all Jewish cultural institutions during that period, even while flourishing for a time during a more liberal political atmosphere. Actors and directors, just like others during that period, were highly aware of labor relations, and tried to create egalitarian working relationships. Organizations such as the Yiddish Actors’ Union, based in Warsaw, played a crucial role in providing a forum for theater professionals to discuss these issues and try new solutions, such as collectively run theaters. Theatrical performances themselves also addressed social issues. Michal Weichert’s Yung-teater was particularly known for political engagement, staging an attention-getting avant-garde performance of the play Boston, by Bernhard Blum, about the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti, in 1933. Yiddish theatre in the Americas The 1883 Russian ban on Yiddish theatre (lifted in 1904) effectively pushed it to Western Europe and then to America. Over the next few decades, successive waves of Yiddish performers arrived in New York (and, to a lesser extent, in Berlin, London, Vienna, and Paris), some simply as artists seeking an audience, but many as a result of persecutions, pogroms and economic crises in Eastern Europe. Professional Yiddish theatre in London began in 1884, and flourished until the mid-1930s. By 1896, Kalman Juvelier's troupe was the only one that remained in Romania, where Yiddish theatre had started, although Mogulesko sparked a revival there in 1906. There was also some activity in Warsaw and Lvov, which were under Austrian rather than Russian rule. In this era, Yiddish theatre existed almost entirely on stage, rather than in texts. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1901–1906 reported, "There are probably less than fifty printed Yiddish dramas, and the entire number of written dramas of which there is any record hardly exceeds five hundred. Of these at least nine-tenths are translations or adaptations." Beginning in 1882 and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, amateur theatrical companies presented Yiddish productions in New York City, leading to regular weekend performances at theatres such as the Bowery Garden, the National and the Thalia, with unknowns such as Boris Thomashefsky emerging as stars. The Thalia Theatre sought to change the material of the Yiddish stage to better reform the material that was being produced. “The reformers of the Yiddish stage, Jacob Gordin later explained, wanted to “utilize the theatre for higher purposes; to derive from it not only amusement, but education.” Jacob Gordin himself had numerous times tried to get his plays onto the