Guests

Guest Speakers

More guests to be announced…

Joyce Antler
April 12 Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold
Joyce Antler is the Samuel Lane Professor of American Jewish History and Culture and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies Emerita at Brandeis University. She is the author of The Journey Home: How Jewish Women Shaped Modern America; You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother; and Jewish Radical Feminism: Voices of the Women’s Liberation Movement, along with numerous other books and articles in women’s and Jewish history. She also co-authored the prize-winning documentary drama, Year One of the Empire. Professor Antler is an interviewee in two of the films screening at the festival Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold and We Met at Grossinger’s.

Thomas Doherty
April 12 The Burning Cross
Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University since 1990, is a cultural historian with a special interest in Hollywood cinema who has also taught and lectured overseas as a Fulbright scholar. In 2005, he received recognition as an Academy Film Scholar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Doherty is the author of a bookshelf of outstanding books, including Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s; Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture and World War II; Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934; Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism and American Culture; Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration, Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939; Show Trial: Hollywood, HUAC & the Birth of the Blacklist,and Little Lindy is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century. Doherty’s forthcoming book is How Film Became History: The Rise of the Archival Documentary in 1930s America.

Hasia R. Diner
April 15 We Met at Grossingers
Hasia Diner is Professor Emerita at New York University, where she held the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Chair in American Jewish History, with joint appointment in the department of history and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. She also served as NYU’s Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History. Her work has focused on American Jewish history, American immigration and ethnic history, and the history of American women. A prolific author, several of whose books have won prizes, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a Fulbright award. Among her many books are Hungering for America: Italian, Irish and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000, Lower East Side Memories: The Jewish Place in America; (with Beryl Lief Benderly), Her Works Praise Her: A History of Jewish Women in America: From Colonial Times to the Present and The Jews of the United States: 1654–2000, We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945–1962, and Immigration: An American History, with Carl Bon Tempo. She is an elected member of both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Jewish Research, and lectures widely to scholarly and community audiences on a range of topics. She is a visiting professor at Harvard University Divinity School.

Abby Ginzberg
April 12 Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold
Abby Ginzberg is a Peabody award-winning director who has been producing compelling documentaries about social justice for over 30 years. Her film And Then They Came for Us about the connection between the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II and Trump’s Muslim travel ban, won a Silver Gavel Award and played in major festivals across the country. Her film Agents of Change about the 1960’s struggle for black and ethnic studies on college campuses premiered at the Pan African Film Festival, where it won the Jury and the Audience Awards for Best Feature Documentary. She holds a BA from Cornell University and a JD from Hastings College of the Law.

Karin Oehlenschlaeger
April 26 The Last Spy
Karin Oehlenschläger is a cultural program curator at the Goethe-Institut Boston and has been curating the German Film Series at the Coolidge for thirteen years. She’s been with the Goethe-Institut since 2005 and is responsible for film, literature and political programs. She holds an MA in German Literature and Communications from Johannes-Gutenberg University, Mainz.

Shulamit Reinharz
April 12 Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold
Dr. Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brandeis University. While at Brandeis, she created a graduate program in Women’s Studies as well as the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute for the study of the intersection between Jews and gender. She was born in Amsterdam and grew up in the United States with intermittent stays in Israel. She is the author or editor of sixteen books, including the recent 100 Jewish Brides: Stories from Around the World and Hiding in Holland: A Resistance Memoir. She is interviewed as an expert in the film Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold.

Lisa Rivo
Festival Co-Director
April 13 I Have Sinned (Al Khet)
Lisa Rivo is Co-Director of The National Center for Jewish Film. Founded in 1976, NCJF owns one of the world’s largest archives of Jewish-content films. The Center, which rescues, restores and makes available rare archival films, also distributes the work of contemporary filmmakers and has a dozen new films being produced under its aegis. She oversees the Center’s programmatic, distribution, curatorial and exhibition activities. Lisa has co-directed and co-curated 17 Boston-area film festivals and has curated other series worldwide. Ms. Rivo consults regularly with filmmakers, scholars, and curators, and has sat on numerous film festival juries. She has a degree in Art History from Vassar College and focused on American visual culture and film at Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts PhD program. Lisa worked in the film program of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and as Director of Public Information at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Prior to joining NCJF in 2006, she was a Research Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and Associate Director & Senior Writer of the African American National Biography, an encyclopedia edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Sharon Pucker Rivo
Festival Co-Director
April 13 I Have Sinned (Al Khet)
Sharon Pucker Rivo, Executive Director and Co-Founder of The National Center for Jewish Film, has been a leading force in the field of Jewish film and culture for more than five decades through her work as a curator, programmer, archivist, film distributor, film and television producer, and academic. In the mid-1970s she and co-founder Miriam Krant rescued a languishing collection of Yiddish-language feature films. Today, NCJF is the largest archive of Jewish film outside of Israel, and a major distributor of restored classic and new independent Jewish-content films. Ms. Rivo was an early advocate for the inclusion of film in the study of history and culture and for the historically accurate use of visual materials. She has worked with hundreds of filmmakers around the world as a consultant and has appeared as an expert in many documentaries and television programs. She has curated film programs for venues from Boston to Beijing, including co-curating the first ever retrospective of Yiddish cinema, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ms. Rivo has been a member of Brandeis University faculty for more than thirty years and she lectures widely on the history of Jews in cinema, a field she helped pioneer. Internationally recognized as an authority on Jewish and Yiddish film, film archiving and restoration, and Jewish programming and distribution, she lectures and has served on numerous international film festival juries.

Judith Rosenbaum
April 12 Labors of Love: The Life and Legacy of Henrietta Szold
Judith Rosenbaum is CEO of the Jewish Women’s Archive, a pioneering national organization that documents Jewish women’s stories, elevates their voices, and inspires them to be agents of change. An educator, historian, and writer, Judith served for nearly a decade as JWA’s Director of Public History and Director of Education, developing its major programs and educational initiatives. Judith earned a BA in History from Yale University and a PhD in American Studies from Brown University with a focus on women, gender, and social movements. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to study women’s collective communities in Israel, and received a dissertation grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study to pursue research on the women’s health movement. Judith teaches, lectures, and publishes widely on Jewish studies and women’s studies. She has also served on the faculty of the Bronfman Fellowship and is a Schusterman Senior Fellow. In 2025, she received Hebrew College’s Esther Award for Courageous Women’s Leadership.

Mikhl Yashinsky
April 13 I Have Sinned (Al Khet)
Born in Detroit, Michigan, Mikhl Yashinsky is a Yiddish playwright, performer, translator, and teacher based in New York City. He has appeared with the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene in the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof directed by Joel Grey and in the title role of Goldfaden’s The Sorceress, in which he brought a “keen, if malevolent, psychology” to the title role of Bobe Yakhne (New York Times). His Gospel According to Chaim, the first new Yiddish drama professionally produced in the United States for a number of decades, “jolted the repertoire with a work that is both traditional and delightfully subversive” (Forward) and his recent musical Feast of the Seven Sinners was hailed as a “saucy spectacle which sprouts excitingly unorthodox fruit” (Forward). His publications include, as co-author, In eynem: The New Yiddish Textbook (White Goat Press, 2020), and, as translator, Adventures of Max Spitzkopf: The Yiddish Sherlock Holmes (White Goat Press, 2025) and The Mother of Yiddish Theatre: Memoirs of Ester-Rokhl Kaminska (Bloomsbury, 2025). Recently, he was among the international Yiddish artists profiled in the Australian documentary Welcome to Yiddishland. For more see: www.yashinsky.com and instagram.com/mikhldarling