For over seventy years, Molly Picon, star of Yiddish theater and film,
delighted audiences with her comic song and dance performances. While her
career began in vaudeville and flourished in the Second Avenue theaters of New
York's Lower East Side, Picon later performed on stage and in Yiddish and
Hollywood films for Jewish and non-Jewish audiences around the world. Her
engaging persona and powerful performances helped keep Yiddish culture alive
by bringing it out of the shtetl and into mainstream American culture.
Although Picon always played assertive characters on stage, for many years she
struggled to be taken seriously as an independent woman and actress.
Ultimately, however, she emerged as an icon for second generation American
Jews and helped her audiences appreciate their immigrant past and forge new
American Jewish identities.
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