Jewish women were active in animation from its first and formative years. Since animation is, by and large, a group art that requires collaboration at all stages of production, the study of Jewish women working in animation sheds light on the level of integration of ethnic minorities and women into the industry’s labor force. Yet, despite the collaborative nature of animation work, the participation of Jewish woman has not always been acknowledged precisely because they were most active in low- and mid-level positions in the field in its early decades. With the exception of the rare female directors, most Jewish women worked as writers, storyboard artists, animators, inkers, voice actors, musicians, editors, and fillers.   

In her 1928 essay on film editing, Jewish film director Ėsfir Shub (1894-1959) left an indelible description of her experience in the “back room” of the profession. She described the work of the “montazhnitsa” (montage-girl), a Soviet film term that overlaps with the work of the animation editor, as the art of splicing live-action film clips into synthesized cinematic movements and hand-painting over celluloid. The work demanded “the ability to accurately determine the action of each shot (and frame) in isolation, and visual memory.” Shub employed gender-specific language to describe these frame-by-frame negative-cutters: “The labour of a montazhnitsa and her role in the production process is not widely known, and yet it is a large department with a well-organised workforce…This collective of women workers delights us with its political harmony, social activism, and a sense of absolute camaraderie toward one another” (Gadassik).

Since the production of animation is the most labor-intensive form of filmmaking, requires long production cycles, and typically demands substantial funding often underwritten by government support, it makes sense to discuss Jewish women in animation by geo-political context, as each country has its own industry-wide economic and political structures.

We begin with Disney, the studio that has defined the entire industry of animation. Every country that embarked on the industrialization of animation in the interwar period modeled its own studios after Disney’s use of departmentalization, specialization, and factorization.

Replying to an aspiring female animator in 1937, Disney studios wrote: “Upon closer inspection of your application, we note that you list your occupation as ‘housekeeper.’ We assume, therefore, that you are a woman. If this is the case it will be impossible for us to further consider your application inasmuch as we employ only men in our animation department” (Mallory). Although many women, including several Jewish women, worked as pourers, inbetweeners (a lower rank of animator who rendered inbetween shots), copiers (copying drawings onto cels), and inkers, these jobs were considered grunt work and were typically uncredited roles, while men occupied the creative positions, such as animation director, artist, head of story, and production designer. Jewish women had even steeper barriers to entry, as Disney—one of the few non-Jewish-owned film studios on the West Coast—tended to hire white Christian men in its art department, sardonically described by film historian Steven G. Kellman as “conspicuously Judenrein” (free of Jews) (63).

On the East Coast of America, smaller and more experimental New York studios, such as Bray Studios, Fleischer, Cineffects, Neil Sessa, Zander, IF Studios, and Phoscine, provided alternative opportunities to Jews and women. In addition to integrating female personnel into their creative departments, Fleischer Studios was also notable for the creation of the provocative Jewish character Betty Boop, an aspiring and sexually “liberated” Yiddish-theater actress. Voiced by Jewish actress Mae Questel, Betty Boop wants nothing more than to rise above the immigrant Jewish culture of the Lower East Side tenements. At Fleischer, aspiring female animators, such as Lillian Friedman Astor (1912–1989) and the Russian Jewish immigrant Edith Vernick (alt. Ida Wernik), were able to rise from uncredited roles in the inking and opaquing departments to the creative departments.

Striving to improve employment conditions at Van Beuren Studios in New York, rank-and-file employees began to organize in 1935. Aspiring Jewish animator Sadie Friedlander Bodin (1910-1995), who worked as an inker and scene planner at Van Buren, served as the recording secretary of the would-be union. After her union activities became known and she was fired without notice, Bodin and her husband were the first activists to picket an animation studio on grounds of discrimination against women. Bodin and her husband stood during the busy lunch hour on Seventh Avenue with signs that read “Van Beuren violates Sec. 7-A NRA by firing Union Labor for Union Activity. Do not patronize theaters where Van Beuren animated cartoons are shown—Tattletales and Rainbow Parade” (Sito). The struggle to unionize failed and Van Beuren never rehired Sadie Bodin, but she went on to take managerial positions at several New York studios. Most animation studios in New York had unionized by the time of the Disney strike of 1941.

