2024 OFFICIAL SELECTIONS
BUND: THE HOPE AND THE PAST (1987, w/ New English Subtitles)
JEWISH LUCK (1925, World Premiere New Live Score)
THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (1969)
HESTER STREET (1975)
ONLINE FILM: STARTING TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17
BUND: THE HOPE AND THE PAST (1987, w/ New English Subtitles)
A free viewing link will be posted here on Dec 15. The film will be discussed in YNY’s Social Justice Workshop Monday, December 23 at 2:30PM.
1987 Yiddish-language film by David Kedem featuring new English subtitles by Josh Waletzky.
A 1987 Yiddish-language film by Israeli filmmaker David Kedem that explores the history of the Bund and the progressive labor group’s continuity in New York City. Featuring rare interviews with leading New York Bundists, including some important members of the current Yiddish scene. We are excited to present this film featuring new 2024 subtitles produced especially for Yiddish New York by Josh Waletzky.
After viewing, you can attend (in-person or on Zoom) a discussion of the film in the YNY Social Justice Workshop on Monday, December 23, 2024, 2:30pm – 3:45pm EST.
FILM/PERFORMANCE:
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 21, 5:30PM & SUNDAY, DECEMBER 22, 9:00PM
JEWISH LUCK (1925, World Premiere New Live Score)
Saturday Night: At the 14th St. Y (344 E 14th St.) YNY Full Festival pass holders will be emailed a code to register for this event). CLICK FOR TICKETS: @ 14StY (includes panel discussion featuring actress/GOSET scholar Yelena Shmulenson and world-renowned Yiddish cinema scholar Jim Hoberman, moderated by YNY film curator Eve Sicular). Registration for this event is now closed.
Sunday Night: At Hebrew Union College, 1 W 4th St. ($25, included in a Full Festival Pass). CLICK FOR TICKETS
Both of our showings of Jewish Luck, the famed 1925 Soviet Yiddish silent film by Alexy Granovsky will feature the WORLD PREMIERE of a specially-commissioned new score by Lori Goldston, performed by Goldston (cello) with multi-instrumentalist Ilya Shneyveys. The Saturday night showing will include a panel featuring film critic J. Hoberman & actress/GOSET researcher Yelena Shmulenson, moderated by YNY film curator Eve Sicular.
Jewish Luck, one of the most important Soviet Yiddish films, is based on Sholem Aleichem’s series of ironically comic stories featuring the character Menakhem Mendl – a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Lead actor Solomon (Shloyme) Mikhoels and director Alexey Granovsky were both key members of the sensationally modernist Moscow-based GOSET Soviet Yiddish Theater company, but unlike their legendary onstage creations together, this screen feature strives for ethnographic detail without experimental performance technique.
Likewise, production design here by Natan Altman, an avant garde painter, is esthetically faithful to traditional shtetl folk culture — inspired by Jewish fieldwork studies of Sh. An-sky’s expeditions into the late-Tsarist Pale of Settlement. Filmed on locations of quintessential shtetl Berditshev and cosmopolitan Odessa, Jewish Luck shared cinematographer Eduard Tisse with Sergei Eisenstein, whose epic Battleship Potemkin also staged scenes on the famous Odesa Steps during the same summer of 1925. Soviet Jewish author Isaac Babel wrote idiomatically sardonic intertitles for this silent Yiddish film, and its original live accompaniment was composed by GOSET musical director /conductor Lev (Leyb) Pulver, a conservatory-trained violinist who was raised playing weddings in a family of klezmorim.
“Bucolic in spite of itself, Jewish Luck is affectionate but unsentimental….Startlingly fresh and superbly controlled…. Briskly paced, skillfully alternating sight gags and character farce, Jewish Luck is dynamic rather than elegiac.”
— J. Hoberman, The Crooked Road of Jewish Luck [Art Forum]
This event is sponsored by a Humanities New York Action Grant and presented by 14Y and Yiddish New York with promotional support from YIVO and COJECO. Jewish Luck screens courtesy of The National Center for Jewish Film (www.jewishfilm.org), which is responsible for rescuing, restoring, and creating the translation and English intertitles for the film.
MONDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 23, 9:00PM
THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY (1969)
At Hebrew Union College, 1 W 4th St. Admission: $10 (included in a Full Festival Pass). You can also pay at the door. Not available by Livestream.
Ex-con goes meshugge for “call girls, bar mitzvahs… Mafia barbecues, dog training classes, Congressional hearings, and hotel pajama parties.” Includes a panel discussion.
