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JOSH WALETZKY is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, born and raised in New York City. He has worked as a director, writer and editor on numerous documentary films about cultural and social themes, beginning as a sound editor on Ibeorgun (1975, the Kuna Indians) and Academy Award-winning Harlan County, U.S.A. (1976, striking coal miners). He directed and edited such films as Image Before My Eyes (1981, Jewish life in pre-Holocaust Poland), Partisans of Vilna (1986, Jewish resistance to the Nazis), Academy Award-nominated Music for the Movies: Bernard Herrmann (1992, Hollywood’s greatest film composer), Dashiell Hammett: Detective. Writer. (1999, the inimitable writer-icon), and Sacred Stage: The Mariinsky Theater (2005, the Kirov Ballet and Opera survive into the 21st century). His editing credits include Emmy Award-winning Itzhak Perlman: In the Fiddler’s House (1995, world’s premiere violinist embraces klezmer music), Peabody Award-winning Revolution! (1997, birth of the United States), A.C.E. Eddie Award-nominated The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition (2000, the Anglo-Irish explorer), Emmy Award-winning She Says: Women In News (2001, gender and journalism) and The Venetian Dilemma (2004, wonder-city as museum or viable habitat).

Waletzky is a graduate of Harvard College and NYU Film School, where he studied acting and directing with Marketa Kimbrell. He was a script and music consultant to Barbra Streisand on her production of Yentl (1983), and has worked as a director on script development, including the screenplay for Simple Justice (1987, a 1940s Kansas housewife and civil rights pioneer), under a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts.

Waletzky has also been a lifelong force in the field of Yiddish music, and co-produced the Grammy-nominated album of Jewish songs of resistance, Partisans of Vilna (1989). His groundbreaking CD of original Yiddish songs, Crossing the Shadows (2001), was hailed as “a classic of the American-Jewish folk revival”.