While Jewish women made some strides in the animation industry during the Second World War, only with the advent of television in the 1950s and the breakdown of Disney’s reign in international animation did Jewish women begin to find consistent opportunities in independent animation, television, and commercials.

Faith Hubley (née Chestman, 1924-2001), born into a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, became one of the most influential independent animators. Starting out as a messenger at Columbia Pictures, Hubley worked her way into sound-effects and music editing. She often worked with her husband John, and they achieved mainstream recognition for their experimental work, winning Oscars for their shorts Moonbird (1959), The Hole (1962), and A Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass Double Feature (1966). After being diagnosed with breast cancer, Faith Hubley stepped out with her solo 1975 debut W.O.W. Women of the World, a collage that took a global view of the changing attitude towards the sexes and an idealized vision of a liberated creative future for all of humanity. Thereafter, Hubley added 24 more solo films to her credits.

Beginning in the 1970s, Jane Aaron (1948-2015) worked primarily in television, innovating expedient methods of animation for Sesame Street, PBS, and MTV. Aaron produced over 150 animated shorts for Sesame Street, which promoted social equality as it brought letters, numbers, and concepts to young viewers. Aaron achieved auteur status with her experimental films A Brand New Day (1974) and This Time Around (1989), and her work has been exhibited at art museums such as the Whitney Biennial and the Museum of Modern Art. In This Time Around, household objects perform a frantic domestic dance against a landscape that speeds by as if seen from a house whirling out of control, until the artist’s hand comes into view to reveal the real scale of the miniature objects and her mastery over the entire scene.

Some animators sought to adapt aspects of Jewish culture to animation. Sally Heckel’s (b. 1945) The Bent Tree (1980) is an animated short based on Itzik Manger’s Yiddish folk song Afn Veg Shteyt a Boym (On the Road Stands a Tree), about a child whose boundless imagination triggers his mother’s fears and anxieties and stymies his experience of the world. In Face like a Frog (1987), Sally Cruikshank (b. 1949) animated a frog’s obsessive (and psychedelic) search for his roots in a haunted house, set to Danny Elfman’s music, which included sounds from Eastern European Klezmer music.

Caroline Leaf (1946-) also distinguished herself in the auteur era of animation, when directors assumed full artistic control and responsibility for a film. Born in Seattle to a Jewish family, Leaf studied at Harvard University before moving to Canada and innovating several animation techniques, which she often applied to stories with overt Jewish content. In The Street (1977), Leaf applied paint to the camera lens to animate a short story by Mordecai Richler about his childhood memories of growing up in a multi-generational Jewish family in Montreal, in which the immediate desires of the grandson emerge alongside the thwarted aspirations of a sick and dying grandmother. In The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (1977), Leaf used sand to animate Franz Kafka’s classic novella about a salesman who turns into a bug. In the collaborative film Interview (1979), Caroline Leaf and Veronika Soul explored their daily lives and creative processes as women filmmakers through a combination of film techniques.

In the contemporary Canadian scene, Jewish animators Janet Perlman, Joyce Borenstein, Vanessa Schwarz, and Tami Sivan remain active. Tami Sivan, trained in Canada, directed the animated Jewish music videos Agam Anakit (Giant Lake, 1991) and HaShomer shel Hagan (The Garden’s Guard, 1991), in collaboration with British-trained Daniel Isaacs.

Jewish women have also been active in animation in South America. The animation collective Red Argentina Mujeres de la Animación (RAMA; Red Argentina Women of Animation) includes several Jewish artists. RAMA created the experimental short En boca de todas (On Everyone’s Lips, 2018) to showcase the collaborative nature of women artists through the integration of highly diverse techniques and styles. The overall flow and poetic mood achieved in the film come to an abrupt end in the final scene, which ends in violence against women.

Ileana Andrea Gomez Gavinoser, one of the Jewish animators who participated in RAMA, has also explored Jewish themes, such as her watercolor animated film Full Stop (2017). Argentinian filmmaker Maria Victoria Menis’ Camera Obscura (2008) combines documentary World War I footage and hand-drawn animation, alternating between Spanish and Yiddish to tell the story of Gertrudis, a Jewish girl born on an immigrant ship headed for Buenos Aires. Considered homely by locals, Gertrudis comes to see herself for the first time when a travelling French photographer makes her his model as he passes through her town. Menis corrals a blend of different media, visual styles, and languages to meditate on beauty.

