Jewish culture is swamped with passionate outbursts, filled with extremes, and doused with plenty of feeling. Performers were simply reaching into the depths of their recent past to find material for their hilarious acts. The Jewish stage simply magnified the Jewish culture by playing on the stereotypes of Jews that the community all knew.  It was easy for them to laugh at themselves.  Now that they were in America and given the opportunity to break free from repressed types of humor, their jokes became vulgar.  They wanted to break out of the shells they had been held in for so long back in Eastern Europe.  As Howe says, “Ill-lettered Jews had been held in check too long by the repressiveness of the old-world morals and the system of “respect” for learning.  Now, in America, it was their turn–still more, the turn of their sons and daughters” (Howe 558).So many Jews turned to performing because the business disregarded rank and respected the talent only.  Performance was their first major channel for emotion that would bring the community together.  Therefore, Jewish theatre threw away niceties and elegance and thrived in energy and emotion, which is so prevalent in the art and theatre we love today.  Howe describes Jewish theatre beautifully by saying, “It was a theatre spontaneously expressionistic, for it set as its goal not the scrutiny of personal relationships or the probing of personal destinies, both of which have been dominant concerns of the modern and classical theatres of the west, but rather a mythic ordering of Jewish fate, whether through historic spectacle or family drama.  It held up a mirror of recognition for its audiences—and they, for a good length of time, seemed almost to care less about what the mirror showed than about he mere fact that, in all its glitter, the mirror was there.” (Howe 560)