This February 7-11 2024 , the Rady JCC is excited to be introducing ‘Put a Yid on It! Festival of New Yiddish Culture’!
These five exciting days full of films, music, and workshops will build a meaningful bridge between the world of European Jews as expressed in pre-holocaust Yiddish art and culture with the modern upsurge in curiosity and interest in Yiddish as expressed in the films and music of what has been called the Yiddish Renaissance.
There will be music for everyone’s taste, young and old, from the beautiful and joyful Balkan inspired Klezmer of Toronto’s Beyond the Pale to the wild Yiddish HipHop, Funk, Klezmer fusion of Montreal’s Socalled.
The festival will include such classics of Yiddish Cinema such as Tevya, which show the cinematic mastery of Yiddish language filmmaking of the 30’s, as well as fascinating films of the Yiddish Renaissance such as Hester Street, a 1975 film starring a youthful Yiddish speaking Carol Kane telling the story of the new immigrant experience against a beautifully rendered backdrop of turn of the century New York City’s Lower East Side.
We are also thrilled as a part of this festival to be hosting a book launch and presentation at Handsome Daughter for a brand-new book Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication by Winnipeg based film historians Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar. Our festival will be rounded out by a talk with Itay Zutra on Yiddish Expressions, and oh how expressive they can be!
Click HERE to view the complete lineup