SOURCE: Erdman, Harley. “Introduction.” In Staging the Jew: The Performance of an American Ethnicity 1860-1920, pp. 1-13. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997.

In the following excerpt, Erdman explores the influence of Jewish stage stereotypes on artists and audiences in the period between 1860 and 1920, showing how various artists both fulfilled and reshaped expectations of their performances.

The actor David Warfield used to tell a story about his professional debut as part of a second-rate West Coast company in the late 1880s. The play was Tom Taylor's Victorian melodrama The Ticket-of-Leave Man, a quarter-of-a-century-old English play that by then was an American stock repertory staple. The role was Melter “Aby” Moss, Jewish henchman and counterfeiter. When Warfield recounted the story to a journalist in 1926, after a long career that saw him celebrated first as the foremost Jewish “delineator” of the day and later as “the greatest living actor in...