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Restored Yiddish film ‘I Have Sinned’ captures pre-war Polish Jewry
There’s an old British expression, “a curate’s egg.” The story goes that a couple once hosted their vicar for dinner and served him an egg, not realizing that it wasn’t very fresh. When they asked him how he liked it, the vicar, a tactful person, said: “Parts of it were excellent.”
The 1936 Yiddish film Al Khet (I Have Sinned), digitally restored by the National Center for Jewish Film and screened this week at the New York Jewish Film Festival, is a curate’s egg.
On the one hand, it’s incredibly primitive, and not because of its age. Its story, about the ill-starred romance of a Jewish military officer and what happens 20 years later, is nothing with nothing; the second half is shamelessly melodramatic, and the pace is slow, too.
On the other hand, the legendary comic duo Dzigan and Schumacher, in their film debut, are superb; the rich Polish Yiddish is delicious, and as a snapshot of mid-1930’s Polish Jewry, it’s extraordinary.
Al Khet was the first Yiddish talkie made in Poland, where even later Yiddish films had technical frailties. Even the beautifully produced and photographed The Dybbuk (1937) suffers from clumsy sound editing. But compared to American or French films from the same year, Al Khet looks prehistoric. Exterior scenes were shot silent and dialogue was dubbed in afterwards with zero regard for synchronization, so that at times people are shown to be speaking with their mouths completely closed.
The acting ranges from simple and straightforward to children’s-theater pantomime. There are errors in basic continuity: In one scene, an army officer says goodbye to his sweetheart, and in the next scene he asks his friends to say goodbye for him, because he can’t do it!
But Al Khet is the only Yiddish film — the only film in any language, actually, as far as I know — to deal with the effects of WWI on Eastern European Jewry. An illegitimate birth is a major plot element, which would have been unthinkable in a contemporaneous American movie.
And no film paints a more detailed picture of life in interwar Yiddishland. The unselfconscious coexistence between religious and secular Jews; the work life of tailors (Jews, under 10% of the population, made up almost half of Poland’s clothing industry); the veneration of America; the texture of religious life, with its daily prayers, crowded crack-of-dawn ‘slikhos‘ services before the holidays, tsitsis gone dingy from constant wear… they’re all there.
After some stock footage of WWI to establish the era, the opening few minutes are pure documentary: cobblestone alleys, wooden houses, a Jew leading a goat on a rope, a water-carrier bringing pails up to an apartment with no plumbing, and so on. A similar montage opens Yidl Mitn Fidl (“Yiddle with his Fiddle”) which was shot in Poland the following year, and I’ve long suspected that its purpose was to enable those who had long since left “the Old Country” to see a bit of it again.
The film’s biggest asset is, of course, Dzigan and Schumacher.
Al Khet is commonly assumed to be a comedy-team vehicle — the sort of thing Abbott and Costello used to turn out. But Dzigan and Schumacher did not play set characters, they varied what they did for each of their smart, satirical sketches; they were the Jewish grandfathers of Bob and Ray, so to speak. And they’re in supporting roles, playing the protagonists’ helpful friends — the traditional ‘comic relief’ slot.
Still, they walk off with the movie. Their acting is off-the-cuff and naturalistic, they have great chemistry and of course, they’re very funny. In the film’s best comedy scene, Schumacher stands in his room wearing his talis (prayer shawl) and tefilin (phylacteries) and mumble-chanting his way through shakharis, the morning prayer, when Dzigan enters and peppers him with questions. Of course Schumacher can’t answer (there’s no chatting allowed during prayer), but he drops Yiddish words and phrases into the Hebrew prayers, folding them right into his mumbling.
(At the NYJFF screening, this scene seemed to go over most of the audience’s heads. Either they couldn’t tell the difference between the Hebrew and the Yiddish, or the style of Jewish prayer had been lost somewhere in the generations. It’s a sad thought either way.)
Two other cast members are of interest. Kurt Katch, who plays a secular Jewish father in the film, began his career in the heyday of silent German cinema and wound up in Hollywood, where he appeared in some of the major titles of the 1940’s, like Watch on the Rhine and The Mask of Dimitrios.
Ruth Turkow, born Ruth Kaminska, who played his daughter, was genuine Yiddish theater royalty: her mother, Ida Kaminska, one of the most important figures in mid-century Yiddish theater, was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for her performance in The Shop on Main Street, and her grandmother was Ester-Rokhl Kaminska, known as “the mother of Yiddish theater.”
The film features a fine score by Henokh Kon (who also composed the score for The Dybbuk). One song he wrote for Al Khet, “Shpil zhe mir a lidele in yidish” (“Play Me A Yiddish Song”), became a standard that’s still in the repertoire.
The new English subtitles are also a bit of a mixed bag. For example, when the Al Khet prayer is recited, no subtitle appears — even though it’s the title of the film! On the other hand, the translator (the talented Mikhl Yashinsky) is smart enough to keep the language colloquial. Too many new subtitle translations use dry, clinical language — the sort of thing you get from GoogleTranslate — and have no feel for idiomatic speech, so that the audience often has no idea what the characters are really saying. Still, some subtitles go by too fast to be read, or they scroll by at a steady high speed that forces the viewer to stare at the bottom of the screen and avoid looking at the actual movie.
And there are some nice things to look at. Though the picture quality varies with the different source materials used in the restoration, the cinematographer’s eye is still evident, and the exterior long-shots especially have some arresting compositions.
I wouldn’t recommend Al Khet as anyone’s first Yiddish movie — that ought to be Grine Felder, Overture to Glory or Uncle Moses — but for those with an interest in juicy, authentic Yiddish or pre-war Jewish life in Europe, it’s invaluable.
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Forverts podcast, episode 8: Subway stories
דער פֿאָרווערטס האָט שוין אַרויסגעלאָזט דעם אַכטן קאַפּיטל פֿונעם ייִדישן פּאָדקאַסט, Yiddish With Rukhl. דאָס מאָל איז די טעמע „די אונטערבאַן“.
אין דעם קאַפּיטל וועט איר הערן צוויי אַרטיקלען: משהלע אַלפֿאָנסאָס פּערזענלעכן עסיי „און אַלץ צוליב אַ יאַרמלקע!“ וואָס איר קענט אַליין לייענען דאָ, און אַ צווייטן אַרטיקל פֿון שׂרה־רחל שעכטער, „זכרונות פֿון אַן אונטערבאַן־פּאַסאַזשיר“, וואָס איר קענט לייענען דאָ.
צו הערן דעם פּאָדקאַסט, גיט אַ קוועטש דאָ.
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New York City Police Investigate Antisemitic Subway Assault
New York City Police Department (NYPD) vehicles are seen in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
The New York City Police Department (NYPD) is investigating an antisemitic incident in which an African American male assaulted a Jewish public transit commuter on the subway, according to local reports.
The victim, Jeremy Garrett, told an ABC affiliate that he was reading a psalm on Monday morning when the assailant struck him on the head, knocking off his kippah in the process. Garrett later received treatment at a local hospital, WABC-TV reported.
“I thought the window of the subway fell on me,” Garrett recalled. “We tussled a bit, I was trying to hold him on the train, and then the doors closed, and they opened the doors again, and he ran off … it’s horrible because it happened on Purim, you know, right before the holiday.”
Garret added, “I still want justice, but I do forgive the man … They keep coming for us. We still keep living, so we’re not going to stop.”
New York City has seen similar incidents in recent months. In January, a woman was punched in the face while riding the New York City subway for wearing a hat that said “F—k Antisemitism,” according to a local report.
“F—k Jews,” the suspect, described as a “Black man in his 40s,” allegedly said to her before striking the blow, the New York Daily News reported, citing local law enforcement.
The victim then “fled” the railcar at the 116th St. – Columbia University subway station in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, while the assailant remained on board, the News added. She was reportedly not seriously injured, as medics did not treat her following the incident’s being reported to law enforcement.
Just last month, a 17-year-old student who attended the Renaissance Charter School in the Jackson Heights section of the Queens borough called on his classmates to “rise up and kill the Jews.”
Antisemitic hate crimes in New York City have seen a dramatic rise in recent years. The latest NYPD hate crime statistics show a 182 percent increase in January 2026, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s first month in office, compared to the same period last year.
Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist who has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career, has repeatedly accused Israel of “apartheid” and refused to recognize its right to exist as a Jewish state.
Such positions have raised alarm bells among not only New York’s Jewish community but also Israeli business owners and investors, who fear a hostile climate under Mamdani’s leadership.
Jews were targeted in the majority (54 percent) of all hate crimes perpetrated in New York City in 2024, according to other data issued by the NYPD.
A recent report released in December by the Mayor’s Office to Combat Antisemitism noted that figure rose to a staggering 62 percent in the first quarter of 2025, despite Jewish New Yorkers comprising a small minority of the city’s population.
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, antisemitism in New York City has eroded the quality of life of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, which is the target in many antisemitic incidents.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In 2025, New Yorkers have seen organized antisemitic harassment. In November, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“The Jewish community is filled with anxiety and trepidation. We know that it’s open season,” Rabbi Mark Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, said in a statement to NY1 in February. “We’ve encountered these kinds of threats for the last 2,500 years, but if anything, there’s never been a greater time to be alive as a Jew than today.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Gavin Newsom just confirmed the demise of the Democratic party’s support for Israel
“Let no American imagine that Zionism is inconsistent with patriotism,” said Louis Brandeis, American Jewish leader and Supreme Court justice, in 1915. “To be good Americans, we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews, we must become Zionists.”
