The Yiddish Book Center's

Wexler Oral History Project

A growing collection of in-depth interviews with people of all ages and backgrounds, whose stories about the legacy and changing nature of Yiddish language and culture offer a rich and complex chronicle of Jewish identity.

Fiddler on the Roof: Manufacturing Memory

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Joel Halpern, professor emeritus of Anthropology at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, reflects on the historical inaccuracies and paradoxes in the representation of the Jewish shtetl in the Fiddler on the Roof movie.

This is an excerpt from an oral history with Joel Halpern.

This excerpt is in English.

Joel Halpern was born in Bronx, New York in 1929.

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Other video highlights from this oral history

"Why Don't You Go Back to Hester Street?"

1 min 33 sec

Antisemitism in Archeology

2 min 20 sec

Car factory work was segregated by ethnicity

3 min 11 sec

Celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah in the 1930s

1 min 17 sec

Sheltering a Jewish Family in Serbia

4 min 3 sec

Middle Class Mischief

2 min 23 sec

More information about this oral history excerpt

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