Happy Birthday, Molly! Celebrate East and West and the Other Migrating Identities

Live Score and Film Screening of East and West starring Molly Picon Featuring composer of the 1991 score Pete Sokolow and Michael Winograd

Co-sponsored by the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History
$15 general ● $10 students/AJHS/CJH/YIVO members/seniors ● $18 at the door

This delightful comedy that scholar Jeffrey Shandler famously called “anti-nostalgic”, East and West opens as Morris Brown, a New Yorker better acquainted with his checkbook than his prayerbook, returns to Galicia with his very American daughter, Mollie, for a family wedding. The bride, daughter of his traditionally observant brother, and Mollie, whose exuberant antics fill the film, could not be more different. But Mollie unexpectedly meets her match, an engaging young yeshiva scholar who forsakes tradition and joins the secular world to win her heart. East and West features classic scenes of Molly Picon lifting weights and boxing, teaching young villagers to shimmy and stealing away from services to gorge herself before sundown on Yom Kippur. Underlying these hijinks is filmmaker Goldin's affectionate appreciation of the differences and tensions inherent in immigration.