Sept ? movie: Green Fields. This was a 1937 movie all in Yiddish. It was filmed in the US but set in, well they never say exactly, but I'd guess somewhere in Eastern Europe. A yeshiva student goes out into the world and into a rural community. Two peasant familes fight over who gets to host him and their daughters both fall for him. Eventually everything works out in a romantic comedy sort of way.
I never heard of Yiddish movies from the early 20th century before. I looked for more information online, but unfortunately I didn't find out whether Green Fields was unique, or part of a whole Jewish film community outside of Hollywood, similar to the African American film industry. Honestly, it wasn't a triumph of great moviemaking. But it was a sweet film, heartfelt and simple. The most interesting thing was the cultural details, like the peasant mother teaching her daughter how to act properly so she'll attract the scholar.
(Also I was a bit amused that the film was shown as TCM's "Friday Night Import," even though it was made in the US with an American cast and crew. I guess they called it an import since it wasn't in English.)
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there was a very large yiddish film/theatre industry for a while (pre-1950s, mostly)--but of course, since none of those movies were popular, most have disappeared entirely. i can't believe tcm showed a yiddish movie!!
Before WWII, New York City had one of the largest, if not the largest, Yiddish-speaking communities in the world, and with it a large body of Yiddish-language entertainment, including newspapers, magazines, radio, and live theatre. (The word "schmaltzy" as applied to art comes from the tradition of selling chicken-fat-based snacks in the Yiddish theatres, which ran heavily towards formulaic weepy melodramas.) It only figures that they'd have had a significant Yiddish film industry, too.