In 1899, before he was Harry Houdini, Ehrich Weiss walked into an Omaha, Neb., police station and asked officers to tie him up, lock him down and see if he could escape. Minutes later, the young Jewish immigrant was free, and the handcuffs were off—a feat that would propel him into a life of stardom.
Nearly a century after his death, the same handcuffs, shackles and other apparatus Houdini owned and used are on display in the new exhibit “Mystery and Wonder: A Legacy of Golden Age Magicians in New York City” at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a research library at Lincoln Center.
The exhibition features more than 300 artifacts from New York’s “golden age” of magic, including objects tied to many of the Jewish magicians who helped define the field in America.
Jews made up a significant share of the world’s most successful magicians during the rise and peak of the field’s popularity, from roughly the 1870s to 1940. The reason, according to exhibit curator Annemarie van Roessel, was tied in large part to their immigrant status.
“Magic really gave the Jews a way to succeed,” van Roessel told JNS at a preview of the show, which opened Feb. 12 and is on view until July 11. “It was a way to reinvent themselves.”
For many Jewish immigrants facing discrimination, limited privilege and restricted access to education and professional opportunities, entertainment, including magic, offered a path forward, van Roessel said.
“Entertainment, not just magic but singing and theater, was an incredibly important way for a lot of immigrant families, especially Jewish immigrant families, to find a foothold and potentially become incredibly successful,” she told JNS.
The exhibit centers on the collection of Dr. Saram Ellison, a New York physician and co-founder of the Society of American Magicians, whose 1,500-volume library of rare magic books was donated to the public library system around the time of his death in 1918.
Ellison’s collection included ephemera, illusion models, magic wands and the first magic book published in the United States.
Van Roessel, who began working on the exhibit in 2020, told JNS that the show is centered on New York because the city was the hub of popular entertainment when magic was coming into its own.
As the capital of music, dance and theater, she said, New York became both a home base for magicians and a launching point for the tours and connections that defined the field.
Jewish immigrants were an integral part of the New York theater scene in the early 20th century, according to Jeffrey Gurock, professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University.
“As far as music and theater and things of that sort are concerned, there was a tradition among secularized Jews in Eastern Europe,” Gurock told JNS. “There was a Yiddish theater in Eastern Europe, and they transplanted it here. But to some extent, their embrace of these types of activities was part of their becoming Americanized.”
Many performers changed their names to blend more fully into American culture, van Roessel said. The most notable example was Houdini, who was born in Budapest, moved with his family to the United States as a child and later settled in New York as a teenager.
He modeled his stage name after the French magician Robert-Houdin.
“Many, many of these magicians were from immigrant families, were first- or second-generation immigrants, immigrants themselves, and they almost all changed their names to sound more American or also just to create stage presence,” she told JNS.
Gurock said that widespread name-changing was not primarily a response to antisemitism.
“It wasn’t so much overt antisemitism, but the pressure to look and sound like an American led Jews to change their names,” he said. “Italians changed their names. Irish changed their names. All those groups wanted acceptance. It wasn’t a uniquely Jewish phenomenon.”
Joshua Jay, a New York-based Jewish magician who has performed in more than 100 countries, offered a different explanation.
He told JNS that for much of magic’s golden age, Jewish immigrants were shut out of many conventional career paths and had trouble finding employment in non-Jewish-owned businesses.
One of the “great, wonderful exceptions,” Jay said, was the theater, much of which was Jewish-owned.
“The theater was somewhere where you could excel and go out on your own,” he said. “It was somewhere where you didn’t have to feel antisemitism and being closed out.”
Houdini talked about this explicitly, according to Jay.
“He saw somebody onstage, and it was the first time that he felt he could look up to somebody because of their career,” he said. “That’s the moment he decided he wanted to be a magician.”
When Jay first began practicing card tricks with his father in Canton, Ohio, he did not know he was stepping into a tradition shaped in no small part by Jewish performers. Today, the 44-year-old spends much of his time lecturing across the country on the subject.
“There are things in the Kabbalah, and there are mystic aspects of Judaism that touch on magic,” he told JNS. “But for me, it came from a much more rational place.”
Jay said the subject of Jews in magic began to interest him only later in his career, over the course of which he has performed for two U.S. presidents and at halftime shows, thrown out a ceremonial first pitch with a magic trick, helped the U.S. Postal Service create its magic stamp series and consulted on magic for “Game of Thrones” and other television and film projects.
Now, he said, he spends much of his time outside of performing lecturing on why so many magicians were Jewish—a discovery he said he made almost by accident.
“I guess you could say I developed an expertise in a very arcane subject matter, which is all of the magicians and spectators and assistants who have been killed in the line of magic,” he told JNS.
“There are lots of them: people who’ve been accidentally shot, purposely shot to look like an accident, framed murders, burned alive, buried alive, and I noticed even many of those people were Jewish,” he said.
A second reason so many Jews were drawn to magic was the value Jewish culture places on entertainment, according to Jay.
In his view, many Jewish families saw performance not as frivolous but as a meaningful skill tied to joy and community life.
“Being raised in a Jewish family, in my family, it was never frowned upon to be a performer,” he told JNS. “It was never frowned upon to say, ‘I want to entertain people for a living,’ whereas so many people I meet to this day say, ‘Oh, you’re a magician. Can you make a living doing that? Do you get paid to do that?’”
“That’s just such a—to be frank—such an un-Jewish line of inquiry,” he said.
Jay’s work on Jewish magicians offers context for several of the figures featured in the exhibit, among them Max Malini (born Max Katz Breit in Poland), Horace Goldin (born Hyman Elias Goldstein in Vilnius) and the Bamberg Dutch Jewish family that performed as magicians for generations.
Jay, who is a member of the Society of American Magicians that Ellison founded, told JNS that the magic community is similar to the Jewish one.
“Our community is unbelievable,” he said. “It’s like the Jewish community. These people, I feel like they are from my tribe—magicians. And it’s amazing.”
He especially enjoys performing for Jewish audiences.
“I think Jewish audiences are quite discerning in what they like in their entertainment,” he said. “I certainly hope my shows offer a very sophisticated kind of entertainment and cater to somebody not who wants to feel wonder and not know how it’s done, but somebody who really thinks rationally about something and is still fooled.”
“That’s what’s so beautiful about magic,” he said. “Not that we willingly suspend our disbelief, but that it’s an unwilling suspension of disbelief.”
