The Nasty Girl

On Mother's Day the Society and its cosponsors, screened a film about an original meaning of Mother's Day. Julia Ward Howe, who famously wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic, called for a Mother's Day of Peace in 1870 when she asked women to oppose all forms of war. The film The Nasty Girl is based on a true story Anna Rosmus of Bavaria. Attacked by her community as a busy body and much worse, uncovered the participation of her town's citizens in their complicity and compliance with the Nazis, Rosmushas braved harassment and death threats to exhume history and facilitate commemoration.

Women's Studies and Film Studies Professor, Dana Plays of the University of Tampa and local psychoanalyst Michael Poff, MSW provided commentary and context and faciliatate discussion. It was especially exciting that Dana Plays is currently in progress on several projects including a post-modernist documentary "The Story of OttilieMoore," about her great aunt who provided safe-haven for more than 300 Jewish children at villa L'Hermitage, where she also sponsored the artist Charlotte Salomon, during WWII in Villefranche sur-Mer, France.

According to Professor Plays, Anna Rosmus decided to research her town's history during the Third Reich when the President issued an essay contest on the topic. While she did not make the deadline because she was blocked at every turn from finding out information, this passion to know about her town’s participation came to define her life. In a presentation to an American university audience, Rosmus, explained that she wanted people to gain knowledge from her work. “Once people pay attention to what happened, I hope they learn to understand that action or nonaction has consequences. Whether you intend crimes or just let them happen by looking the other way, going about your private life as if that were not the case; there are consequences are there nonetheless. The guilt is there. People lose their lives and other people have to live with the loss of these lives.”

The film’s director, Michael Verhoeven's, first film was about the White Rose resistance. His interest was piqued when his parents explained that this was an oppositional movement of young people active during the rule of the Nazis. It gave him pause because he had been taught that resistance was not possible and he was intrigued by what they had managed to achieve. His film, The Nasty Girl, is a further uncovering of hidden history.

Professor Plays explained that director, Michael Verhoeven was part of the second generation of the people who were involved in the Nazism of Germany. These film makers decided to confront their history and bring it to the screen.

Michael Poff characterized the film as being about a woman who is struggling to be a mother and to be a powerful mother of change in the world. He compared her quest for knowledge to the difficult process of psychoanalysis and its goal of self-knowledge. Knowing the good and bad averts the tendency to take the bad part of us and see it as belonging out there. Such projects lead to scapegoating. The focus becomes finding something out there while not owning the bad inside us. Psychoanalysis helps us to accept the good and bad in us. It is life, facing our own demons and not look to something outside us as evil and in need of destruction in order to not have to face our own evil. Sonya preserved and never let go of that wish to find out what is true. Poff said that the movie was about uncovering denial-- the wish to not believe what has to be believed because it is true. He described it as a story about repression, meaning the wish to not have to feel. If psychoanalysis teaches us anything, Poff observed, is that the repressed will always return. Someone is going to come back and to tell the story along the way; she illuminated the kind of forces that weigh against those who try to tell the truth.

Professor Plays interpreted the film as a feminist one. The film was about a woman with a voice and the presentation of the film drawing on the experimental techniques of Bertel Brecht’s alienation structure allowed Sonya’s story to come forward according to pivotal point of film theorist Laura Mulvey’s revolutionary article, “Visual Pleasure of the Narrative Cinema” (1975). Mulvey argued that the male audience was more privileged in desire and voyeurism in traditional Hollywood films than is true for women viewers. Male spectators have a vicarious experience through the male protagonist indulging their voyeuristic spectatorship of human pleasure in a darkened theatre. Mulvey called for a new filmic structure that could address the female viewer. Professor Plays described the structural devices the director used to promote a female voice. These devices included: speaking directly to the audience, photographic backdrops, and showing the interior family life in the larger structure of the society. Speaking directly to the audience causes breaks in the belief in the fictive narrative of the film. This distancing affect causes the audience to engage with the work intellectually and critically, rather than allowing the viewer to watch the film in a dream-like state. Because it is a woman speaking to you, the distancing structure stages the film as feminist. All backdrops are in black and white and are not real. They are photographs and as such they call to attention to modes of production. In another scene the family is suppose to be in a living room but they are driving around in a vehicle and the whole town becomes visible.

Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society President, Lycia Alexander-Guerra asked Professor Plays to explain how sexuality and a feminist voice are integrated into the film when both men and women can be feminists. Noting a feminist voice does not only come from women, Professor Plays characterized the feminism of the Sonya character as being in control of her own sexuality and she was going to continue her work and demand that Martin participate in childrearing. She wasn’t going to privilege his work over her work. The director tells the story of a strong that is control of her own voice/life, she keeps at it. Michale Poff added that Sonya did not control her family. She was in control of herself in her relationship with Martin and the family. She wasn’t dominating in the sense of limiting Martin’s voice and she exercised her pleasure in her ability to woe him. They were not locked in a power battle, but in a struggle over how to be human beings with each other. Dr. Alexander-Guerra adopted the position that the feminism of the film was not about privileging one body with one set of genitals over another; it was not a feminist voice is not one of power like doer-done (e.g. Jessica Benjamin) to shifting power with the ability to negotiate. Since she had no need to privilege one person over the other; her own self of personhood do not need to subjugate another.

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Professor Dana Plays is an internationally recognized filmmaker and digital media artist. She teaches cinema studies, world cinema, women’s studies, and film and digital production at The University of Tampa, and has held previous teaching appointments at Syracuse University and Occidental College, since 1990. Plays' filmography consists of 31 works in film and digital video. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art: Color of Ritual, Color of Women, Avant-Garde Women Filmmakers of the Twentieth Century, and more than 50 international film festivals, including Edinburgh, Montreal Nouveau, and Seattle International Film Festivals. Her films have garnered more than 23 film festival awards including the prestigious First Prize Jurors' Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival for Nuclear Family; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Experimental Film at the Houston International Festival for Across the Border; and Best Documentary Award at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, which also was broadcast on VPRO, a Dutch national television network. Since arriving at The University of Tampa in August 2005, Plays has had national awards and exhibitions including a Black Maria Film Festival award; a solo retrospective in Boulder, CO, at First Person Cinema, the longest standing American showcase for independent film; a digital installation of her piece Salvage Paradigm, at the Play Space Gallery, in San Francisco; a digital installations of and her video montage of Hollywood films situated in the Los Angeles River, River Madness, at the Skirball Center in Los Angeles. Plays served on the board of directors of Film Forum, in Los Angeles, Canyon Cinema, in San Francisco, and the board of trustees of the Putney School, in Putney, VT. She has ongoing membership with the College Art Association, Society of Film and Media Studies and University Film and Video Association.

Michael Poff, LCSW is in private practice, Tampa and specializes in child, adolescent, adult and family psychoanalytic psychotherapy, adult psychoanalysis. He completed training as a psychoanalyst at the Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa in 2005. He is a supervisor to clinicians in psychoanalytic psychotherapy practice and is a psychoanalytic staff member, The Carter-Jenkins Center, Tampa. He is currently co-authoring a chapter on health and relationships, in nursing textbook: Comprehensive Women’s Health Care, edtied by Alexander, Hood, and Mallard-Johnson. For over twenty years, Mike Poff has been coordinating local annual psychoanalytic society film series and has been a field instructor, supervisor for MSW students in training, USF School of Social Work, a guest lecturer USF Department of Psychiatry and the USF School of Nursing, an outpatient psychotherapist with the Menninger/St. Joseph’s Psychiatry Center, Tampa and a Child and family psychotherapist, The Children’s Home, Tampa.

Forgotten Holocausts: Remembering the Roma and Jehovah’s Witness Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust.

And the Violins Stopped Playing is the 1988 film adaptation of the book And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust by Alexander Ramati. Ramati’s book is a biography of Roman Mirga who plays the accordion while his father played the violin and his mother a sings in a restaurant. The film chronicles the family’s attempts to escape the Nazi’s round-up and extermination of the Roma.

