San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

The world’s  first Jewish film festival, the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF), was founded in 1980 to stir up discussion among Bay Area Jews about Jewish identity, politics and culture. It has quickly become an international model for alternative Jewish expression that has been replicated more than 100 times worldwide, and it has also provided programming for dozens of festivals, including those in London, Germany and Russia. In recent years, this annual Bay Area festival, which attracts well over 30,000 people, has been the place where critical discussions of the day have taken place and reverberated across the region. 

After spending 29 years as the engine driving social expression in the Bay Area Jewish community, SFJFF has created a new project in order to stay at the leading edge of constant changes in technology, and to keep pace with the fundamental shifts in the ways in which its audiences create and consume media. The New Media Initiative, launched in the Spring of 2009 with seed funding from the Righteous Persons Foundation, the Revson Foundation and several others, will bring the experience of the festival and the expertise of SFJFF to the internet through searchable archives, educator resources and social networking tools for teen filmmakers. 

Evaluators excited by SFJFF’s success in “attracting new audiences otherwise unconnected to Jewish life” comment that, “More and more people under 30 are using multi-media, especially video and film, to experience the world of ideas and the world around them.” One cautious evaluator warns, “I appreciate most of the work the Festival does, but I do feel this year they may have crossed the line.” A third adds, in order for SFJFF “to help Jews and others share stories through film and culture,” it will need to stay “on the cutting edge of media technology.”