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How the Jewish Museum brought Black film history to new audiences
It was 1970 and Black-Jewish relations weren’t at their best. Two years earlier, the Ocean-Brownsville teachers’ strike in Brooklyn had pitted Black and Jewish New Yorkers against one another. Distrust lingered between Black artists and museums after the controversial 1969 Met exhibit Harlem on My Mind showcased life and culture in Harlem, but excluded the work of Black Harlem natives. The Art Workers Coalition had just been founded, demanding better Black and Puerto Rican representation in museums, particularly MoMA.
Karl Katz, director of the Jewish Museum, was determined to find a way to connect the museum to its “African-American neighbors.” He noted in his memoir The Exhibitionist that, although Harlem “began only a dozen or so blocks north” of the museum, their exhibitions “generally had trouble drawing a diverse crowd.” When a friend told Katz about race films — films from the early 20th century made specifically for Black audiences usually starring all Black casts — Katz knew he wanted to show them at the museum.
In 1970, the film series The Black Film — a showing of 14 Black movies made between 1925 and 1965 — opened. Curated by an interracial team — Black film scholar Pearl Bowser, color-barrier breaking TV producer Charles Hobson, and psychologist and art exhibitor Mel Roman — the event was a collaboration between the museum and the Harlem Cultural Council. A number of publications, including the Black newspaper The New York Amsterdam News, covered it.
“It’s all about this community,” said Gillian Bowser, Pearl Bowser’s daughter and a professor of ecosystem science and sustainability at Colorado State University. “And a community saving and celebrating its history. And the Jewish Museum was part of that initial effort to recognize the importance of saving the everyday voice.”
Now, over 50 years later, excerpts from the films are back on display at the Jewish Museum.
Hidden Gems
The films in the series were collected by Bowser, a former cookbook author who became known as the Godmother of Black Independent Cinema for her work in film preservation and scholarship on Oscar Micheaux. Micheaux was a prolific race film producer and owner of the first Black-owned movie company, Lincoln Motion Picture Company.
The museum program included Micheaux’s 1925 film Body and Soul, starring Paul Robeson in his first film role. Historians also believe it’s the only film he ever worked on with a Black director. Robeson plays twins — one a conniving criminal and the other an innocent young man who has to deal with his brother’s misdeeds.
Another film is an early work by Melvin Van Peebles, director of the pioneering blaxploitation film Sweet Sweetback’s Bassdassss Song. His 1957 film in the Bowser collection, Sunlight, has some of the criminal elements of his most famous work, but is primarily a tender portrayal of young Black love.
The Negro Soldier, a 1944 production by the United States Department of War that celebrates Black soldiers’ valor during World War II.
“What a surprise the Nazis will get,” the narrator says as the troops march on. “Black, brown, yellow and white men from all Americans land on the airfield of Berlin.”
The 1970 series opened the year before Van Peebles released Sweet Sweetback’s and kicked off the blaxploitation movement, which often highlighted criminal lifestyles. The films Bowser showed offered a different form of Black representation. Lisa Collins, a documentarian and mentee of Bowser’s, noted that it “was so revolutionary at that time” to have films showing Black Americans as judges, scientists and working professionals.
Saving film history
Bowser preserved both American and international films, including movies from London and Senegal. Without her, it’s possible some of these films would have never seen the light of day. Her friend and collaborator Louis Massiah, a MacArthur awarded filmmaker and founder of the non-profit media center Scribe Video in Philadelphia, told me she knew where to find old reels or fragments of film strips at risk of being thrown out.
“She would go to movie theaters and she would chat up projectionists,” Massiah told me, noting that Pearl was “extraordinarily charming.”
He commented that “it was absolutely rare” for people in the general public to have films made by non-commercial Black filmmakers
“This is before the Internet. This is before the accessibility of films,” said Massiah. With money from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Bowser was able to take the race films on the road. “For a lot of folks, it was a revelation.”