Jewish women were among the first generation of animators in the Soviet Union, whose revolutionary ethos, penchant for art unions, and state-funded practical workshops promoted egalitarianism in the arts well ahead of the United States and Europe. Several Jewish women achieved recognition in the 1920s, before animation was a separate field of filmmaking; they included Ėsfir Shub at the montage division of the state-owned film studio Goskino. Shub edited segments of Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike! (1925) and October (1928), as well as “non-played film” (such as the filming of inanimate objects and audio sound-recordings of the street) that formed an archive of footage frame by frame that could theoretically be used by other filmmakers. Her own film, Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), exemplifies her approach to montage by slicing and compiling so much archival stock footage that she was able to make a “documentary” of the Russian Revolution despite the dearth of cinematic footage.

The first Soviet Jewish women went into animation during the silent era, when the new Bolshevik state sought to envision and manifest a new world using new media. In her memoir account of her and her sister Valentina’s animation careers, Zinaida Brumberg (1900-1983) wrote that “we went into animation in the 1920s when Soviet art was boiling, transforming, ventilating, going up and down. Everything was bubbling” (4). Valentina (1899-1975) and Zinaida Brumberg worked primarily in the genre of fairytale, directing over 50 films that helped shape the Soviet animation aesthetic. Mariya Benderskaia (1894-?) went on to direct several animated films, including the animated adaptation of Kornei Chukovsky’s tale Moidodyr (1927) and the political satire The Adventures of the Little Chinese (Prikliucheniia Kitaichat, 1928). Sara Yakovlevna Mokil (1906-1984) was a puppet maker and designer who worked in Alexander Ptushko’s studio. Although much of her work went uncredited, Ptushko mentioned her contribution to his film The New Gulliver (1935). In 1937, Mokil debuted as a director in her own right with The Fox and the Wolf (Lisa i volk, Mosfilm, 1937), the first Soviet film shot using the newly invented full-spectrum “three-color” method. After the consolidation of Soviet animation into the single mega-studio Soyuzmultfilm in 1936, to which she was not invited, Mokil never returned to animation directing. From 1936 on, she made a career of teaching puppetry and puppet-animation; after the war, she settled at Mosfilm as a costume designer and makeup artist, with credits in Sadko (1952) and Ilya Muromets (1956).

The Soviet women who went into animation generally belonged to middle-class Jewish families who saw higher education as a means of integration into Russian Society. Ėsfir Shub, born in Surazhe in the southwest part of the Russian Empire, left to study literature at the Institute for Women’s Higher Education in Moscow in the mid-1910s. In 1929, Sara Mokil graduated from the Moscow College of Handicraft and Art Industry. In 1918, Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg enrolled in Ilia Mashkov’s courses at VKhUTEMAS (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), where several students, including women, turned to the new medium of stop-motion animation in an atmosphere that encouraged students to think of art in terms of its industrial production.

The new medium of animation, especially in the silent era, was well-suited for the many ethnic nationalities that found themselves absorbed into the Soviet Union. The Brumbergs began to create shorts for the new workshop ambitiously called the All-Union National Institute of Cinema (GTK, later VGIK), seeking to use the new medium’s potential to create a progressive culture. Their early films, such as Kitai v ogne (China in Flames, 1925), The Samoyed Boy (1927), One of Many (1927), and Give Us a Good Store! (1927), were political satires notable for their aesthetic integration of different styles, such as Chinese landscape and topography, traditional Jewish papercutting, and an avant-garde constructivist style with folk-art elements and bold caricatured lines.

The Brumbergs were also involved in the first use of animated clips on the theatrical stage. Along with the sibling team Nikolai (1892-1979) and Olga Khodataev (1894-1968), the Brumbergs created animated clips as a theatrical device in collaboration with Natal’ia Sats (1903-1993), who founded the world’s first children’s theater at the precocious age of fifteen. Although the use of film clips—especially documentary film footage—was a hallmark of Soviet theater in the 1920s, Sats was the first to specifically incorporate animation into the theatrical action on stage for her children’s ballet pantomime Negritenok i obez’iana (The Little Negro Boy and the Monkey, 1927).

