Join BHS Director of Special Projects Diane Lapis for this special event, with a showing of this 57-minute film and talk with its producer/director, Michal Goldman.

In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources to build four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. At Home in Utopia focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony – aka the Coops – the largest and most member-driven of these cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists. “Coopniks” helped found a network of cooperatives, including Camp Nitgetdeiget in Beacon New York. They saw themselves as part of an international movement. In the 1930s they opted to bring their passion for racial justice home by integrating their own cooperative house, with unexpected consequences. An epic tale of the struggle for equity and justice across two generations, the film tracks the rise and fall of one community from the 1920s into the 1950s, paying close attention to the passions that bound people together and those that tore them apart. Along the way, At Home in Utopia bears witness to lives lived with courage across the barriers of race, language, convention, and sometimes even common sense.

All are welcome — and admission is free.