When Gillian Bowser was a kid, she accompanied her mother to screenings at art house theaters and public libraries, often tasked with being the projectionist at the latter.
“The people hadn’t seen Black people in Westerns, they hadn’t seen all these films that were shot that were just forgotten for a long time,” she said.
The Jewish Museum was one of the first major institutions to showcase Bowser’s work and expanded the audience she was able to reach. She was later able to take the films around the country, including on a tour to various historically Black colleges and universities.
A revival of art — and issues of the past
For the new exhibit, filmmakers Lisa Collins, Mark Schwartzburt and Anthony Jamison cut the 14 films from the 1970 exhibit into short vignettes that are projected onto a large wall on the museum’s third floor and played on a loop. Collins and Schwartzburt, mentees of Bowser who had been working with her on an Oscar Micheaux documentary until her death in 2023, conceived of the new installation through conversations with New York Jewish Film Festival Director Aviva Weintraub. Collins told me Weintraub was integral in getting the museum to agree to the project, although with one complex stipulation: that each film be cut down to 30 seconds. The process took hours of editing, and a few times the three filmmakers tried to pitch Weintraub slightly longer cuts, but the final vignettes still capture the heart of the original films.
“At the end of the day, we always wanted to show enough of the film to keep you interested and to get you interested to see the larger version,” said Jamison.
On a smaller monitor, two short films play on rotation. One is an excerpt of a short documentary Collins and Schwartzburt made shot in 2021 when a 90-year-old Bowser returned to the Jewish Museum for the first time in 50 years and spoke to them about her memories of working there. Bowser passed away two years later. Another is a segment from a 1984 episode of Paper Tiger Television, a public access TV program based in New York. A young Bowser explains Micheaux’s legacy, crediting his genius and “chutzpah” for the strides he made in Black cinema.
Many of the films from the 1970 series are available for viewing in various places, such as Kino Lorber’s “Pioneers of African-American Cinema” collection, the Criterion Channel, and other streaming services. Bowser’s total collection includes over 500 films, which are stored at the Smithsonian institute, and are a testament to her dedication to making sure Black stories don’t disappear. For a long time, Black filmmakers struggled to have their achievements and contribution to American history recognized.
“As the Black community, we may be facing this again,” Gillian said, noting the recent removal of monuments to slavery at national parks. “Our job now is to make sure these stories get saved and retold.”
In an interview, Schwartzburt expressed a similar sentiment.
“The political environment we’re in right now, where there is so much erasure going on and backstepping — taking back civil rights — this couldn’t be more important,” he said.
The post How the Jewish Museum brought Black film history to new audiences appeared first on The Forward.
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Iranian Regime Uses HispanTV to Spread Antisemitic Propaganda Across Latin America, ADL Warns
Iranians attend an anti-Israel rally in Tehran, Iran, April 19, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
As the Iranian regime escalates its campaign of disinformation against Israel, Tehran is now flooding Latin America with antisemitic propaganda and pro-terrorist messaging, using outlets such as HispanTV to reach millions of Spanish-speaking audiences and reshape public perceptions in the region.
On Tuesday, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) released a new report detailing a dramatic rise over the past two years in antisemitic and anti-Israel content on HispanTV, the Spanish-language network run by the Iranian regime as part of its coordinated disinformation campaign across Latin America.
With the capacity to reach nearly 600 million Spanish speakers through satellite, cable, livestreaming, and social media, ADL characterizes HispanTV, which launched in 2012, as “the world’s leading platform for peddling antisemitic hate and disseminating anti-Israel prejudice and incitement across Latin America and the wider Spanish-speaking world.”
According to the report, HispanTV consistently disseminates content that reinforces long-standing antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish influence, spreads conspiracy theories, fuels the demonization of Israel, and glorifies Iranian-backed terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah.
The study notes that the network’s hateful content has escalated sharply over the past two years, especially in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“HispanTV consistently frames Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks as legitimate and praiseworthy acts of resistance worthy of celebration,” the report says. “This reframing is essential to the channel’s ideological project, converting mass violence into a foundational myth of liberation.”