The animated segments for The Little Negro Boy did not survive, but they were described in some detail by both Zinaida Brumberg and Natal’ia Sats, as well as in theatrical reviews and stage-set photographs. In her memoir Sketches from My Life, Sats described the placing of the animated segments within the production: My ideas were largely borne out by the production.… A corner of the jungle, with lianas hanging, birds flying, elephants wandering about. A cartoon is projected onto a flat to the right, showing a thicket where our actors playing African children are hiding. They are lying in ambush, waiting for more animals to appear. At a signal from Nagua, the children start banging their tom-toms. The frightened animals scamper away (cartoon here). Nagua shoots at the hindmost doe but misses and starts in hot pursuit. A panorama of the forest in motion: Nagua is chasing the doe. At a certain moment, the actress playing Nagua disappears and the action is continued in the cartoon… In this story of amazing adventure the transition from scenic action to the screen is quite natural (111-112).

Ivan Ivanov-Vano, the official face of Soviet animation for many decades, gave high praise to the use of animation for the theatrical stage, writing that the use of animation “uniquely expanded the production’s spatial and temporal spheres, pushing against the narrow framework of the theatrical stage” (45). He was especially taken with the use of animation (by the same creative team of the Brumbergs and Sats) in the play About Dzuba. The hero’s “flights of fancy were brilliantly implemented in the cartoon, which was projected straight onto the scenery, and since there were naturally various objects on the stage, the picture quickly became refracted” (40-41).

Despite the praise showered by Ivanov-Vano, the official face of Soviet animation for many decades, on their early use of animation for the theatrical stage, the Brumbergs forged their directorial identities independently from Ivanov-Vano, whose group, known as IVVOS (an acronym of the surnames of the group’s directors), was the all-male directorial group that rose at the studio through a sustained focus on technological advancement.

After Stalin consolidated Soviet animation in 1936 into the single mega-studio Soyuzmultfilm, the Brumbergs corralled artists, including other Jews and women, who were floundering in the Moscow art world, into their directorial group. They gave Jewish actress Faina Ranevskaya (1896-1984) the voice role of the Babrikha in their wartime film The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1943), after the State Committee for Cinematography (Goskino) froze her out of the live-action industry because of her controversial role as a Polish-Jewish mistress in Mikhail Romm’s film Dream (1943). One of their protegées, Jewish designer Lana Azarkh (1922-2014), wrote many years later that the Brumberg sisters “believed in me and helped me establish myself as an artist. They and I listened and prayed to the same God” (156).

After the Second World War, Jews in general and Jewish women in particular contributed to animated films with explicit Jewish material, including the writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya (b. 1938) and animation artist Francesca Yarbusova (b. 1942), who worked on Yuri Norstein’s masterpiece Tale of Tales (Skazka skazok, 1979) that took his postwar Jewish childhood as its basis. Jewish scriptwriters such as Zinaida Yakovlevna Filimonova (1920-2015) wrote successful scripts for Soyuzmultfilm. Alexandra Svidirova (b. 1951) wrote the first animated film overtly about the Holocaust, Story of a Doll (1984). In this film, a Don Quixote puppet created in a concentration camp comes to life in the aftermath of the gruesome murder of the entire barracks; the living puppet takes on the Reich and ends up on display at the Auschwitz Holocaust Museum. This Don Quixote is designed as a “living skeleton,” that thin space between life and death occupied by the most psychologically deteriorated inmates.

Because Film Polski, the Polish state film studio, was dominated by men and privileged live-action filmmaking in the interwar period, women who aspired to animation typically took alternative or independent routes to establish their careers.

Franciszka Themerson (1907-1988), the daughter of Jewish artist Jakub Weinles and Jewish pianist Łuja Weinles, worked under difficult conditions to co-create five experimental films with her husband Stefan Themerson. Although resources were very limited, it was the heady days of the Warsaw avant-garde and the couple improvised in ways that produced not only new techniques but also innovative content that exploited the tensions between art and commercial and educational agendas. For their film Apteka (Pharmacy, 1930), they jerry-rigged their own animation stand by attaching a camera underneath a glass plate covered in translucent paper. By lighting the small pharmaceutical objects on the glass plate and moving the light source in concert with those objects, the Themersons managed to make the dynamic qualities of light the main subject of the animation. For their next film Europa (1931-32), likewise made independently in Warsaw and exhibited by art cinema theaters such as START (Society of Enthusiasts of Art Cinema), the Themersons animated a futuristic poem by Jewish poet Anatol Stern about the deterioration of the world. Having stepped out as avant-gardists of dynamic collage montage, the Themersons then produced a commissioned commercial for Wanda Golińska’s jewelry shop and an educational film for the Institute of Social Problems in Warsaw. They eventually founded the Film Authors’ Cooperative (SAF), where they painted directly on live-action footstock to achieve a technological and aesthetic breakthrough that later influenced Roman Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958).

