The Yiddish King Lear, directed by Harry Tomashefsky in 1934, is an 80-minute American movie in Yiddish with English subtitles. It is based on a play in Yiddish (Der Yudisher Kenig Lir) by Jacob Gordin, a Russian Jewish playwright and poet, written in 1892. Its cultural significance lies in the play’s reviving Jewish theatre and the film’s contributing to the development of Yiddish cinema. Gordin rewrote Shakespeare’s play most probably in order to put Jewish theatre onto more serious tracks, whereas Tomashefsky revived it as part ‘of the Federal Theatre Project’s Yiddish Unit, created under a plan to put unemployed Yiddish actors back to work at the height of the Great Depression’ (Joel Schechter). The chapter tries to answer a number of questions linked with adaptation strategies concerning both Gordin’s play and Tomashefsky’s film: how does Shakespeare’s text inform the fictional world of the Jewish quarter in Vilna? How are tradition and change reflected in the film? What place does the film occupy in cinema in Yiddish? What status does the film enjoy in adaptation theory? Finally, what kind of Shakespeare derivative does it constitute?