(PDF) (DOC) (JPG)June 24, 2019

MAHWAH, N.J. – Steven Fischler, co-director and producer of “From Swastika to Jim Crow,” screened his film on February 14. The program was presented under the auspices of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies and was attended by students and members of the general public.
 
First released in 2000, the documentary explores the similarities between Nazism in Germany (the Swastika) and racism in the American south (Jim Crow). In 1933, the Nazi government expelled Jewish scholars from German universities. Many of them found teaching positions in Southern universities, where they sympathized with the plight of their African-American colleagues and students. The horrors of prejudice became a common thread that would bind these exiled Jewish professors with their black students and colleagues. The film pairs shocking archival footage of the KKK dressed in costume and carrying torches with footage of Nazi salutes and marching German soldiers to compare the barbarity of both ideologies.
 
Friends since the age of nine, Fischler and his co-producer Joel Sucher grew up in a rough-and-tumble Brooklyn neighborhood and early on they took the rebellious road: declaring themselves “anarchists” while still enrolled in Brooklyn Technical High School. In 1970, two of their NYU student films, I am Curious Haroldand Inciting to Riot, caught the attention of film school instructor Martin Scorsese, who encouraged them to use film as a political tool. Establishing their own production company, Pacific Films, while still film students at NYU, Sucher and Fischler began tackling political difficult subjects. In 1978, the two received Guggenheim Fellowships in film, becoming the youngest to ever do so. Two films resulted, “Free Voice of Labor: the Jewish Anarchists” (1980) and “Anarchism in America” (1982).
 
Sucher and Fischler, into the nineties, worked with Martin Scorsese and Oliver Stone on some of their iconic films, including Goodfellas,Cape Fearand JFK.  In Beyond Wiseguys (2007), the pair probed Hollywood’s fascination with mob-related stereotypes. Among those interviewed included John Turturro, Isabella Rossellini, Susan Sarandon, Martin Scorsese, Chazz Palminteri, Ben Gazzara and Marisa Tomei. In 2014, venturing closer to home, Fischler and Sucher made Dressing America: Tales from the Garment Center,” that focused on an assortment of immigrant Jews who built New York’s rag trade. 
 
Crossing the Hudson, Fischler directed Five Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, which premiered on PBS in 2017, bringing best-selling writer Helene Stapinski’s story of growing up in a Jersey City family of generations of swindlers, bookies, embezzlers, murderers and mobster wannabes to the screen.

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