and performed in Russia and New York in the 1920s. Professional Yiddish theatre in New York began in 1886 with a troupe founded by Zigmund Mogulesko. At the time of Goldfaden's funeral in 1908, the New York Times wrote, "The dense Jewish population on the lower east side of Manhattan shows in its appreciation of its own humble Yiddish poetry and the drama much the same spirit that controlled the rough audiences of the Elizabethan theatre. There, as in the London of the sixteenth century, is a veritable intellectual renascence." Jacob Dinezon quipped: "The still young Yiddish theatre that went to America did not recognize its father just three or four years later, nor would it obey or come when called." Responding in a letter to Dinezon, Goldfaden wrote: "I do not have any complaints about the American Yiddish theatre not recognizing its father... it is not rare that children do not recognize their parents; or even that the parents cannot travel the road their children have