Jews on Broadway: How Jewish Composers Invented the American Musical

The Most Jewish Art Form That Doesn’t Look Jewish

If you walked into a Broadway theater on any given night in the twentieth century, you would likely see a show written by Jews, produced by Jews, directed by Jews, and starring — well, not always Jews, but often enough. The American musical theater — that exuberant, sentimental, magnificently artificial art form — was, to an extraordinary degree, a Jewish creation.

Consider the roll call:

• Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Baline, Russia)
• George and Ira Gershwin (born Jacob and Israel Gershowitz, Brooklyn)
• Richard Rodgers (New York) and Oscar Hammerstein II (New York)
• Lorenz Hart (New York)
• Leonard Bernstein (Lawrence, Massachusetts)
• Stephen Sondheim (New York)
• Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick (New York and Chicago)
• John Kander and Fred Ebb (Missouri and New York)
• Jule Styne (born Julius Kerwin Stein, London, raised in Chicago)
• Frank Loesser (New York)
• Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe (New York and Berlin)

These names wrote Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Cabaret, Chicago, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and virtually every other musical that matters. The American musical is, in its DNA, a Jewish art form — even when the songs are about Surrey with the fridge on top.

Irving Berlin: The Prototype

The story begins with Irving Berlin (1888–1989), who may be the single most improbable figure in American cultural history. Born in a small town in Russia, he arrived in America at age five, grew up in crushing poverty on the Lower East Side, had no formal musical training, and could play the piano in only one key (F-sharp — he had a special instrument with a lever that transposed).

He wrote over 1,500 songs. Among them: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “White Christmas,” “Easter Parade,” “God Bless America,” “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Cheek to Cheek,” and “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

A Russian-Jewish immigrant who could barely read music wrote the definitive American Christmas song, the definitive American Easter song, and the definitive American patriotic anthem. Jerome Kern said of Berlin: “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He IS American music.”

Rodgers and Hammerstein: The Revolution

If Berlin invented the American popular song, Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960) reinvented the American musical. Before them, musicals were essentially variety shows with a thin plot connecting the songs. Rodgers and Hammerstein made the musical a dramatic form — an integrated work of art where songs advanced the story, revealed character, and expressed emotion organically.

Their partnership produced: Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), The Sound of Music (1959), and more. These shows dealt with serious themes — racism in South Pacific, domestic violence in Carousel, totalitarianism in The King and I — wrapped in some of the most beautiful melodies ever written.

Both men were the sons of Jewish families. Rodgers’ father was a physician; Hammerstein’s grandfather had built the first opera houses in New York. Neither was particularly observant, but the values that run through their work — tolerance, compassion, the dignity of the outsider, the belief that people can change — are recognizably Jewish.

Bernstein and Sondheim: The Next Generation

Leonard Bernstein brought classical music’s ambition to Broadway. West Side Story (1957) — his collaboration with Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins — fused jazz, Latin rhythms, symphonic complexity, and raw emotional power into something unprecedented. It was Romeo and Juliet in Spanish Harlem, and it shattered every expectation of what a musical could be.

Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) took it even further. Starting as Bernstein’s lyricist on West Side Story, he went on to compose and write some of the most sophisticated, challenging, and emotionally devastating musicals in Broadway history: Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987).

Sondheim’s work was dark, complex, and often uncomfortable. His characters were flawed, his resolutions ambiguous, his harmonies thorny. He refused to give audiences easy emotions or simple morals. He was, in the Broadway context, the equivalent of a Talmudic disputant — endlessly questioning, endlessly complicating, endlessly insisting that the truth is more interesting than comfort.

Fiddler on the Roof: Coming Home

In 1964, the American musical finally, explicitly, came home to its Jewish roots. Fiddler on the Roof — with music by Jerry Bock, lyrics by Sheldon Harnick, and book by Joseph Stein — told the story of Tevye, a poor Jewish milkman in the Russian shtetl of Anatevka, whose daughters’ marriages challenge the traditions he holds dear.

The show was a sensation — the longest-running Broadway musical of its time (3,242 performances). Its songs — “Tradition,” “If I Were a Rich Man,” “Sunrise, Sunset,” “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” — entered the permanent canon of American music. Zero Mostel’s original performance as Tevye was legendary.

Fiddler succeeded because it was both specifically Jewish and universally human. The questions it asked — How do we hold onto tradition in a changing world? How do we let our children go? What do we owe to the past? — were questions every audience recognized, regardless of religion or background.

Kander and Ebb: Dark Brilliance

John Kander and Fred Ebb brought a darker, more European sensibility to Broadway. Their masterwork, Cabaret (1966), was set in Weimar Berlin as the Nazis rose to power — a musical about the seductive dangers of ignoring political evil. Chicago (1975) was a savage satire of celebrity, corruption, and media manipulation. Both shows were deeply influenced by their creators’ Jewish consciousness of history’s horrors.

Cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies — “Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome” — became one of the most chilling figures in musical theater: a clown who entertains while the world burns. It was a particularly Jewish nightmare, set in the city where the Holocaust began.

Why Jewish Composers Dominated

The dominance of Jewish composers on Broadway was not a coincidence. Several factors:

Musical training: Many grew up hearing cantorial singing in synagogue — complex, emotionally expressive vocal music that influenced their melodic sensibility. The interval patterns of Jewish liturgical modes appear throughout Broadway music.

Theatrical tradition: The Yiddish theater of the Lower East Side — with its melodrama, its music, its emotional intensity — was a direct predecessor of the Broadway musical.

The outsider’s perspective: The musical theater is, at its core, about outsiders trying to belong — cowboys in Oklahoma, street kids in Manhattan, a milkman in Russia, a governess in Austria. This is the Jewish immigrant story in a thousand disguises.

The desire to be American: Like the Hollywood moguls, Broadway composers channeled their immigrant hunger for acceptance into art that defined America. They could not become American in the country clubs. They became American by writing America’s songs.

Legacy

The Broadway musical is changing — more diverse voices, more varied stories, more inclusive casting. But the foundation laid by Jewish composers remains the bedrock. Every musical that integrates song and story, that uses music to reveal character, that asks audiences to laugh and cry and think in the same evening, is building on the tradition created by Berlin, Rodgers, Hammerstein, Bernstein, Sondheim, and their peers.

They took the emotional intensity of the synagogue, the storytelling genius of the Yiddish theater, and the unbridled ambition of the immigrant, and they created an art form that belongs to everyone. That is the Jewish gift to Broadway — and through Broadway, to the world.