According the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “between 1933 and 1945 and Roma ("Gypsies") suffered greatly as victims of Nazi persecution genocide. Building on long-held prejudices, the Nazi regime viewed Gypsies both as "asocials" (outside "normal" society) and as racial "inferiors"—believed to threaten the biological purity and strength of the "superior Aryan" race.” “In a decree dated December 16, 1942, Himmler ordered the deportation of Gypsies and part-Gypsies to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At least 23,000 Gypsies were brought there, the first group arriving from Germany in February 1943.”


The distinguished scholar and artist-in-residence at San Diego State University, Yale Strom provided a rich historical and cultural context in which to view the film. You can hear his comments by following this link.

According to psychoanalyst Michael Poff, the story is about memory of different kinds; the ability to remember the time before (the holocaust), a time that was happier. It was also about communication and language and about how music integrates the cognitive aspects of our experience with our unconscious experience. Poff located his remarks in the work of ego psychoanalysts Heinz Hartman. In his book, Ego Psychology and The Problem of Adaptation, Hartman moved psychoanalysis away from drive theory to an analytic focus on the human capacity to adapt. For Poff, the Roma’s lives were about adaptation and sublimation at the highest levels of creativity.

Poff also distinguished between Dymitr who is elected by the “kris” or the clan council and the ousted clan leader. Shero Rom (meaning Big Person) is highly respected and has the last word on clan matters. Unlike the Shero Rom in the film, Dymitr has the capacity to adapt to reality versus the fixation on his position. Poff noted all the things the Roma had to let go to manage the adaptation to reality. Dymitr’s music allowed him to reach out from himself to the people he was leading that allowed him to make choices about group survival that alluded the ability of the Shero Rom.

Poff also contrasted the kind of knowing that the notorious physician, Josef Mengele pursued versus that which Dymitr found most useful. For Mengele, knowledge was all narcissistic and it was not used for the principles of love and reaching higher purposes.

There were so many dimensions to the movie that we did not have a chance to discuss from a psychoanalytic perspective such as, the need for love and the desire to experience sex and sensuality at least once in one’s life in spite of the horrific circumstances; the ability to be in community and coalition with one another; the little girl who is forced to leave her family and run to a total stranger in the hope that she will be taken in and the the emotional and moral compass of the one who is not hunted by the Nazi’s to help the one who is; the ability of rivals to move beyond their differences to work together to enable their own survival and for former foes to willingly give their lives for their past enemies to keep the family/community together – their altruism and selflessness; why women had to be subjugated and not incorporated into the decision-making of the ruling councils and so on.

The Film Purple Triangles documents the “spiritual resistance” of a family of Jehovah Witnesses as an example of the suffering of many Jehovah’s Witnesses under the Nazis.
“The Christian theology of the Witnesses diametrically opposed Nazi ideology on three basic points: The Witnesses rejected racism, ultra-nationalism, and the deification of the State and its führer. The Witnesses obey governmental authority, but they owe prior allegiance to God and his Kingdom. Therefore, if a government demands what God prohibits, or prohibits what God requires, the choice for the individual Witness is clear. This position threw thousands of Witnesses into a pitched spiritual battle with the Nazis.

On the streets, at factories, in schools, and even in homes, the Hitler salute signaled the people’s fidelity to the führer. The calculated messianic symbolism of the Hitler salute, meaning in essence “Salvation comes from Hitler,” was not lost on the Witnesses. They couldn’t heil a mere man. This daily, visible refusal soon led to beatings, firings from jobs, destruction of property, and prison sentences. Out of obedience to God and love of neighbor, Witnesses would not join the Nazi Party, Labor Front, or Hitler Youth, nor would they vote in elections, observe boycotts of Jewish businesses, serve in the military, or perform war-related work.”*

Yale Strom’s comments were instructive on the impact of faith on surviving the despair and torture of being in the camps or confronting the SS. Noting that in the true story of the Kusserow family in which the father was imprisoned, the mother and sister were placed in a concentration camp, one brother was shot to death and another was beheaded, their faith became stronger. Few Jews and other people of faith converted for the sake of saving their lives. Poff noted that faith made them more resilient and allowed them to not get eaten up by anger and drawn down by hate.

