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Sholem Aleichem Sholem Aleichem will be the first full-length documentary-film portrait of the life, work, and legacy of the most popular and influential Yiddish writer of modern times. Born in a small town in Ukraine in 1859, Sholem ben Menakhem Nokhem Rabinowitz would become known to millions of readers across Europe, in the Americas, and beyond as Sholem Aleichem—the pen name he adopted early in his career. In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Sholem Aleichem emerged as one of the most influential literary voices among East European Jews and a leading advocate for promoting Yiddish—then the traditional vernacular of this community of some 5,000,000 people—as a modern literary and cultural language.
Sholem Aleichem is now most widely familiar as the author of the stories that formed the basis of the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” Through the story of his life and work, this film provides viewers with a compelling introduction to the experiences and creativity of East European Jews during the fervent decades at the turn of the last century —an era that forged the basis of modern Jewish politics, culture, and identity, shaping much of Jewish life up to the present. |
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| Reemergence: Jews in Today's Germany | ||
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In 1938, half a million Jews lived in Germany. At the time of reunification in 1989 the Jewish community had only 30,000 members. Since then, however, it has risen meteorically so that today 175,000 Jews live in Germany. That number continues to rise mainly because of Russian Jews who see Germany as a land of opportunity. In 2002, 19,200 Jews from the former Soviet Union settled in Germany, more than the number who emigrated to Israel and nearly twice the number who were admitted into the US. Germany now represents the third largest Jewish community in Western Europe -- after England and France -- and the nation with the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world. In light of this astonishing growth, REEMERGENCE, a ninety-minute documentary for television, will explore today’s German Jewish community through portraits of a number of its members from Holocaust survivors to the new Russian Jewish immigrants, from Jews that are "ethnically" Jewish to those who are religious. Through these individuals’ lives, the film will examine the complex identity of Jews in post-Holocaust Germany and the relationship between the Jewish community and the larger German culture in light of past history and current political events.
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