USA, 1969 [released 1989]
Directed by Michael Roemer
Starring Martin Priest, Ben Lang, Maxine Woods and Harry Nemo
Approx. 81 min. New 35mm print/New 4K restoration.
A nearly-lost comedic time capsule, “The Plot Against Harry” is a legendary period piece among latter-day klezmer fans, as its deftly kaleidoscopic late-1960’s milieus display authentic NYC-area clubdate bandstands and simkhe dancing. Likened by reviewers to the work of Robert Altman, Jim Jarmusch, and Franz Kafka, the movie was written after copious immersion research by director Michael Roemer (himself a yekke outsider who had left Berlin via Kindertransport). Sociologically detailed scenes are gently laced with rolling ironic absurdities, and coated with a light layer of what The New Yorker’s Richard Brody admiringly termed “rancid schmaltz.” Filmed in lucid black & white on a dizzying array of locations, with a brilliant, largely non-professional cast, this misunderstood masterpiece was finally a festival triumph twenty years after production. Roemer’s own odyssey with clueless Hollywood studio executives was yet again recounted in 2023 when its new restoration was re-released, as described below by Film Forum:
“Deadpan, small-time Kosher Nostra member and ex-con Harry Plotnick (Martin Priest) is just released from prison and trying to regain his lost turf in a neighborhood turned topsy-turvy. After a chance reunion with his ex-wife and grown children, Harry is suddenly immersed in middle-class normality and goes meshugga when he gets into the catering biz with his ex-brother-in-law (Ben Lang). What follows is a world of call girls, bar mitzvahs, lingerie fashion shows, Cuban-Chinese mobsters, subway parties, Mafia barbecues, dog training classes, Congressional hearings, and hotel pajama parties. Shelved by writer/director Roemer in 1969 following a laugh-less preview, THE PLOT AGAINST HARRY emerged two decades later when he overheard a technician performing a video transfer of the film laughing hysterically. On a whim, Roemer made two 35mm prints and sent them to the New York and Toronto Film Festivals (it was a hit with audiences), before releasing theatrically to great acclaim in early 1990 as a bona fide comedy classic.” – Film Forum
YNY’s film panel will include Allen Lewis Rickman, Bruce Goldstein of Film Forum, and curator Eve Sicular.
Watch the trailer:
TUESDAY NIGHT, DECEMBER 24, 7:00PM
HESTER STREET (1975)
At Hebrew Union College, 1 W 4th St. Admission: $10 (included in a Full Festival Pass). You can also pay at the door. Not available on Livestream.
Oscar-nominated Carol Kane stars in this 1975 adaptation of an 1896 novella by Abe Cahan. Come early at 6:45PM to join in a Zingeray Yiddish sing-a-long! Includes a panel discussion.
USA, 1975 [restored 2021]
Directed by Joan Micklin Silver
Starring Carol Kane, Steven Keats, Mel Howard, Dorrie Kavanaugh
When Joan Micklin Silver wrote the script she would direct as “Hester Street,” her adaptation of Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novella re-focused the story to center a newly-immigrated young mother rather than the “oysgegrint” [already-assimilated] husband. Jake had been the title character in Abe Cahan’s publication “Yekl: A Story of the New York Ghetto,” yet it was Carol Kane’s portrayal of his wife, the greenhorn Gitl, which brought the movie its Oscar nomination. (Cahan’s own English-language text was based in turn on his original serialized Yiddish 1895 work, “Yankel der Yankee.”) The film, made in black & white with a mix of Yiddish and English dialogue, faced many obstacles to production and distribution, since Hollywood did not welcome such pointedly Jewish material, let alone directed by a woman. Producer Raphael Silver, the director’s husband — and himself the son of a prominent Cleveland rabbi — brought together investors, and this feature joined the fledgling indie film industry as a pioneering effort self-distributed to the commercial US market, thanks also to pointers from John Cassavetes. While some in the cast were native speakers of mameloshn (with notable cameos by longtime stars Zvee Scooler as the rabbi, Eda Reiss Merin as the rebetsin, and Leib Lensky as the peddler, as well as Doris Roberts in her supporting role as neighbor Mrs. Kavarsky), other actors including Kane and her co-star Steven Keats were non-Yiddish speakers coached by Michael Gorrin, himself a veteran of Yiddish ARTEF theater and cinema (“Grine Felder” [Green Fields] 1937), as well as many English productions on stage, screen and TV. Mel Howard, playing the boarder Bernstein, a last-minute cast recruit from the production crew, serendipitously had been raised in a Lubavitcher family.
The program will include a discussion of the film and Q&A with Rukhl Schaechter (Editor of the Yiddish Forverts) moderated by YNY film curator Eve Sicular.
Watch the trailer: