Postwar Yiddish writer Chava Rosenfarb. (Courtesy National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene)
NEW YORK Not long ago, Sabina Brukner, the literary manager at the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene (NYTF), was tasked with modernizing some old records. The NYTF, as we have kvelled about in the past, is the oldest consecutively producing theater company in the United States. When your files go back to 1915, there’s a lot of material. So the time was right for a spreadsheet listing every production the company had staged, all in one place. When Brukner completed the job, she noticed something: there were “few, if any” plays written by women.