When Sharon Pucker Rivo left Kansas City to study political science, she never dreamed years later she would be
considered one of the world’s foremost experts on Jewish films. Yet that’s exactly what she is now, and she’ll be here next Wednesday, Sept. 10, to discuss the use of film in Nazi propaganda. (For more information, see box)
Rivo will provide an analysis of film propaganda — newsreels, documentary and narrative film — employed by the Third Reich in its campaign for genocide against the Jewish people. Her presentation will include video clips from several Nazi propaganda films, including two rare films preserved and restored by Rivo’s organization, The National Center for Jewish Film: “Hitler Gives a City to the Jews” and “der Ewig Jude (The Eternal Jew).”
Born in Kansas City, Mo., the Jewish film expert grew up in a three-generation household with her parents Joseph Pucker and Ida Katz Pucker and brother Bernie Pucker, her uncle Leo Katz and her maternal grandmother Lena Katz, a Yiddish-speaker born in Radin, near Vilna. After attending Southwest High School, she spent two years at the University of Illinois before transferring to Brandeis University. She graduated from Brandeis in 1961 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and continued her studies at the University of California, Berkeley, earning a Master’s of Arts degree in political science in 1963.
Now the executive director and co-founder of the National Center for Jewish Film, Rivo has been a leading force in the field of Jewish film and culture for more than three decades through her work as a curator, programmer, archivist, film distributor, film and television producer and academic. Established in 1976, The National Center for Jewish Film is a unique, independent, nonprofit film archive, distributor and exhibitor, located on the campus of Brandeis University. Under Rivo’s leadership, NCJF has become the largest archive of Jewish-content film in the world, outside of Israel, with holdings of more than 15,000 reels of film. Rivo was an early advocate for the inclusion of film in the study of history and culture and for the historically accurate use of visual materials.
Rivo has taught at Brandeis University for more than 20 years and lectures widely on the history of Jews in cinema, a field she helped pioneer. Internationally recognized as an authority on Jewish film, film archiving and restoration, and Jewish programming and distribution, she has been an invited lecturer at hundreds of venues and has served on many film festival juries.
Rivo came to Boston originally to visit her brother who was living there. Not thrilled with the graduate program she was enrolled in at the time, she interviewed for a position at WGBH-TV.
“Because I had a background in political science, I was hired in the news department in 1963, the week that Kennedy was assassinated,” she said, adding that within four months she became a producer.
Around this time she also met Dr. Elliott Rivo, an OB-GYN originally from Buffalo, N.Y. The two married in 1965: three children, Lisa, Steven, and Rebecca, followed.
As a producer Rivo said she learned all kinds of things and then was hired by the Institute for Jewish Life, a think tank that was created by the Council of Federations, to be its arts and media director. It was while she had that job that she said stumbled across feature films that had been made in the Yiddish language.
“They were held privately by a guy in New York, and I ‘set out to save them.’ That collection became the beginning, the genesis, of what is now the National Center for Jewish Film.”
She attempted, and originally failed, to raise money from the Jewish community for the project. Luckily the National Endowment of the Arts and the American Film Institute supported the project.
That was in 1975, when it took $25,000 to save one film. Now the process costs between $80,000 and $100,000 per film.
“We had no idea what we were getting into and we’ve probably raised between $4 and $5 million now,” Rivo said.
Soon they began collecting anything that was Jewish on film. Film studios were throwing out their silent films and Jewish organizations were getting rid of their old films as well. Those films were worth saving, Rivo said, because they had extraordinary footage of Jews in Iran, Yemen and other places across the world.
“They would send camera people to the various places in Northern Africa or Europe or wherever they were trying to save people in order to make fundraising and educational films. But, they were all tossing those films out,” she said.
Eventually they began collecting Holocaust materials as well. By then they had established The National Center for Jewish Film.
“Once we set up the archives, filmmakers came to us to get footage of Eastern Europe for the new films that they were making,” she explained. Most of the filmmakers didn’t have distributors, either, “so we became a distribution center and a library for the contemporary materials that were not going to make it financially in the market place.”
“We have distributed about 250 items and about 80 of them are Holocaust related.”
For the past 25 years Rivo has also been teaching. She alternates between a “Film in the Holocaust” course and a class called “Jews on Screen,” which allows her to teach a variety of things.
“I can do some Israeli films, I can do some American films, I can do documentaries … I use a lot of materials from the archives,” she explained.
During her presentation, she will show some images of the diversity and the vibrancy of Jewish Life in Eastern Europe.
“One of my major concerns in all the teaching and speaking that I’ve done is contemporary audiences simply do not have any positive images of Jews. The images that they know are something like the Margaret Bourke-White photo of the liberation of the camps, as Jews as victims, Jews as people that have been tortured and scapegoated and those kinds of things.”
Once Rivo shows some positive examples of Jews in Eastern Europe, she will transition into showing specific genocide propaganda materials from the Third Reich.
“They are quite unusual because they actually made films, especially the documentary and the newsreels, of people who they incarcerated. People were in ghettos and they were starving to death and they were being starved to death by the same people who brought in cameras to document who these people were and used it as part of the whole campaign.”
Rivo lecture details
The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education and the National Archives presents Sharon Pucker Rivo for a lecture titled “Power of Film Images and the Holocaust.” Rivo’s lecture will be held at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 10, at the National World War I Museum, 100 W. 26th Street in Kansas City, Mo.
This lecture is in conjunction with the traveling exhibition, State of Deception: The Power of Nazi Propaganda, produced by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and on display through Oct. 25 at the National Archives at Kansas City (400 W. Pershing Road, Kansas City, Mo.). It is the sixth program in the eight-part Wednesday Evening Speaker Series presented by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, in partnership with the National Archives at Kansas City and the National World War I Museum.
The National Archives will remain open until 6:30 p.m. for exhibition viewing preceding this program, with free light receptions provided from 5:30 p.m. until 6:30 p.m. Small plates and cocktails will be available for purchase at the National World War I Museum from 6 p.m. until 7 p.m.
There is no admission charge for the exhibition or for the programs, but reservations are strongly encouraged for all programs and receptions by emailing or calling 816-268-8010. For more information, visit www.mchekc.org.