Yiddish Cinema: The Drama of Troubled Communication – Book Launch
Featuring authors Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar
Handsome Daughter – 61 Sherbrook Street – FREE

The turbulent Yiddish world of the first half of the twentieth century produced great works not only of literature, theatre, and music, but of cinema. In their new book, Jonah Corne and Monika Vrečar explore these little-known, “ethnic,” diasporic films and bring to light the films’ unique preoccupation with the idea that, to quote the Czech-Jewish media philosopher Vilém Flusser (1920-1991), “the structure of communication is the infrastructure of human reality.” The book addresses several subjects through which this fascination is articulated, including the family, religious tradition, immigration, displacement, new forms of mass media, antisemitism, and Jewish mysticism. Ultimately, the book offers a novel way of understanding Yiddish cinema, showing how the movies surprisingly “theorize” about communication—and the struggle to communicate—from the position of a wildly entertaining, often devastating, popular dramatic art form.

Jonah Corne is an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, Film and Media at the University of Manitoba, where he serves as the Coordinator of the Film Studies program.

Monika Vrečar is an independent scholar who holds a PhD in Philosophy and Theory of Visual Culture from the University of Primorska, Slovenia. She currently teaches in the School of Art at the University of Manitoba.

Join us for a reception following the presentation with drinks and snacks.