Maya Balakirsky Katz, professor and chair of the art history department at Touro College and author of Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation, will screen shorts from the Soviet Union’s animation studio Soyuzmultfilm, which was as pervasive and influential in the Soviet imagination as Disney was in America’s. Katz and film critic J. Hoberman will discuss how the studio brought together Jewish artists from all over the USSR and served as a haven for dissident artists, allowing them to explore distinctive elements of their identity as Jews and Russians.

They will screen the following shorts:

Crocodile Gena (Roman Kachanov, 1969)
The Pioneer’s Violin (Boris Stepansev, 1971)
The Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979)