There Are Jews Here takes you on a journey to places where most never imagined Jews existed, following the untold stories of four once thriving American Jewish communities that can now barely hold a minyan. Most American Jews live in large cities where they are free to define themselves Jewishly in any way they wish. But almost invisible to most of the country are roughly one million Jews scattered across far-flung communities where they are barely hanging on. For them, Jewish identity is a daily urgent challenge; if they don’t personally uphold their communities and live affirmative Jewish lives, they and their legacies could fade away forever.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS is a groundbreaking personal exploration of the community and family divisions that are redefining American Jewish identity and politics. The filmmakers' own families are battlegrounds over loyalty to Israel, interpretations of the Holocaust, intermarriage, and a secret communist past.
EGG CREAM is a short film about the enduring meaning of a beloved chocolate soda drink born on the Jewish Lower East Side. The egg cream contained neither eggs nor cream – it was a product of necessity and hardship, but a source of joy and sweetness. Through a tour of egg cream establishments led by a filmmaker and his young daughter, exhaustively researched archival imagery, and even a song by Lou Reed, the film examines the Jewish experience in America and the mythology of a simpler time.
This film tells the story of the Jewish pilgrims who founded Congregation Shearith Israel—a “Remnant of Israel”—in 1654 in the Dutch trading post of New Amsterdam, modern day New York City. Shearith Israel’s sister congregation, Touro Synagogue in Newport, RI, was built in 1763 and is the oldest continual Jewish house of worship in the U.S. Woven through this tale are Haym Solomon, who helped finance the American Revolution; Uriah Levy, the Naval Commodore who saved Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello from ruin; and Emma Lazarus, whose poetry captured the dreams of millions of immigrants to America. Viewers will also learn about the history of Sephardic Jews who fled to the New World to escape the Spanish Inquisition, and how the independent synagogue worship system developed in ancient Babylon.
AND THERE WAS ISRAEL is not revisionist history. It is an accessible, clearly argued essay on how Israel came to be, and the far-reaching ramifications of colonial projects.