Across its broadcasts, HispanTV portrays Jews and Zionism as “an omnipresent, evil force” manipulating governments through a coordinated malicious scheme, reinforcing deeply entrenched antisemitic stereotypes about Jewish influence and power.
The report also finds that another central theme in the network’s coverage is the glorification of terrorist groups, depicting them as “extraordinary examples of heroism and bravery,” celebrating attacks that killed civilians, and vowing continued violence until the “complete annihilation of the occupants” — an apparent reference to Israel.
“The Iranian regime’s media outlet is spreading classic antisemitic conspiracy theories and anti-Israel propaganda to potentially millions of people across Latin America and beyond, making the Islamic Republic a destabilizing force not only in the Middle East, but across the Spanish-speaking world,” ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.
“With antisemitism already at historic levels globally, Tehran is funding a massive media propaganda operation that is priming the pump for spreading antisemitism and hate against Israel and Jews the world over,” he continued.
While systematically undermining Israel’s right to exist — depicting the Jewish state as a “colonial,” “genocidal,” and “terrorist” project — HispanTV presents the Iranian regime as a principled alternative to Western democracies and positions Tehran as the leader of the “Axis of Resistance,” according to the ADL’s newly released report.
The Iranian network also depicts Jews and Israelis as “operating a highly organized global disinformation apparatus designed to deceive the world and justify genocide,” minimizing or outright denying the reality of antisemitism.
The ADL argues that the lack of decisive action by governments, international bodies, and corporations has allowed the Islamic regime to leverage HispanTV to disseminate its hateful conspiracies around the globe.
“If this threat is not seriously addressed, the result will likely be the radicalization of Spanish-speaking audiences across Latin America and beyond,” the report says.
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US Justice Department Launches Investigation Into Antisemitism at Lincoln Memorial University Medical School
US Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, US, Aug. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kent Nishimura
The US Department of Justice has opened an investigation into Lincoln Memorial University (LMU) in Tennessee for allegedly having “engaged in discrimination against its Jewish students” over several years, the agency announced last week.
The investigation, which will receive support from the US Department of Health and Human Services, was prompted by complaints that high-level officials at the LMU DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine “intentionally” prevented Jewish students from finishing final exams — an action that could lead to academic failure as well as squandering tens of thousands of dollars in tuition fees.
According to WBIR-TV, a local news outlet based in the city of Knoxville, LMU enacted a new policy which proscribed granting students exam exemptions based on their observing religious holidays. Two Orthodox Jewish students studying medicine are known to have been disproportionately impacted by the dictate, and, according to Rabbi Yossi Wilhelm of Chabad of Knoxville, their qualifications for becoming doctors were allegedly called into doubt by a college official who implied that religious observance is disqualifying.
“This Department of Justice is fiercely committed to shutting down the concerning outbreak of antisemitism that has been spreading on college campuses since the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023,” Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, said on Friday when the investigation was announced. “When colleges and universities single Jewish students out for adverse treatment, they are in clear violation of our civil rights laws and of this nation’s promise of equal opportunity for all Americans.”
Paula Stannard, director of the civil rights office of the Department of Health and Human Services, added, “All students should be free to learn and train in environments free from discrimination. Antisemitism has no place in our nation’s educational or medical training institutions, and OCR [the Office of Civil Rights] will work to ensure that federal civil rights laws are fully enforced.”
In a statement to The Algemeiner, Lincoln Memorial University denied discriminating against anyone, citing its “belief that every single person, regardless of race, situation, or background, deserves the right to a quality educational experience.”
It continued, “We would never intentionally discriminate against any member of our community, and we do not believe we did so as has been alleged in the concerns under investigation by the Department of Justice. Educating our future leaders is why we exist. Any decision that is made is always with the goal of providing the best education for each and every student.”
Antisemitism in academic medical centers located on college campuses is fostering noxious environments which deprive Jewish health-care professionals of their civil right to work in spaces free from discrimination and hate, according to a study by the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department in May.
