Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa

In many ways, Marlene Booth was just like any other girl growing up in the fairy-tale world of 1950s Iowa. She went to football games with her father, sang the Iowa Corn Song with pride, dreamed of being a cheerleader, was a member of the Girls Club and Student Court, and ended up marrying her high-school sweetheart. But there was something about her that always made her feel different: She was Jewish. With warmth and wisdom, Booth provides a missing link in discussions of Jewish identity "the negotiated identity" of Jews in small-town America who adapt their behavior to accommodate to local norms. Through hilarious home movies, conversations with old friends and footage of Marlene’s thirtieth high school reunion, we witness the forging of an identity composed of conflicting parts. Marlene Booth’s RAANANAH (1981), THE FORWARD (1988) and WHEN I WAS 14 (1996) were featured in previous San Francisco Jewish Film Festivals.

Marlene Booth is an award-winning filmmaker, who has worked in film since 1975, both as an independent filmmaker for her own company, Raphael Films, and for public television station WGBH-TV in Boston. She has produced and directed several major documentary films screened on PBS, at national and international film festivals, and in classrooms nationwide. Among Ms. Booth's awards is the Cine Golden Eagle, an Emmy nomination, a Bronze Apple from the National Educational Film/Video Festival, and Outstanding Independent Film at the New England Film & Video Festival. Her films were selected for screening at the Margaret Mead Film Festival, the Atlanta Film/Video Festival, Cinema du Reel in Paris, and Jewish Film Festivals in San Francisco, Boston, London and Moscow. She has received funding for her films from, among other places, the Iowa Humanities Board, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Humanities Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts through the New England Regional Fellowships. Ms. Booth was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. She received a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Beloit College in 1970 and an M.F.A. in film from Yale University in 1975. She was a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College for the academic year 1985-86. In 1992, Ms. Booth founded Kesher, the Cambridge Community Hebrew School/After School. For her work at Kesher, Ms. Booth received the coveted Keter Torah Award from the Boston Bureau of Jewish Education, the Charlotte Bloomberg Award, and recognition as the parent Role Model of 1994 from the Boston Parent's Paper. FILMOGRAPHY Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa, 1999. When I Was 14: A Survivor Remembers, 1995, (SF JFF 1996). The Double Burden: Three Generations of Working Mothers, 1992. The Forward: From Immigrants to Americans, 1989, (SF JFF 1989). Orange Line Symphony, 1987. Ra'ananah: A World of Our Own, 1981, (SF JFF 1981). They Had a Dream: Brown vs. Board of Education Twenty-five Years Later, 1980.