'Come see, and hear, the mother tongue!' Yiddish cinema in interwar London

Abstract

This essay offers a sociohistorical examination of the exhibition and reception of Yiddish language film in interwar London. Utilising a range of primary sources (newspaper commentary; publicity material; municipal documents; interview testimony) the Yiddish cinema is situated within broader practices of Jewish filmgoing, and contemporary cultural and social life. Drawing on recent writing on the public sphere, this body of films is understood as meaningful to its London audience in two key ways. Firstly, with an emphasis placed on ‘the local’, it is analysed as a communal institution of the Jewish East End. Here, particular attention is given to the site of exhibition, and to audience behaviours. Secondly, through tracing the discourse surrounding Yiddish film in the Jewish press, its imagined potential to function as a vessel carrying positive representations of Jewry into a gentile gaze in a generalised public sphere is examined. The essay also offers a detailed chronological account of the Yiddish films that were screened in London.