Joel Saxe (Ph.D.) is a documentary filmmaker, multi-media artist, writer, oral historian and ethnographer. He has taught video production, oral history and documentary arts to a wide range of learners — college and high school students, adult learners, elementary and middle school programs, elders, and youth in detention.
In teaching media arts – digital video, camerawork, sound recording, audio editing, crew collaboration, small format “zine” publishing – Saxe integrates the development of interviewing skills, and an awareness of oral history and the Socratic method. A critical perspective is introduced through exercises desconstructing print advertising and TV commercials.
As a media artist, Saxe has produced films on issues of multiculturalism in education, the performing arts, and Yiddish culture. His work has been shown at film festivals around the U.S. and at museums including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York and the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in Tel Aviv.
Working among communities of Jewish immigrant elders in Miami and New York, Saxe has spent over a decade, documenting the Yiddish language and culture. Film, video, audio, and photography have been used to document varied scenes where generational folkways — largely destroyed by the Holocaust and assimilationist pressures in émigré lands — were still being practiced. The collection of folksongs, oral histories, and the recording of Jewish socialist activism were particular foci.
In Western Massachusetts, Saxe has helped create media literacy projects on issues of media violence, racism, welfare and income inequality. Saxe teaches in the Dept. of Communication at UMass-Amherst; he also helps to produce “Bread & Roses,” a radio show in Northampton that explores efforts to create a fair economy and social justice.