Strom recalled that a friend of his who survived the Holocaust and the camps had initially given up. He had become one of the individuals who lost their minds and rocked back and forth near the barb-wire fence. Until one day, he heard the voices of his parents telling him he was not ready to go and then he heard the voice of God also telling him he was not ready to go. He vowed that if he survived he would dedicate his life to teaching tolerance for all people.

Strom reminded the audience that the current genocides of Rawanda and the Sudan were caused because of intolerance and because the world turned a blind eye.

For more information:

For more information on the Roma and the Holocuast visit: http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/people/USHMMROM.HTM

*Form more information on the persecution of the Jehovah Witnesses from a doctrinaire perspective visit: http://www.baycrest.org/Spring%202001/article12.htm and read Purple Triangles: A Story of Spiritual Resistance by Jolene Chu
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HIMMLER'S CIRCULAR OF DECEMBER 8, 1938:"COMBATTING THE GYPSY NUISANCE"
Experience gained in combating the Gypsy nuisance, and knowledge derived from race-biological research, have shown that the proper method of attacking the Gypsy problem seems to be to treat it as a matter of race. Experience shows that part-Gypsies play the greatest role in Gypsy criminality. On the other hand, it has been shown that efforts to make the Gypsies settle have been unsuccessful, especially in -the case of pure Gypsies, on account of their strong compulsion to wander. It has therefore become neces-sary to distinguish between pure and part-Gypsies in the final solution of the Gypsy question.

To this end, it is necessary to establish the racial affinity of every Gypsy living in Germany and of every vagrant living a Gypsy-like existence.

I therefore decree that all settled and non-settled Gypsies, and also all vagrants living a Gypsy-like existence, are to be registered with the Reich Criminal Police Office-Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Nuisance.

The police authorities will report (via the responsible Criminal Police offices and local offices) to the Reich Criminal Police Office-Reich Central Office for Combating the Gypsy Nuisance all per-sons who by virtue of their looks and appearance, customs or habits, are to be regarded as Gypsies or part-Gypsies.

Because a person considered to be a Gypsy or part-Gypsy, or a person living like a Gypsy, as a rule confirms the suspicion that marriage (in accordance with clause 6 of the first decree on the implementation of the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor... or on the basis of stipulations in the law on Fitness to Marry must not be contracted, in all cases the public registry officials must demand a testimony of fitness to marry from those who make such an application [to be married].

Treatment of the Gypsy question is part of the National Socialist task of national regeneration. A solution can only be achieved if the philosophical perspectives of National Socialism are observed. Although the principle that the German nation respects the national identity of alien peoples is also assumed in combating the Gypsy nuisance, nonetheless the aim of measures taken by the State to defend the homogeneity of the German nation must be the physical separation of Gypsydom from the German nation, the prevention of miscegenation, and finally, the regulation of the way of life of pure and part-Gypsies. The necessary legal foundation can only be created through a Gypsy Law which prevents further intermingling of blood, and which regulates all the most pressing questions which go together with the existence of Gypsies in the living space of the German nation.

Translated in Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (New York, 1991), pp. 120-21

Giving up vs. Going on: The Role of Remembering the Past

A Secret is the story of a Jewish family in post-World War II Paris. François, “a solitary, imaginative child, invents for himself a brother as well as the story of his parents’ past. But on his fifteenth birthday, he discovers a dark family secret that ties his family’s history to the Holocaust and shatters his illusions forever.” The film is adapted from psychoanalyst’s Philippe Grimbert’s celebrated truth-inspired novel, Memory. The film won the Grand Prix of the Americas Prize at the Montréal World Film Festival in 2007.

USF World Languages Professor, Madeline Camara cautioned against comparing the film against the novel, because they two are distinct languages. She warned that a director cannot convey the same feelings as does the writer. She lectured on three facets of the film: structure, characters, and history. The fragmentation of the movie is appropriate to convey the experience of introspection. Francois’s telling of the story is made possible because of his ‘borrowed memory.’ He has lots of mediators between the past and what he comes to understand about it. What it lent from the stories of others eventually constitutes his memory.

