Ryan Family Film Series: The Shop on Main Street

Exploring broader questions of Jewish/non-Jewish relations during WWII and the boundaries of complicity and empathy under fascism, Ján Kádár's Oscar-winning The Shop on Main Street (1965) underscores postwar anxieties about Jewishness and the emergence of public narratives of history across the Soviet Bloc in the turbulent 1960s. Framed around Slovakian-Nazi collaboration, Kádar's film challenged existing taboos surrounding public discussion of the recent past, while the stellar cast, featuring Ida Kamińska as a Jewish shopkeeper naive to the changes occurring in her once-idyllic village, addressed contemporaneous questions about postwar Jewish futurity.

Followed by a conversation and Q&A with Professor Rachel Moss (Theater and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin) and Noah Shenker (Film and Media Studies)

Co-Sponsored with Jewish Studies and Russian and Eurasian Studies