A Life Apart: Hasidism in America

Filmmakers Oren Rudavsky and Menachem Daum donated the film archive from their landmark documentary, A Life Apart: Hasidism in America to Brooklyn College in 2012. It is described as “audio-visual field notes” on the religious practices, cultural mores, communal organization, family life, inter-communal relations and the Americanization process of a distinctive immigrant community from 1936-1996. The archive contains over 69 hours of unused footage. Rudavsky and Daum collaborated with the Archives to secure a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to digitize the material, convinced the content will be of interest and value to researchers and the general public. The newly digitized archive contains oral history interviews with members of the Hasidic community, scenes of community and family life, and interviews with scholars