A DEFINITE if wobbly line connects the Yiddish theater of 19th-century Eastern Europe and the Lower East Side to the giants of modern American entertainment. It traces a long road from the ghettos and shtetls to Broadway and Hollywood and the likes of Marlon Brando and Barbra Streisand.

That connection is a major theme of an exhibition that opened this week at the Museum of the City of New York. With 250 posters, playbills, photographs, film clips, set designs, costumes and other artifacts, it shows how what began as traveling troupes performing for poor Jewish audiences in Europe turned into a major New York entertainment center that provided a vital escape for the Lower East Side’s sweatshop workers and pushcart peddlers at the start of the 20th century.

Image A statuette from the Goldie Awards, named for the 19th-century actor and playwright Abraham Goldfaden, in “New York’s Yiddish Theater” at the Museum of the City of New York. Credit... Jake Naughton for The New York Times

The exhibition, “New York’s Yiddish Theater: From the Bowery to Broadway,” includes treasures like Miss Streisand’s gray and lavender gown from “Funny Girl,” the 1964 musical about the Jewish vaudevillian Fanny Brice; Zero Mostel’s rumpled Tevye outfit from “Fiddler on the Roof” the same year; and a photograph of a young Frank Sinatra smiling at a poster of Menashe Skulnik, who styled himself as the quintessential nebbish.