Pushcarts and Plantations: Jewish Life in Louisiana
| Pushcarts and Plantations: Jewish Life in Louisiana | |
|---|---|
| File:Pushcarts and Plantations screenshot.jpg | |
| Directed by | Brian Cohen |
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Release dates
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1998 |
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Running time
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54 min. |
| Country | USA |
| Language | English |
Pushcarts and Plantations is a 1998 documentary about Louisiana Jewry from award-winning director Brian Cohen. The documentary combines interviews with historians and locals to tell the 300-year-old history of different Jewish communities found in the North, South, and New Orleans. The documentary shares anecdotes about local heroes, little known facts, and personal accounts.
Summary
Sephardic traders were the first Jews to settle in Louisiana, and, despite antisemitic legislation, their community thrived. Over a hundred years later, in the 1830s and ’40s a large number of Jews from Alsace-Lorraine settled in Northern Louisiana.
Since early settlement, some Jews have integrated the Southern culture into their Jewish culture. The film interviews two little old ladies who recently put out a Kosher-Creole cookbook, which shows how observant Jews can whip up Fake Frog’s Legs or Oysters Mock-a-Feller — a twist on the famous New Orleans dish Oysters Rockefeller that replaces the oysters with gefilte fish.
The documentary explores what it means to be Jewish in a community where it’s generally assumed that everyone is Christian. “Lafayette is not New York,” one woman says, “you’re not surrounded by Jews. So you can’t just decide, I’ll be Jewish and just be.” If you want to be Jewish, she explains, you have to be an active Jew. One mother in Southern Louisiana recalls that in order to have her children bar and bat mitzvahed she had to teach them Hebrew herself and then drive them hours away to New Orleans for the ceremony.
Trivia
The first king of Mardi Gras, Lewis Salomon, was Jewish. But since that celebration in 1872 there has yet to be another Jewish king.
Reception
"Poignant...with evocative voices and image," said Museum of the Southern Jewish experience.
"A thoughtful and compassionate documentary," said Toronto Jewish Film Festival
See also
Other documentaries about Jewish communities in Amierica:
References
External links
- Pages with broken file links
- English-language films
- 1998 films
- Documentary films about Jews and Judaism in the United States
- American documentary films
- American films
- Documentary films about United States history
- Jewish-American history
- Jews and Judaism in Louisiana
- History of Louisiana
- Documentary films about New Orleans, Louisiana