“Academia today is increasingly cultivating an environment which is hostile to Jews, as well as members of other religious and ethnic groups,” StandWithUs director of data and analytics and study co-author, Alexandra Fishman, said in a statement at the time. “Academic institutions should be upholding the integrity of scholarship, prioritizing civil discourse, rather than allowing bias or personal agendas to guide academic culture.”
Titled “Antisemitism in American Healthcare: The Role of Workplace Environment,” the study includes survey data showing that 62.8 percent of Jewish health-care professionals employed by campus-based medical centers reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, it added, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing, the report said, the likelihood of antisemitic activity.
The study is not StandWithUs’s first contribution to the study of antisemitism in medicine. In December 2024, the Data & Analytics Department published a study which found that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health-care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims.
The study included a survey of 645 Jewish health workers, a substantial number of whom said they were subject to “social and professional isolation.” The problem left over one quarter of the survey cohort, 26.4 percent, “feeling unsafe or threatened.”
The issue is currently being investigated by the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce, with a focus on the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) David Geffen School of Medicine, the University of Illinois’ College of Medicine, and the University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine.
“This investigation will aid the committee in considering whether potential legislative changes, including legislation to specifically address antisemitism discrimination, are needed,” education committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) wrote in a letter to Steven Dubinett, dean of UCLA’s Geffen School. “The committee has become aware that Jewish students and faculty have experienced hostility and fear at the hands of peers, colleagues, and administrators at UCLA Med, and it has not been demonstrated that the university has meaningfully responded to address and mitigate this problem.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Captain of Israeli Olympic Bobsled Team Responds to Swiss Commentator’s Claims He ‘Supports Genocide in Gaza’
Milano Cortina 2026 Olympics – Bobsleigh – 2-man Heat 2 – Cortina Sliding Centre, Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy – February 16, 2026. Adam Edelman of Israel and Menachem Chen of Israel react after their run. Photo: REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
The captain of Israel’s bobsled team competing in the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics in Italy has responded to remarks made by a commentator on the Swiss network Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) who claimed the athlete should have been banned from the Olympics because of his “support of the genocide in Gaza.”
Commentator Stefan Renna made the remarks as Adam Edelman, an American-Israeli, and his teammate Menachem Chen performed their two-man bobsleigh run on Monday, in which they finished in last place. Renna said on air that Edelman is a “self-defined ‘Zionist to the core’” who had posted “several messages on social media in support of the genocide in Gaza.” The commentator also claimed Edelman had poked fun at a “Free Palestine” demonstration.
Renna further commented that Edelman had “said the Israeli military intervention was, I quote, ‘the most morally justified war in history.’” He also said Edelman should have been barred from the Milan-Cortina Games just like the International Olympic Committee banned Russian athletes if they made comments in support of the war that started after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. “This just goes to show that sport is obviously eminently political,” Renna told viewers.
A clip featuring the commentary was removed from the RTS website on Monday night because it was not “appropriate” for a sports broadcast, a spokesperson for the network told Deadline.
Edelman took to social media to respond to the RTS clip and the comments made about him.
“I am aware of the diatribe the commentator directed towards the Israeli bobsled team on the Swiss Olympic broadcast today,” he wrote on Monday. “I can’t help but notice the contrast: Shul Runnings [the team’s nickname] is a team of 6 proud Israelis who’ve made it to the Olympic stage. No coach with us. No big program. Just a dream, grit, and unyielding pride in who we represent. Working together towards such an incredible goal and crushing it. Because that’s what Israelis do. I don’t think it’s possible to witness that and give credence to this commentary.”
Edelman also reposted a comment from US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, who said the RTS broadcast was “beyond disgusting” and that the “Jew-hating” Swiss commentator “spewed bigotry and bile” as the Israeli team competed.
The Israeli bobsled team is competing in the final two-man run on Tuesday and the four-man run later this week.