At Home in Utopia

Streaming video - 2015

A home of one's own: that's the American dream. But what happens when the dreamers are immigrants, factory workers, and Communists? In the mid-1920s, thousands of Jewish immigrant garment workers managed to catapult themselves out of urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building four cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. They believed that owning one's home went a long way toward controlling one's fate. At Home in Utopia focuses on the United Workers Cooperative Colony -- also known as the Coops -- the most grassroots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, where many of the residents were Communists or sympathetic to the communist movement. Beginning as a sta...lwartly secular East European Jewish working class enclave, they were part of an international movement, the power of which blows minds today. In the 1930s they opted to bring their passion for racial justice home, by racially 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 them 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, nation, language, convention, and sometimes even common sense. more