East Endings

Meet Harry Blacker and his friends. They have gathered at Bloom's Kosher Restaurant in London's East End to celebrate the 82nd birthday of Blacker, an artist, satirist and cartoonist. They are busy schmoozing about the Jewish East End in the 1930s: "an eternal ghetto" of Eastern European immigrants, where poverty was noble, the Yiddish Theatre was the synagogue and the anarchists practiced the loving religion of "rachmones" and "tzedakah" (compassion and charity). Punctuated with archival footage, animations of Mr. Blacker's quirky cartoons, and the Yiddish swing music of the Barry Sisters - this is the social history of Jewish London at its most personal.