Jacob Jacobs (theater)
American theatre director
Jacob Jacobs (born Yakov Yakubovitsh) (January 2, 1890 – October 14, 1977), was a Yiddish theater and vaudeville director, producer, lyricist, songwriter, coupletist, character actor, comic born in Rosca (now Riska, Romania). In 1904 the family emigrated to the United States and Jacobs worked in a soda factory, later in a sheet-metal factory, and then learned tailoring.
In 1907 he joined the chorus in a vaudeville theater and he sang couplets on Sundays, when vaudeville plays could not be presented. The following year he was hired as a vaudeville actor. In 1911 he was in his first play, Leon Kobrin's Yankel Boyla at the Odeon theater. In 1912 he became director of the Lyric Theater in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and then a partner with Nathan Goldberg in the Lennox Theater in Harlem.
From 1926 to 1930 he was co-director of the National Theater, and subsequently the Prospect Theater in the Bronx. He wrote the music to his own couplets. He married Rebecca Treitler (Betty), daughter of the Yiddish theater director.
In 1932 he collaborated with composer Sholom Secunda on a Yiddish musical comedy, I Would If I Could.
“Jacob Jacobs (theater)” enters the record as american theatre director. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jacob, Jacobs and theater can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17421415. VIAF identifies the subject as 31223952. The Library of Congress control number is n94033248. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1890, 1977, 1904 and 1907.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jacob Jacobs (theater)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.