National Center for Jewish Film

The National Center for Jewish Film is a non-profit motion picture archive, distributor, and resource center. It houses the largest collection of Jewish-themed film and video outside of Israel. Its mission is to collect, restore, preserve, catalogue, and exhibit films with artistic and educational value relevant to the Jewish experience, and to disseminate these materials to the widest possible audience.

Founded in 1976, the National Center for Jewish Film (NCJF or the Center) became an independent 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in 1981. The Center is located on the campus of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

The NCJF archive exclusively owns an estimated 10,000 cans of film (35 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm, super 8) and thousands of master videotapes. This collection of feature films, documentaries, fiction and non-fiction short films, newsreels, home movies, and institutional films includes material dating from 1903 to the present. These films address a wide range of topics, including: the Jewish immigrant experience in America, Yiddish theatre and cinema, pre–World War II European Jewry, the Holocaust, Judaism and the arts and music, relations between Jews and other groups, Sephardic culture, Israeli history, and Hollywood portrayals of Jewish life.

The Center’s collection includes ethnographic studies of past and present Jewish communities in China, Mexico, Morocco, Australia, Tunisia, Russia, Argentina, Bosnia, India, Romania, Greece, and Egypt, travelogues depicting Jewish life in Poland before World War II, U.S. government World War II newsreels, studies in Israeli history, Holocaust films exploring little-known sites of genocide like Transnistria and Babi Yar, anti-Jewish propaganda, and Yiddish-American feature films. Individually and collectively, the films distributed by NCJF dispel stereotypes about Jews and educate audiences about the diversity and cultural richness of Jewish life.

NCJF's first priority is the preservation and restoration of rare and endangered nitrate and acetate films. NCJF preservation activities began 30 years ago with the rescue of a languishing Yiddish language film collection. Since that time, NCJF has preserved and restored 36 Yiddish feature films, making them available in 35mm, 16mm, video, and DVD formats.

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