Jazz is prayer. It is too passionate to be anything else. It is prayer distorted, sick, unconscious of its destination. The singer of jazz is what Matthew Arnold said of the Jew, “lost between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.” In this, my first play, I have tried to crystallize the ironic truth that one of the Americas of 1925—that one which packs to overflowing our cabarets, musical revues and dance halls—is praying with a fervor as intense as that of the America which goes sedately to church and synagogue. The jazz American is different from the dancing dervish, from the Zulu medicine man, from the negro evangelist only in that he doesn’t know he is praying. I have used a Jewish youth as my protagonist because the Jews are determining the nature and scope of jazz more than any other race—more than the negroes, from whom they have stolen jazz and given it a new color and meaning. Jazz is Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker. These are Jews with their roots in the synagogue. And these are expressing in evangelical terms the nature of our chaos today. You find the soul of a people in the songs they sing. You find the meaning of the songs in the souls of the minstrels who create and interpret them. In “The Jazz Singer” I have attempted an exploration of the soul of one of these minstrels. Samson Raphaelson. New York, October, 1925. _CAST OF CHARACTERS_ Cast of characters in the first production of “The Jazz Singer,” by Lewis and Gordon in association with Sam H. Harris at the Fulton Theatre, New York City, Sept. 15, 1925. CANTOR RABINOWITZ _Mr. Howard Lang_ MOEY _Mr. George Shafer_ SARA RABINOWITZ _Miss Dorothy Raymond_ YUDELSON _Mr. Sam Jaffe_ JACK ROBIN _Mr. George Jessel_ CLARENCE KAHN _Mr. Robert Russel_ GENE _Mr. Ted Athey_ EDDIE CARTER _Mr. Barney Fagan_ HARRY LEE _Mr. Arthur Stewart Hull_ MARY DALE _Miss Phoebe Foster_ RANDOLPH Dillings _Mr. Robert Hudson_ MISS GLYNN _Miss Mildred Leaf_ FRANKLYN FORBES _Mr. Paul Byron_ A STAGE DOORMAN—JIMMY _Mr. Tony Kennedy_ LEVY _Mr. Nat Freyer_ SIX CHORUS GIRLS _Misses Mildred Jay, Ruth Holden, Eleanor Ryan, Mildred McDonough, Viola Thomas, Betty Wilton, Rita Crane_