[Yiddish stage and screen actress Molly Picon, New York]

Molly Picon (1898–1992), born on the Lower East Side of New York to Polish-Jewish immigrants, became the most famous Yiddish film and theater performer of all time. Regarded as the personification of Second Avenue’s “Yiddish Broadway,” she made her theater debut in 1912 and her film debut in 1921, during the course of a lengthy European tour that would make her a star in a legendary career that spanned more than seventy years.