Semi-creepy, Yiddish-speaking puppets took Manhattan a half-century before The Muppets
Fifty years before Kermit the Frog invaded Broadway with pigs, rats, and chickens, poet and puppeteer Yosl Cutler regularly performed comedic tragedies with his Yiddish-speaking menagerie. At the beginning of the twentieth century, half a million Yiddish-speaking Jews lived in New York’s Lower East Side. Second Avenue, known as the “Jewish Rialto,” served as Yiddish…
