Rivertowns Jewish Consortium presents Mayim Film Series
Wednesdays October 14, 21, 28 | Greenburgh Hebrew Center | 7:30 pm

October 21-"At Home in Utopia--The Coops"
Filmmaker: Michal Goldman

The United Workers Cooperative Colony, a housing complex created and populated 80 years ago by American Communists and their sympathizers. Commonly known as "the Coops," the project has been privately owned for decades and includes only a handful of its original 2,000 residents.
In this film Michal Goldman has recaptured a daring social experiment, limning its idealism on race relations and social justice and its ultimately fatal embrace of Communist doctrine.

The Bronx alone offered four examples - the Communist Coops; the Farband Houses, run by a Labor Zionist group; the Sholom Aleichem Houses, built by Yiddish-speaking socialists; and the Amalgamated Houses, founded by the garment workers' union. She captures the vigor of daily life in the Coops. The residents maintained a 20,000-volume library, cooperative stores, youth clubs; they welcomed, indeed recruited, black families, leading to interracial dating and marriage. Yet even internally the Coops fell victim to dogmatic rigidity. With the housing complex in debt in the early 1940s and at risk of defaulting on its mortgage, residents refused to increase their monthly rents by $1 a room. Sure enough, the Coops were sold to a private owner in 1943.

Facilitator: Rabbi David Holtz, TBA

Fee: $30 SERIES/INDIVIDUAL FILM: $12 PER PERSON

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