Sara Adler (née Levitskaya, some sources give Levitsky or Levitzky, changed to Lewis;[1] 26 May 1858 – 28 April 1953) was a Russian actress in Yiddish theater who made her career mainly in the United States.

[a][6] In Russia, she married Maurice Heine (born Haimovitz),[6] the leader of a provincial Yiddish theater troupe.

She joined Adler's Finkel-Feinman-Mogulesko troupe as its principal actor for both dramatic and operetta roles.

[6] According to Harold Clurman, who married their daughter Stella, Sara taught Jacob about acting and helped him gain confidence on the stage.

[1] In 1891, Adler acted in a production of Siberia by Jacob Gordin that her husband directed, which was seen as the beginning of serious Yiddish theater (in contrast to the previous vaudeville and melodrama).

She also portrayed characters from plays written in other languages in Yiddish translations, such as Nora in A Doll's House.

On March 14, 1939, her 50 years of work were honored at the National Theater, where she performed the third act of Resurrection.

[7] Although probably most remembered for her lead roles opposite her husband, Sara Adler also set out on her own with the Novelty Theater in Brooklyn, where she presented (in Yiddish) works of Ibsen and Shaw well before they were familiar to an English-language audience.

After Rudolph Schildkraut quarreled with Max Reinhardt in Vienna, Sara Adler brought him to Brooklyn to play the husband in Gordin's stage adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata.