Photo: Ch. Maderthoner, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Barbra Streisand as Yentl Mendel (also as Anshel), directed by Barbra Streisand
Yentl is the film Barbra Streisand spent fifteen years fighting to make, and it remains the defining achievement of her career. Released in 1983, directed, co-written, co-produced, and starred in by Streisand herself, it adapts Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story “Yentl, the Yeshiva Boy” into a musical drama about a young Jewish woman in early twentieth-century Eastern Europe who disguises herself as a man in order to study sacred texts. It won Streisand the Golden Globe for Best Director — the first time a woman had won that award — and it proved, against considerable industry scepticism, that a female star could command a major studio film from every side of the camera.
The story is set in a small Polish shtetl in 1904. Yentl Mendel, played by Streisand, is the daughter of the local rebbe, who secretly teaches her Talmud even though Orthodox tradition forbids women from studying sacred law. When her father dies, Yentl faces a future of marriage and domestic life that would end her studies. Instead, she cuts her hair, dresses as a young man, takes the name Anshel, and travels to a yeshiva, a school for religious study, where she is accepted as a male student. There she befriends Avigdor, played by Mandy Patinkin, a fellow student who becomes her closest companion — and the object of a love she cannot declare without revealing her secret. Complications deepen when Avigdor, forbidden to marry his beloved Hadass, played by Amy Irving, asks Anshel to marry Hadass in his place.
Streisand’s performance is a remarkable act of dual creation. As Yentl, she is curious, witty, and fiercely intelligent, a young woman whose hunger for learning is presented as a spiritual calling, not a rebellion for its own sake. As Anshel, she is more guarded, more watchful, a young man learning to inhabit a body and a social role that do not quite fit. The distinction is subtle — a change in posture, in gaze, in the way she listens — rather than a broad comic disguise, and it is all the more effective for its restraint. At forty-one, Streisand was older than the character she played, but her conviction carries the role: audiences believe Yentl because Streisand believes in her so completely.
The film’s most daring choice is its use of music. Rather than staging conventional musical numbers in which characters sing to each other, Streisand and composer Michel Legrand, with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, use songs as interior monologue: Yentl sings her thoughts, doubts, and prayers directly to the audience, while the other characters do not hear her. Songs such as “Papa, Can You Hear Me?” — sung as Yentl leaves her father’s grave to begin her journey — and “Where Is It Written?” — a questioning of tradition and faith — function as soliloquies, giving the audience access to a mind that the world around Yentl refuses to hear. The score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, and its intimacy is the film’s emotional key.
As a director, Streisand shows a confident, classical eye. She recreates the shtetl world with detailed production design, shoots the yeshiva scenes with a reverent attention to ritual and study, and allows long, quiet passages in which learning itself — the poring over texts, the debates between students — becomes dramatic. She also directs her co-stars with generosity: Patinkin’s Avigdor is warm, conflicted, and genuinely likeable, while Irving’s Hadass is not a mere rival but a young woman trapped by the same traditions that confine Yentl, seeking affection and purpose within narrow limits. The love triangle that results is unusual and moving, because each character’s desire is understandable and each character’s situation is impossible.
The path to production was long and difficult. Streisand first encountered Singer’s story in the late 1960s and pursued it through years of studio rejections, with executives doubting that audiences would accept a musical about Talmudic study, a female director, or a star playing a young man. She prepared by filming a short test in Czechoslovakia, assembled a team that believed in the project, and eventually secured financing from United Artists. That persistence is part of the film’s legend, and it gives Yentl a resonance beyond its story: it is a film about a woman demanding access to learning, made by a woman demanding access to directing.
Critical response was largely admiring, though some reviewers questioned the casting and the film’s earnest tone. The Golden Globe for Best Director was historic, and the film’s subsequent Oscar nominations — including Best Supporting Actress for Irving and Best Original Score, which it won — confirmed its standing. The widely noted omission of Streisand from the Best Director Oscar nominations became a talking point about the Academy’s treatment of women directors, a conversation that would continue for decades. Regardless of awards, Yentl endures as a singular achievement: a studio musical about faith, gender, and the right to learn, made with total personal commitment.
For Past Tunes readers, Yentl is essential because it connects Streisand’s earlier roles to her later career. The themes of her best work are all here: a heroine who refuses an assigned place, a voice used as an instrument of thought, and a belief that popular entertainment can address serious ideas. Yentl Mendel, like Fanny Brice and Katie Morosky before her, is a woman who wants more than the world offers — and who, in Streisand’s hands, becomes a figure of enduring inspiration.
The film’s visual world deserves particular attention on a second viewing. Streisand and cinematographer David Watkin create a palette of candlelight, snow, and dark wood that feels both historically grounded and dreamlike, as if the shtetl exists partly in memory. The yeshiva interiors, with their long tables and crowded shelves, convey the seriousness of study without romanticising poverty, while the outdoor scenes in the Czechoslovak countryside give Yentl’s journey a physical scale that matches its spiritual stakes. It is a beautifully shot film, and its restraint makes the musical soliloquies feel all the more intimate when they arrive.