Artistically rooted in many different entertainment genres, including variety theater, Yiddish theater, and classical theater, Jargon theaters were by definition a hybrid form of entertainment. They purposely blurred the boundary between the private and public spheres, allowing Gentile and Jewish spectators to share a circumscribed intimacy in a society generally defined by rigid distinctions of class, gender, and ethnicity. Whereas scholars such as David Sorkin, Marion Kaplan, Shulamit Volkov, and Gershom Scholem agree that a “private Jewish culture” continued to exist in Imperial Germany, they emphasize how Jews generally aspired to follow the formula of the Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskala: “be a human being out of doors and a Jew at home.” Popular entertainment permitted Jews to transcend this essential distinction. By focusing on the family, the most intimate sphere in which Jews experienced and defined themselves as Jews, Jargon theaters turned the private into a public affair. On stage, where they were watched by hundreds of Jews and Gentiles every night, Jews appeared to reaffirm their Jewishness in the context of family life, doing so in the most public way imaginable. In this private/public setting, they were simultaneously human beings and German Jews. It was precisely this dual quality that made Jargon theaters attractive to audiences, who must have sensed the more universal meaning in this endless stream of family farces.