For nearly 20 years, I have moved between Hollywood sets, recording booths and Yiddish stages. To me, they have always been part of the same career. The through line is older than any of them: Jews are a storytelling people.
That idea is at the heart of my new project, “Klezmerette”: an album of Yiddish songs, out October 16, and a documentary film about making it. Yiddish is not a punchline in this work. It is a full sentence.
In one sense, “Klezmerette” is new. In another, it’s the culmination of two decades of work. To explain what I mean, let’s rewind.
I was 17 when I walked into acting school at NYU, fresh out of a yeshiva and determined to prove that I could be both Modern Orthodox and a working actor. Being Modern Orthodox suggested to me that I could, in fact, be modern.
I wasn’t afraid of antisemitism or particularly worried about tzniut, modesty. I worried about the schedule. Would I have to take class or perform on Shabbat? Could I make it to Friday night dinner with my family uptown? I was naive enough not to be afraid and excited to prove I could do both.
In a way, I had been training for the theater my whole life, at home, every Friday night. My father dressed for Shabbat like he was meeting the Pope and sang Kiddush like he was giving a concert. We gathered around the same table with the same candles, wine, challah, melodies and ancient story. It was a profoundly theatrical experience: community forged through song, story and food.
That table became the original thesis of “Klezmerette”: Jews have sustained a shared identity by gathering to tell and retell our stories aloud. It’s why the album is built the way it is, with songs as scenes, each one a story sung to a room.
One Friday during my first winter, I stayed in class too late to take the subway before Shabbat. So I walked nearly 50 blocks from 27th Street to my parents’ apartment on 75th, in the dark and rain. No one at dinner knew what that walk meant to me. But I did. I was proving I could hold all the parts of my life at once. Honestly, I felt pretty badass.
Inside the Stella Adler Studio hung a giant vintage theater poster in Hebrew letters, featuring a young Stella Adler and her brother Luther. Knowing Stella was Jewish made me feel held by the program’s matriarch, even though she was no longer alive. But it took me until my final production to understand what that poster was telling me.
I was playing Hermia in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” directed by Stella’s grandson, Tom Oppenheim. Instead of playing her as the usual pretty ingénue, I made her broad, physical and ridiculous — a pretty girl with a big sense of humor. Tom recognized something vaudevillian in me: the boldness, levity and courage it takes to go for the laugh.
He told me I acted like his family and asked whether I would continue the legacy of Yiddish theater.
Until then, I had not understood that Stella was raised on the Yiddish stage by two of its great actors, Jacob P. and Sara Adler. That poster wasn’t decoration. It represented a lineage, and Tom was inviting me into it.
This was not some marginal Jewish history sitting outside my “real” acting education. It was underneath it. From Torah to Yiddish theater, Broadway and Hollywood, storytelling is not extracurricular for us. It is an inheritance.
My first professional job was in a translated production of Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance” with Tom. Soon after, the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene and the Workmen’s Circle — now the Workers Circle — offered me a scholarship to study Yiddish. I joined the Folksbiene’s troupe and began traveling the country performing songs and sketches.
Then I booked my first Off-Broadway leading role in the Yiddish-language musical “Gimpel Tam.” The New York Observer called me “sympathetic” and “utterly alive” — no small feat, since my character was horrendous. Before long, I was performing at Town Hall with giants like Fyvush Finkel. I was no longer simply learning about this tradition; I was finding my place within it.
At the same time, I was building a career in voiceover, television and film. I hoped those paths would allow me to keep Shabbat, keep kosher and raise a family without compromising my values or my ambitions. My agents and managers never asked me to minimize my Jewish work, although one fellow actor warned it wouldn’t help me get auditions. I kept going.
Years later, I opened the pilot of “God Friended Me” as Rabbi Zoe Schwartz, a proud, liberal Jewish woman and rabbi with friends across faiths. By then, I had a toddler. Playing her made me feel seen. I did not have to abandon my ambition for motherhood or flatten my Jewishness for mainstream television.
Working in both worlds taught me which Jewish stories get told — and which don’t. I am deeply grateful every time Hollywood tells a Jewish story. But gratitude should not keep us from asking for greater specificity, especially now.
Hollywood too often portrays Orthodox Judaism as a prison from which a protagonist must escape. Sometimes that is a person’s truth. For many others, the religious community is a haven and a beautiful place to worship and raise children. Israeli Jews, meanwhile, are too often reduced to conflict or violence. Where is the sweet, guitar-playing man from Tel Aviv? I know plenty of him.
What I want is a wider emotional vocabulary: less self-flagellation, more curiosity about who we are and more Jewish characters whose Judaism requires neither an apology nor a fuss.
Part of the problem is old. The Jewish founders of early Hollywood were trying to overcome systemic antisemitism and enter American life. Jewish writers often followed an unofficial principle: write Yiddish, cast English. They filled American stories with Jewish rhythm, humor and pathos while allowing the characters themselves to appear universal — or explicitly Christian. Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas.” Decades later, George Costanza was ostensibly not Jewish but was unmistakably modeled on Larry David.
This approach helped Jewish artists assimilate. It also blurred us.
A similar inheritance runs through American acting. Stella Adler went on to join the Group Theatre, whose work helped shape modern American performance. The training she passed to actors like Marlon Brando was informed by an imagination, social responsibility and emotional fluency rooted, in part, in the Yiddish stage.
Hollywood still speaks Yiddish because it inherited the language of those artists: big feeling, sharp humor, social conscience and the conviction that stories do not merely entertain a culture. They help create one.
“Klezmerette” is my attempt to say all of that out loud — and in the original.
Across 10 songs, eight of them almost entirely in Yiddish, the album holds sensuality, sorrow, comedy, longing and joy. Its cantorial roots sit alongside Broadway, Roma music and tango. Yiddish is a diaspora language, and our music contains traces of those journeys.
When I sing in Yiddish, I tap into one part of myself to express something universal. I am not simply singing a song; I am inhabiting it. That is what I do on every set, stage and sound booth.
At 17, I walked 50 blocks in the rain to prove I could hold two lives together. On October 15, I’ll walk onto the stage at The Cutting Room with a six-piece band and sing to a room of people gathered, like my family around that Shabbat table, to hear an old story told out loud.
Nearly two decades later, “Klezmerette” is the realization that those lives were never separate. Yiddish theater was not a detour from my Hollywood career. It was the tradition beneath it — and this project is my way of carrying that tradition forward, fully and loudly, in my own voice.