For much of the next century, most American Jews stacked their liberalism on top of their patriotism on top of their Zionism. They overwhelmingly voted for the Democratic Party, and overwhelmingly supported both Israel and the United States-Israel alliance.
In recent years, however, many have found it increasingly difficult to deny is that support for Israel is, at present, hard to square with liberalism. And a statement this week by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the probable 2028 Democratic candidate for president, made clear exactly how profoundly that shift has changed the Democratic party.
Israel is discussed by some “appropriately as sort of an apartheid state,” Newsom said on a podcast, adding that the U.S. would likely have no choice but to reconsider its military aid to the Jewish state.
Given that Newsom is broadly a centrist, his words made a clear statement: Politicians understand that uncritical support for Israel is no longer compatible with the Democratic mainstream. Democratic voters are pushing politicians to, if not abandon Israel entirely, then at least condition their support for it. And the future of American Jews and the Democratic Party is now not only up to Democratic politicians who decide how much to give Israel and under what conditions.
It is also up to American Jews, who have to decide whether those politicians, in doing so, are moving away from their values, or bringing them back into alignment.
Shifting sympathies
A Gallup poll released last month found that Americans’ sympathies now lie more with Palestinians than with Israelis. Up until last year, the opposite had held true. For Democrats, whose sympathies already “flipped strongly” — per Gallup — to Palestinians in 2025, the difference is more stark: 65% said they sympathize more with Palestinians, while just 17% say they sympathize more with Israelis.
Those tempted to write the change off as the result of a party captured by a young far-left should consider that, last year, Pew found that 66% of Democrats over the age of 50 have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from just 43% in 2022. (For those ages 18 to 49, the number was 71%.) A full 73% of Democrats over 50 said they had “none at all” or “not too much” confidence in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I have no doubt that some will say that the change is because people don’t understand the complexity of the situation in the Middle East; because they have forgotten the lessons of history; or because the Democratic Party is comfortable embracing antisemitism.
These claims ignore a simpler explanation: That the voters who are registered with the one major U.S. political party that still claims to care about liberalism, democracy, and human rights watched as Israel, by its own admission, killed some 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza.
They saw Israel’s leaders make it next to impossible for civilians in the Strip to receive necessary food and humanitarian aid. They see settler violence rising in the West Bank, including against American citizens, amid increased talk of annexation. They hear Netanyhau continue to insist that there can be no Palestinian state, and understand that the alternative he foresees is not one state with equal rights, but either a future of endless wars, or an undemocratic state in which Palestinians live under Israeli control without the rights of citizens.
In that context, many voters see that unflinching support for Israel is no longer in line with the values that drew them to their party. And since they cannot change Israel, they are trying to change their party.
No more cognitive dissonance
Democratic voters, in insisting that their politicians not walk in lockstep with Israel, are insisting that the party break its cognitive dissonance around Israel. Which means that the future of American Jews in the Democratic Party depends not only on how sensitively Democratic politicians navigate criticizing and checking Israel without elevating antisemitism. It also depends on whether American Jews are willing to admit this dissonance to ourselves.
For some, this is not an open question. There are American Jews who have no relationship to Israel, or whose relationship is an overwhelmingly critical one. Per last year’s Jewish Federations of North America National Survey, a combined 32% of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as either anti-Zionist or non-Zionist.
(Only 7% of American Jews overall consider themselves to be anti-Zionist, and just 8% say non-Zionist,. But most don’t subscribe to the label “Zionist,” either, with just 37% describing themselves as such).
In 2021, one poll of American Jews found that a quarter deemed Israel an apartheid state, well before Newsom likened it to one.
There’s also the reality that the vast majority of American Jews do not name Israel as their top issue when they go to the voting booth, and that the Republican Party is undergoing its own schism over Israel.
Still, that same JFNA poll found that most American Jews — 71% — do say that they feel emotionally attached to Israel. And 60% say that Israel makes them proud to be Jewish, even as 69% say that they “sometimes find it hard to support the actions taken by Israel or its government.”
What this means: For many American Jewish Democrats, encouraging politicians to break with Israel — or accepting that break is already in process — is likely more emotionally challenging than it is for American Democrats generally.
What Newsom’s comments show is that this is an emotional problem American Jewish voters will need to face sooner rather than later. Democratic voters are forcing Democratic politicians to resolve a disconnect, and they want it resolved quickly. The year is no longer 1915. Democratic American Jews are going to need to decide what it means to be “good Americans and better Jews.” If it can no longer involve being both liberal and staunchly pro-Israel, we will need to decide which of those items we find most important.
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