“Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever” Post-Film Discussion with Film Producer Hadas Kalderon and Professor Avraham Novershtern

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Liberation75 and Rodef Shalom Congregation, is excited to offer the opportunity to watch the film “Black Honey, The Life and Poetry of Avraham Sutzkever” and engage in a post-film discussion with the film producer, Yair Qedar, Professor Avraham Novershtern, and CWB scholar Avi Ben Hur.
Educators attending this program are eligible to receive Pennsylvania Act 48 continuing education credits.

As long as Abraham Sutzkever lived, he wouldn’t let a film about his life be made. Ten years after his passing, Black Honey tells the incredible story of the greatest Yiddish poet of modern times. The man who led the Paper Brigade underground movement that saved Jewish manuscripts from the Nazis, survived the WWII due to Stalin sending him a private rescue plane, testified in the Nuremberg Trials, and immigrated to Israel in 1947 where he led Yiddish culture, while writing in astonishing vitality.

Yair Qedar

Yair Qedar is an Israeli filmmaker and civil rights activist. His academic training on 20th century Hebrew literature (Tel Aviv University), propelled him into “The Hebrews” — a documentary project on the Hebrew and Jewish literary canon, centered on filmic portraits of Hebrew writers from the 17 century to recent days. The documentary films which Qedar produced and directed with 10 other Israeli film directors all premiered in film festivals, aired on Israeli TV, and were circulated in hundreds of cinemas and community/cultural centers in Israel and around the world, earning 14 awards.

In 2015-2017, Yair co-directed and produced, with the actor Ilan Peled, the mockumentary mini series “Vanished,” about the disappearance of women artists in Israeli culture. Qedar is also the initiator of various media projects in Israel, in the fields of the conservation of culture, specifically Hebrew literature and language, and in the LGBT community.

Professor Avraham Novershtern

Prof. Avraham Novershtern is professor emeritus from the Yiddish Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He currently serves as the director of Beit Sholem Aleichem in Tel Aviv, a cultural center devoted to Yiddish and the Eastern European Jewish Heritage. A major part of Prof. Novershtern scholarship was devoted to Avraham Sutzkever’s life and work, culminating with a major exhibit at the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, to celebrate Sutzkever’s seventieth birthday (1983). An annotated English translation of Sutzkever’s memoir about the Vilna ghetto will be published in English in 2021, in collaboration with Prof. Justin Cammy.