AT HOME IN UTOPIA - PBS - Independent Lens - AVI

“This was all an experiment. The people that started the experiment thought, ‘We’ll end up with heaven on earth.’”

- Paul “Pete” Rosenblum

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In the mid-1920s, thousands of immigrant Jewish garment workers catapulted themselves out of the urban slums and ghettos by pooling their resources and building cooperatively owned and run apartment complexes in the Bronx. Adjacent to the newly opened subway corridor and in the midst of empty fields, they constructed the United Workers Cooperative Colony, a.k.a. “the Coops,” where they practiced the utopian ideals of an equitable and just society.

AT HOME IN UTOPIA captures their epic struggle across two generations as the Coops residents experiment with breaking down barriers of race and ethnicity, and championing radical ideas that would someday transform the American workplace.

Three other large communities—the Amalgamated Houses, built by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union, the Sholem Aleichem Houses, built by Yiddishists, and the Farband Houses, built by Labor ZIonists —were located near the Coops. But the Coops was the most grassroots and member-driven of the Jewish labor housing cooperatives, with many of the residents practicing—and proselytizing—communists.


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A cross-post from Mininova - http://www.mininova.org/tor/2576332
[www.progressivetorrents.com] AT HOME IN UTOPIA-PBS Independent Lens-sdtv xvid