As a seasoned historian of politically subversive clowning and popular theatre, Schechter brings a unique perspective to Yiddish performance, filled as that story has been with tummlers, clowns, puppeteers, knockabout artists and other outrageous purveyors of sharply barbed satire. He succeeds in introducing readers to a side of Yiddish theatre they may not have been aware of, but it is a study marred by repetition, tendentiousness, tentativeness and the lack of a clear sense of just what impact the many works he describes had on the American Yiddish theatre of their day.

Schechter focuses on the American popular Yiddish theatre (and sometimes film) of the 1930s, a decade distinguished by such cultural landmarks as the Yiddish Theatre Project; the Communist-oriented Artef (the Workers’ Theatre Collective); and playwrights like Moyshe Nadir and David Pinski, puppeteers Zuni Maud and Yosl Kotler, and vaudevillians like Leo Fuchs, Yetta Zwerling, and Menasha Skulnik. Schechter lovingly tells the stories of the plays and sketches that these troupes and artists created and performed, and assesses their engagement with the Depression-era social and political scene.

The assessment, though, fails to penetrate as deeply as it might. Schechter relies far too heavily on synopsis and description, and not nearly enough on documentation in the form of reviews, memoirs and other contemporary accounts. While, admittedly, such documentation can be limited, even when he includes the odd review, he tends to use it only in a cursory fashion, and at times he reports critical responses without documenting them at all. The study therefore provides little sense either of how critics assessed the success of these works as art or entertainment, or of the relative impact of any of these works. Was everyone buzzing about, say, Moyshe Nadir's Rivington Street, or were the writer and his family the only ones to see it? Schechter constantly speculates about this: this play could be read in a certain way; this playwright might have had a particular aim in mind. More evidence would lessen the need to speculate so much.

And Schechter's messianic conceit is a thoroughly unnecessary form of speculation. ‘One of the most radical cultural events in America could have taken place during the Great Depression, if everyone in the country spoke Yiddish,’ the book begins. Addressing the rich realities of American Yiddish culture rather than continuously returning to an invoked parallel universe would have made for a stronger study.