San Francisco Jewish Film Festival is the oldest Jewish film festival in the world, and currently the largest with a 2016 attendance figure of 40,000 at screenings in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael, and Palo Alto. The three-week summer festival is held in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

, usually at the

Castro Theater The Castro Theatre is a historic movie palace in San Francisco that became San Francisco Historic Landmark #100 in September 1976. Located at 429 Castro Street in the Castro District, it was built in 1922 with a California Churrigueresque faça ...

in San Francisco and other cinemas in San Francisco,

Berkeley Berkeley most often refers to: *Berkeley, California, a city in the United States **University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California * George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher Berkeley may also refer ...

Oakland Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third largest city overall in the Bay A ...

, San Rafael, and

Palo Alto Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was estab ...

, and features contemporary and classic independent Jewish film from around the world. In 2015, the organization re-branded itself as the Jewish Film Institute, retaining the name "San Francisco Jewish Film Festival" for the annual film festival. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival also maintains an online archive of Jewish film, and holds individual film screenings throughout the year. The festival was first held at the

Roxie Theater The Roxie Theater, also known as the Roxie Cinema or just The Roxie, is a historic movie theater, founded in 1912, at 3117 16th Street in the Mission District of San Francisco. It is a non-profit community arthouse cinema. History The Roxie is o ...

in San Francisco in 1980. The current executive director is Lexi Leban and the program director is Jay Rosenblatt. In 2009, the officials in charge of the event were criticized for the decision to the screen of a film about ISM activist

Rachel Corrie Rachel Aliene Corrie (April 10, 1979 – March 16, 2003) was an American activist and diarist. A member of the pro-Palestinian group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), she was crushed to death by an armored bulldozer of the Israel ...

. Writing in the N. California JWeekly, Dan Pine noted "If the Academy handed out an Oscar for community turmoil, the Rachel Corrie flap at this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival would win handily." Pine reported that some Jewish community members said that festival organizers "crossed a line into overtly anti-Israel propaganda" and that "Corrie, and now her parents, have worked to ostracize and delegitimize Israel." In a statement, festival Executive Director Peter Stein apologized "for not fully considering how upsetting this program might be." At the same time, the festival did not back down from its decision to screen the film. Th
36th festival
was held between July 21 and August 7, 2016, in five locations around the Bay Area. The featured films included "Germans & Jews", and Director Janina Quint was scheduled to attended the screening. The 37th festival took place July 20 to August 6, 2017, in the same five Bay Area locations as previous years.Article in ''J. Weekly''
/ref> The opening and closing films, '' Keep the Change'' and '' Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story'', were both directed by women. The 38th festival took place July 19 to August 5, 2018.SF Jewish Film Festival website
/ref>

References

External links

San Francisco Jewish Film FestivalJewish Film InstituteSF Jewish Film Festival Youtube ChannelSF Jewish Film Festival on Twitter
Film festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish film festivals in the United States Jews and Judaism in San Francisco Film festivals established in 1980 1980 establishments in California {{US-film-festival-stub