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3 unusual facts about Boris Thomashefsky


Bessie Thomashefsky

She was the wife and stage partner of Boris Thomashefsky, the most popular Yiddish leading man of his era.

Boris Thomashefsky

In 2011 Shuler Hensley portrayed Boris Thomashefsky in The Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, a concert stage show celebrating the Thomashefskys and the music of American Yiddish theatre hosted by their grandson the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

In 1891, with Mogulesko, Kessler, and Adler all engaged in starting the Union Theater, Moishe Finkel brought the still relatively unknown Thomashefsky back to New York to star at his National Theater, where Thomashefsky became such an enormous popular success in Moses Halevy Horowitz's operetta David ben Jesse as to force the Union Theater temporarily to abandon its highbrow programming and compete head on.


Arnold Perlmutter

In 1906 Perlmutter and Wohl composed the music for a romantic drama in English, The Shepherd King; in 1909, Boris Thomashefsky's Dos Pintele Yid and Di sheyne Amerikanerin; and for scores of other historical operettas of the Second Avenue Yiddish Theater District theaters through the early years of the twentieth century.

New York Jewish Film Festival

The 2010 Festival presented N.Y. premieres of restored prints of Falk Harnack's The Axe of Wandsbek (based on Arnold Zweig's novel) about a man who was a paid executioner for the Nazis; and Henry Lynn's classic 1935 Yiddish melodrama, Bar Mitzvah, which features vaudeville jokes, songs, and dancing, and stars legendary actor Boris Thomashefsky in his only film performance.


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