Registration

In this 4-part series, historian and poet Anna Wrobel will showcase films by 20th century Jewish American filmmakers, exploring cinematic storytelling through the lens of the Jewish immigrant perspective. Classes will meet every other week on Wednesday evenings from 6:00-8:30 PM, beginning May 1st, at the JCA. After watching the film, the group will engage in a discussion around the themes and messages that emerged and how it was shaped by the directors immigrant experience, with important historical context and insights from Anna. Participants may to register for the entire series, or just for the specific films or dates that they choose.

May 1, Film #1: Hester Street (1976), made by American-born director, Joan Micklin Silver, looks at Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to New York City in the early 1900's. Cultural adaptations to American life are precisely and beautifully explored. The film deftly presents sociological distinctions between assimilation and acculturation. Carol Kane is a marvel as a young newly arrived Orthodox wife just out of the shtetl. (90 minutes)

Note: Films 2, 3 and 4 were made by immigrants and refugees who came to the U.S. in the early decades of the 20th Century. These may not be Jewish-themed films, providing “new American” eyes, ripe with insight, rendering America and Americans in perceptive ways.

May 15, Film #2: The Search (1947/48) was a Swiss-American collaboration directed by Viennese emigre, Fred Zinnemann. In the postwar ruins of Allied Occupied Germany, an American soldier, played to perfection by film newcomer, Montgomery Clift, gets involved with a lost Czech boy, as child Holocaust survivors are compassionately processed as refugees to the Jewish pre-state Yishuv. (105 minutes)

May 29, Film #3: Dodsworth (1936), based on Sinclair Lewis' 1929 novel, was directed by French emigre, William Wyler. The story follows the disintegration of the marriage of a newly retired auto industrialist and his younger wife who yearns to break out of Midwestern parochialism. A brilliant cast is led by the great Walter Huston as Dodsworth. Mary Astor is a delight as an American living abroad. (101 minutes)

June 5, Film #4: Ace in the Hole (1951) directed by Polish emigre, Billy Wilder, examines how media may turn a tragic event into popular, and profitable, spectacle. In this noir era film, Kirk Douglas plays a fallen reporter trying to get back on top by dragging out the much watched rescue of a trapped miner. Wilder was prescient as to how the advent of television and image-dominated communication would tend to amplify events as well as tend to script them. (111 minutes)

Snacks and lively post-film discussion are promised.