Blacks & Jews in America: "Strange Fruit"
“Blacks & Jews in America”—a month-long film series exploring the complex relationship between African Americans and Jews in the U.S.—will begin October 27th with the showing of the acclaimed documentary “Strange Fruit” and continue through November 17th with screenings each Thursday evening.
The films are being shown in conjunction with the course “History of Black-Jewish Relations in the U.S.” taught by Professor John Bracey, but are open to all members of the Five College community. Each film will be introduced by Visiting Assistant Professor Jyl Lynn Felman, a faculty member in Commonwealth College. Felman will provide a historical context for each film and lead a discussion afterward.
“Strange Fruit” traces the history of lynchings and racism which gave rise to the Civil Rights Movement, through the song made famous by blues singer Billie Holiday. The words to this song were originally written by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx, in the form of a poem expressing his horror after seeing a photograph of a lynching—the “strange fruit” of a dead man hanging from a tree. (October 27th)
"Fires in the Mirror"—a one-woman play by celebrated actress Anna Deveare Smith (more recently of “West Wing” fame)—explores the racial tensions that exploded between black and Jewish residents of Crown Heights, Brooklyn after a seven-year-old black child was struck and killed by a Hasidic leader’s car and then, apparently in retaliation, a Hasidic student was stabbed to death. The actual words of participants and eyewitnesses are woven into a series of vignettes portraying the many sides of this wrenching conflict. (November 3rd)
"The Pawnbroker"—a film classic starring Rod Steiger—portrays the relationship between Harlem pawnbroker Sol Nazerman, an embittered man who can’t escape his past as a survivor of a Nazi death camp, and his Latino assistant, Ortiz. Only after Ortiz risks his own life for Sol does the pawnbroker begin to rediscover his own, and his assistant’s, humanity. (November 10th)
The film series concludes on November 17th with the showing of "Hollywood: An Empire of Their Own.” Originally released under the title Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream, this film tells the story of how a group of Eastern European Jewish immigrants created Hollywood. Paramount’s Adolph Zucker, MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, and Universal’s Carl Laemmle, all immigrants from Eastern Europe, reinvented themselves and the American Dream in the movies, and in so doing created a profoundly American cultural institution while giving rise to a stereotype, based in reality, which has often been used against Jews. (November 17th)
All films will be shown at 7:00 p.m. in Herter 231, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and are free and open to all members of the Five College community
This film series is being sponsored by the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro American Studies, Office of Jewish Affairs, Center for Student Development, and Student Affairs and Campus Life.