With rising antisemitism in Poland, the Themersons escaped Poland and went different ways for a few years during the war out of necessity. After reuniting in England in 1942, they made two films in exile for the Film Unit of the Polish Ministry of Information and Documentation. Their anti-Nazi propaganda film Wzywając pana Smitha (Calling Mr. Smith, 1943) was a haunting account of Nazi atrocities in Poland, aimed at arousing British citizens to acknowledge German atrocities. In their last film, Oko i Ucho (The Eye and the Ear, 1944/45), the Themersons immersed themselves in the visual dynamics of music by using Karol Szymanowski’s songs to offer four different models or types of visual experiences.

For over two decades after the end of the Second World War, a steady stream of Polish-born displaced persons emigrated abroad, taking the richness and darkness of the Polish animation tradition with them. Animator Deborah Szapiro has reconstructed some of this migration of Polish animation in Australia in film festivals and essays. In 1968, Polish Jewish filmmaker Yoram Gross (1926-2015) and his wife Sandra Gross reestablished in Sidney the production studio they had founded in Israel in 1962. As the executive producer on all the films, Sandra Gross worked behind the scenes to recruit and train young animators, including Jewish women. Although they strove to create films with an Australian character, their support of the local immigrant community helped them transport some of the psychological depth of Polish animation. One Polish Jewish immigrant, Antoinette Starkiewicz, arrived in Australia as a teenager in 1960 and rose to become one of Australia’s most recognized animators with films such as High Fidelity (1976), Pussy Pumps Up (1979), and her more recent digital films Zipper (1998) and Man (1999).

In recent years, Polish animation, like the broader Polish art scene, has seen a return to Jewish subjects. Animators Zuzanna Solakiewicz and Nir David Zats’ Cabaret Polska (2008) combines documentary footage, cabaret dancing, and animation to explore the sensual aspects of memory—embedded in food, language, and song—associated with the 1968 anti-Semitic campaigns in Poland.

The situation was much better for women in Czechoslovakia in general, and several Jewish women achieved recognition in the field. Hermína Týrlová (1900-1993), sometimes lauded as “the mother of Czech animation,” and her then-husband and special-effects artist Karel Dodal (1900-1986), together with screenwriter and sound technician Irena Leschnerová (1900-1989), began to experiment with stop-motion puppet animation for commercial use in the late 1920s. Beginning with their short Felix the Cat Receives a Lesson (1927), the trio appropriated popular American animation characters such as Felix the Cat and Koko the Klown to draw Czech viewers to the new medium. After divorcing Hermína in the early 1930s, Karel married their former artistic collaborator Irena Leschnerová several years later, and the new couple opened a small film studio in Prague. Hermína Týrlová went on to become a prominent animator, and at Dodal’s IRE-film studio, the old trio resumed their artistic collaboration. Inspired by Ptushko’s The New Gulliver (1935), the trio produced the animated shoe commercial Tajemství lucerny (The Secret of the Lantern, 1936) and the film Všudybylovo dobradružstvi (The Adventures of a Ubiquitous Fellow, 1936).

But if the Czech animation industry was relatively more open to women, after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslavakia it was closed to Jews. With antisemitism mounting in Czechoslavakia, Irena Leschnerová and Dodal moved to Paris in 1938, where they opened an animation studio but failed to produce any films. When only Karel secured an American travel visa, Irena returned to Prague less than a year after moving to Paris. In 1942, Irena and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt, where Irena directed Yiddish-language performances for Jewish inmates and produced, together with other Jewish prisoners, a propaganda film for the Nazis.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the freezing of state funding, the production of animation nearly collapsed. With time, several animators in the post-socialist “block” have been able to produce severable notable films. After Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence in 1991, Jewish animators were able to turn more directly to national Ukrainian content from a Jewish perspective; for example, Elena Kasavina (b. 1952, Belaya Tserkov) made the 1993 film Bobe-Maices (Grandmother’s Tales) based on Jewish folklore.

