Sophie Tucker organizes benefit for Jewish Relief Fund

March is Women’s History Month. NY1920s always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.

One hundred years ago today … Sophie Tucker organized and headlined a performance whose proceeds went to the Jewish Relief Fund. The midnight “soiree” was held at the Paradise Crystal Room, the legendary club formerly known as Reisenweber’s, 58th Street and Broadway at the southeast corner of Columbus Circle. It was an interracial group pf performers, including members of the Shuffle Along cast. Also among the performers was Irving Berlin.

*New York Herald*, 7 March 1922, p. 12. *Newspapers.com*

Please see our related, earlier posts about:

Mar. 26, 1921: Sophie Tucker at Reisenweber's

May 23, 1921: Shuffle Along debuts

Jul. 23, 1922: Shuffle Along, guest-post by Zachary Price

Sep. 1, 1920: Ziegfeld Follies including Irving Berlin

Dec. 8, 1920: Jewish charity

Sophie Tucker, 1922,. Photo by Maurice Seymour. *Worthpoint.com*

The event was part of a campaign of several weeks to raise $5,000 for the Jewish Relief Fund, which collected money for war refugees in Eastern Europe (“Jewish Relief Drive Aided by Theaters,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 5 March 1922).

– Jonathan Goldman, March 7, 2022

TAGS: charity, tzedakah, celebrity, entertainment, theater, women’s history, vaudeville, Jews, war, refugees