Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 3 hours ago
In December of 2025, LBI hosted the long-lost US premiere of The Family Oppenheim (Semya Oppengeym) (1938) – a powerful Soviet-made anti-Nazi film written by acclaimed German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger (The Oppermanns) in collaboration with visionary Soviet Jewish filmmakers Grigorii and Serafima Roshal.
Conceived in exile, censored in Britain, and banned in the United States, The Family Oppenheim, based on Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, stands as one of the earliest cinematic warnings against Hitler’s rise to power and fascism’s brutal reshaping of Germany. Premiering internationally in the spring of 1939 but soon banned and forgotten for nearly nine decades, the film now returns to US screens – newly restored, translated, and subtitled through a remarkable student-led research project at the University of Oregon led by Miriam Chorley-Schulz. Experience a rediscovered masterpiece once banned by American censors – a work of resistance, vision, and urgency that still echoes powerfully today.
Accompanying the screening, Miriam Chorley-Schulz (University of Oregon) and Rossen Djagalov (NYU) had an illuminating conversation tracing the film’s extraordinary journey from its complex conception to its celebrated 1938 Moscow premiere to decades of suppression, and finally, to its revival today.
In December of 2025, LBI hosted the long-lost US premiere of The Family Oppenheim (Semya Oppengeym) (1938) – a powerful Soviet-made anti-Nazi film written by acclaimed German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger (The Oppermanns) in collaboration with visionary Soviet Jewish filmmakers Grigorii and Serafima Roshal.
Conceived in exile, censored in Britain, and banned in the United States, The Family Oppenheim, based on Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, stands as one of the earliest cinematic warnings against Hitler’s rise to power and fascism’s brutal reshaping of Germany. Premiering internationally in the spring of 1939 but soon banned and forgotten for nearly nine decades, the film now returns to US screens – newly restored, translated, and subtitled through a remarkable student-led research project at the University of Oregon led by Miriam Chorley-Schulz. Experience a rediscovered masterpiece once banned by American censors – a work of resistance, vision, and urgency that still echoes powerfully today.
Accompanying the screening, Miriam Chorley-Schulz (University of Oregon) and Rossen Djagalov (NYU) had an illuminating conversation tracing the film’s extraordinary journey from its complex conception to its celebrated 1938 Moscow premiere to decades of suppression, and finally, to its revival today.