The collapse of the Soviet Union brought professional artists to Israel. Because these new immigrants did not speak Hebrew, animation, as a less verbal filmmaking enterprise and more experimental in nature, offered exciting opportunities.

Beginning in the 1990s, women played a key role in the professionalization and industrialization of animation in Israel. Female graduates from the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, the short-lived Animation Centre in Tel Aviv Cinematheque, and Tel Hai College succeeded in launching careers both domestically and abroad.

Anat Cristi is among the graduates of Bezalel who have succeeded in promoting their work internationally. Her graduate film On My Doorstep (2011) was the first Israeli Animation Short to be accepted to the Cannes Film Festival. Neta Holzer, another graduate of Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, was a lead animator in the Oscar-nominated feature film Waltz with Bashir, which brought Israeli animation into the international festival circuit. Mor Galperin, also a Bezalel graduate, has won international awards for her shorts Holy City (2015), Tanatore (2006), and Swim School (2018) and released her first feature documentary King Kath in 2019. Daniella Schnitzer’s graduation film for Bezalel Within Thy Walls (2015) explores the distance between Jerusalem’s symbolization of holiness and the prosaic realities of everyday life.

Rebecca Akoun, born in France, is also a graduate of Bezalel and is currently based in Austria; she works at the crossroads of identities, such as in her film Body Stranded (2017), which follows David as he struggles with his Jewish identity inside post-revolution Iran, against the backdrop of the fall of women’s rights and the rise of media censorship. In Shaul and Ivan, Akoun animates a Hasidic tale from Martin Buber’s Tales of the Hasidim through pencil drawings rendered in a naïve style.

Ashley Lazarus’ Rashi: A Light after the Dark Ages (1999) is an animated biography of one of the most beloved Biblical commentators. Tamar Tal’s The Red House (2016) explores the changing face of Israeli society through the history of one Tel Aviv building. As these examples show, the production of Jewish animated content by women animators is most visible in Israel.

In the twenty-first century, with the nearly ubiquitous use of computer animation, animation is no longer the regional industry it once was; instead, studios commission artists all over the world for work. For example, Tatiana Rosenthal’s (b. 1971) film $9.99 (2008) weaves together the stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret in collaboration with the author and Israeli producer Amir Harel, using a plasticine cast and sets in Sydney, Australia, and an animation crew that combined Israeli, American, and Australian animators as well as a handful of imported overseas talent.

With the introduction of CGI technology, memes, and micro-shorts, a single artist, such as Louisa Bertman who creates gifs for celebrities, can work alone. Crowdsourcing has also provided animators with independent means of funding; Beth David’s and Esteban Bravo’s animated short In a Heartbeat (2017), for example, was funded by a Kickstarter campaign.

The new opportunities that the digital era has opened up has also enabled the creation of innovative Jewish content. American Jewish animator Jeanne Stern animates Jewish-themed shorts for the website G-dcast.com and the film Some Vacation (2014). Stern also collaborated with Ruth Fertig on the film Yizkor (Remembrance), which uses animation, archival footage, and home movies to tell the story of Fertig’s grandmother.

American Jewish animator Nina Paley is best known for the animated feature Sita Sings the Blues (2008), inspired by the heroine of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana but primarily autobiographical. Paley has also directly explored Jewish and feminist themes in her film Seder-Masochism (2018), a feminist account of the Book of Exodus that imagines the evolution of goddess worship into “the patriarchy.” For Seder-Masochism, Paley developed a unique intermission piece, an “embroidermotion” of the Passover song Chad Gadya using software that mimics hand-stitched designs (Fig. 4).

In a German-Israeli co-production directed by animators Daniella Koffler and Uli Seis, Compartments (2017) explores the story of Koffler’s alter-ego Netta, an Israeli woman whose wish to move to Berlin horrifies her father, the son of Holocaust survivors. Instead of internal organs, characters, buildings, and books carry a compartmentalized drawer filled with the objects of memories, tales, and images, which change throughout the film in relationship to the external character action.

The participation of Jewish women is not exceptional to the history of animation but representative of the diversity that shaped animation history. For Jewish women who found the new medium and industry more hospitable than traditional media, their work sheds light not only on the integration of minorities but on the representation of the world from their own perspectives.