Grantee Partner Spotlight: Matthew Schlerf

A Q&A with Matthew Schlerf

Artist, Activist, Community Organizer, and Historian

Your background is fascinating and multi-faceted – you’ve been a facilitator, tour guide, collaborative theater maker, community organizer, and more. How did you first become interested in the history of Jewish Chicago?

You clearly have a strong vision for how the history of Jewish Chicago might be portrayed or displayed for people. Walk us through what that might look like, what it might culminate in.

My background is in theater. When I was in grad school, I was really interested in "site specific" theater, that is, working outside of traditional theater spaces, bringing theater into the streets or into "found" spaces, and working with the history of those sites. 

Now that I work as a tour guide, I meld my background in "site specific" theater with my work in public history and education. A tour guide is a street performer guiding an audience through the actual places and stories of a particular history. I find that people, especially children, can really engage more with history when they can imagine or embody exactly where the events took place. 

So, my vision is to bring more history out of the archive, out of the library, and into the street. 

That way, you can see more easily how urban histories evolve over time; for instance, imagining the social services and public housing that used to exist on a given street where today you can only see private businesses and single-family homes.

I think you said somewhere that you do theater in Yiddish. That’s such an interesting offering, but I’m curious about how challenging that is, and also by the same token, in what ways is that rewarding?

Chicago actually has a really active Yiddish cultural scene. We have a local chapter of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a Yiddish organization that started in Lithuania in the early 20th century. YIVO offers Yiddish language classes for all levels, young and old, and immersive Yiddish excursions to the beach, to Garfield Park conservatory, happy hour drinks, etc. There are also several Klezmer bands, traditional Yiddish folk bands, here in Chicago. I have friends who incorporate Yiddish in all forms of contemporary art and media, which shows that our love of Yiddish is not simply nostalgia for a lost period, but rather Yiddish is alive and well in Chicago. 

And finding Yiddish actors? You know, I'm not fluent in Yiddish. I've been studying the language for a year now, and I started knowing just bits and bobs from childhood. But this past year, I wrote, directed, and performed in a piece of Yiddish theater that used maybe 40 words total, repeated a lot. It was a clown piece, so the emphasis was on the physical comedy. The words being repeated helped the audience follow along. 

I spoke with a lot of people afterward who either remembered words they'd heard before or picked up new words by context, which I think is testament to how effective theater can be as a vehicle for not just history but for language learning, as people learned new Yiddish words through the context, the world we created, without ever hearing those words translated into English.

This has been fascinating. Is there anything you’d like to add?

I'd like to emphasize that what really got me interested in creating these Jewish Chicago tours was a class I took at the Newberry Library on Indigenous Chicago history. The Newberry collaborated with Native people in Chicago to create a digital humanities project and curriculum around Indigenous Chicago history. 

The class, taught by Rose Miron, was incredible. I learned so much about Chicago I had never known, and the digital maps and walking tours inspired me to start a similar project around Jewish Chicago history. 

I want to give credit to that project and encourage readers to check out their website and resources: https://indigenous-chicago.org.

About Matthew Schlerf

Matthew Schlerf is a professional tour guide with an MFA in Collaborative Theater Making. He leads tours (walking, bus, and car) of the Chicago Loop district focused on early Chicago history and interior architecture, including tours for the Chicago Gangsters and Ghosts Tours. 

Matthew is a member of Chicago YIVO (Institute for Jewish Research) and the Chicago Jewish Historical Society. He studies Yiddish with Chicago YIVO and is an active participant in local Yiddish and Jewish cultural programming. His tours and performances originate from extensive archival research; working closely within the Newberry Library's collections, where he has also taken courses in genealogical research, Indigenous Chicago history, and North Side Chicago neighborhoods. 

In 2024 and 2025, he developed and performed a Yiddish clown piece as part of a radical Chicago Purimshpiel directed by Chicago artist Sivan Spector. This year, Matthew devised a piece entirely in Yiddish with three actors that drew heavily on my research of early Jewish Chicago. 

As a local tour guide, he incorporates his knowledge of Jewish Chicago when guiding tourists and locals through the history of the city. Matthew dreams of developing a tour specific to early Jewish Chicago history, a research passion of his, and was recently approached by the Chicago Jewish Historical Society to lead such a tour for their organization. Overall, his work supports public history and humanities, community theater, local organizing, and the revitalization of minority languages and cultures.