In terms of characters, the family friend, Louise tells Francois the story of his parent’s relationship and his lost brother. It is only she who can tell the story and keep living. Early on when Louise learns that Maxime and Tania are in love, she does not judge them, just as she does not judge Hannah’s decision to return to occupied France with Simon and face the cruelty of the Nazis. It is intimated in the film that Louise is a lesbian and perhaps this is the reason for her lack of an evaluative position.

Dr. Camara brought up the Greek tragedy of Medea who killed her children to punish her husband when he betrayed her. But much more is going on with Hannah then is the fate of the archetypal monstrous mother of myth. When Hannah seemingly decides to sacrifice her son to the police, she is in grave distress. Hannah has lost her parents, her brother and her tie to Judaism. She even believed that she has lost her husband, Maxime to Tania given the infatuation he conveyed toward her through his gazes. Without him, whom Hannah described as her world, she had nothing.

Tampa psychoanalyst, Michael Poff, an audience member for this screening, suggested that children create imaginary friends to deal with the isolation and loneliness they feel and to channel unacceptable affect including rage. Poff give extended remarks on how the film made him feel as a way to understand the plight of the characters. His descriptions included: deep melancholy; grieving that is never able to take place; bitterness about betrayals; and moments of anger interspaced with moments of understanding.

The dead child is idealized by Francois’ father, but Francois, is not related to in a humane and affirming manner by Maxime. Francois is treated as a replacement child and hence carries that psychological dynamic. The replacement child is always going to be seen as a weakling by the parents and is compared and found wanting to the lost child. As a man Francois goes on a journey to find out what really happened to his father’s first wife and son, hoping that the information he recovers will free his father from his guilt and tear down the wall that stand between them.

Dr. Camara noted that Maxime was never able to heal from his past because he was so focused on controlling everything and everyone around him.

My own thought is that Maxmine seemed to be uncomfortable with difference. Maxime idealized Tania for her athleticism and he worshipped his first son Simon for his athletic ability as well. Maxime was quit muscular and seemed to be able to love, only those that were like him. Francois, on the other hand was awkward child and would not respond as Simon had to his father’s coaching. This difference caused Maxime to distance from Francois. In the novel, the stark truth is that Maxime kills Tania when she suffers a stroke because he could not stand the thought of losing his ‘champion.’ Perhaps his inability to tolerate and relate to difference made it easy for him to bury his Jewishness, to simply become like everyone around him and certainly aspire to the Nazi ideal of athleticism noted in the wish for Aryan supremacy. This controlling behavior is evident earlier in the film as he tried to cut Hannah’s strong tie to her Jewish heritage.

Dr. Lycia Alexander Guerra, noted the impossibility of keeping secrets. Secrets cannot be held down or kept from being revealed. In psychoanalytic treatment, the goal is to let history come alive and to help the individual develop the capacity to hold memory and present day life in tension. The movie attempts to convey the importance of revealing the secret to establishing relational bonds through the use of color. The director portrays the past in color, while the present is in black and white. Color is again introduced into the film in the epilogue after Francois has experienced the death of his parents and the birth of his daughter with her ability to say the names of those from the past, something denied him as a child. It is at this point that he has integrated the sorrow of the past with his present ability to recognize what was loss and give it a name.

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Madeline Camara -- Born in Havana, 1957. BA in Hispanic Lang and Lit in University of Havana, MA in Women Studies in Colegio de Mexico, Ph.d in Hispanic Lang and Lit in SUNY at Stony Brook. Has taught at University of La Havana, UNAM, and San Diego State University, California. Was the founder and editor of literary journal Letras Cubanas, in La Habana (1986-1992). Presently she writes a literary column for El Nuevo Herald. She has received a Rockefeller Resident Fellowship in the Humanities in Florida International University, in 1997, as well as a Fullbright Award Border Program in 2001.She is the author, among others, of Vocacion de Casandra (NY, Peter Lang: 2000) and co-editor of Cuba: the Ellusive Nation (Gainsville, Florida UP, 2000). Next books are La letra rebelde: estudios de escritoras cubanas (Miami:Universal, 2002) and La memoria hechizada (Barcelona:Icaria, 2002) Her present research deals with the image of the mulata as an icon for Cuban identity.

Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D. received her medical training at Boston University, her psychiatric training at UF and USF, and in 1986 was chief resident in psychiatry at USF. She received her psychoanalytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and, subsequently, has studied Relational and Self Psychology, as well as Intersubjectivity at the Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc (T-BIPS). She is the current president of T-BIPS, and of the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, as well as founding Co-chair of the Veterans Family Initiative, which provides pro bono mental health services to families of veterans of the Iraqi and Afghani conflicts. She blogs for www.tbips.blogspot.com. Presently, Dr. Alexander-Guerra is in private practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and psychiatry in Tampa, FL.

Yale Strom and Michael Poff to Discuss the Hidden Victims of the Holocaust, April 10, 2010

Thanks to everyone for making this year's film series a success. Don't miss our March 28, 2010 event at 2pm, University of South Florida, College of Medicine, MDA 1097 (Behind the Medical Clinic)

Film: A Secret
Scholar: Madeline Camara, Ph.D., USF Associate Professor of World Languages
Clinician: Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D. Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst

About A Secret: A Secret follows the saga of a Jewish family in post-World War II Paris. Francois, a solitary, imaginative child discovers a dark family secret that ties his family s history to the Holocaust and shatters his illusions forever. Adapted from psychoanalyst, Philippe Grimbert`s celebrated truth-inspired novel Memory.

About Dr. Camara:

Born in Havana, 1957. BA in Hispanic Lang and Lit in University of Havana, MA in Women Studies in Colegio de Mexico, Ph.d in Hispanic Lang and Lit in SUNY at Stony Brook. Has taught at University of La Havana, UNAM, and San Diego State University, California. Was the founder and editor of literary journal Letras Cubanas, in La Habana (1986-1992). Presently she writes a literary column for El Nuevo Herald. She has received a Rockefeller Resident Fellowship in the Humanities in Florida International University, in 1997, as well as a Fullbright Award Border Program in 2001.She is the author, among others, of Vocacion de Casandra (NY, Peter Lang: 2000) and co-editor of Cuba: the Ellusive Nation (Gainsville, Florida UP, 2000). Next books are La letra rebelde: estudios de escritoras cubanas (Miami:Universal, 2002) and La memoria hechizada (Barcelona:Icaria, 2002) Her present research deals with the image of the mulata as an icon for Cuban identity.

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On Holocaust Remembrance Day, Join Yale Strom and Michael Poff as they discuss the hidden victims of the Holocaust


Sunday, April 11, 2010 *Program Begins at 2 PM*

Films: And the Violins Stopped Playing and Purple Triangles
Presenter: Yale Strom, Artist-in-Residence, San Diego State University
Clinician: Michael Poff, MSW, Psychoanalyst

Purple Traingles: Excellent documentary showing that it wasn't just the Jews persecuted during the Holocaust, Jehovah's Witnesses were also victims. They had all kinds of underground printing operations and even some of the songs that we sing presently at the Kingdom Hall were composed in the concentration camps. And the Violins Stopped Playing: Based on a true story, Ramati's novel depicts the atrocities committed by the Germans against the Gypsies during World War II. In the early 1940s, Roman Mirga learns that Gypsies in Germany are being rounded up and shipped to "relocation camps" for extermination. He warns his clan about the impending danger but is able to convince only a handful of them to flee with his family to Hungary. From Publishers Weekly

YALE STROM

“He's a gifted photographer and author, a talented documentary filmma

ker and has his own klezmer band... Strom's multifaceted career is a wonder, and his work schedule is downright fiendish.”

- New York Jewish Week.

“An award-winning musician, author, filmmaker and scholar, this maverick does so many things with such great skill and vision that he's in a league of his own."- George Varga - Music Critic of the San Diego Union-Tribune. " “Through his art, Strom has brought back his spiritual ancestors."

- Time Magazine.

Yale Strom is one of the world's leading ethnographer-artist of klezmer and Roma music and history. Strom's klezmer research was instrumental in forming the repertoire of his klezmer band, Hot Pstromi, based in New York and San Diego. Since organizing his band in 1981, he has composed original New Jewish music that combines klezmer with Khasidic melodies, as well as Roma, jazz, classical, Balkan, Arabic and Sephardic motifs. Strom's compositions range from several quartets to a full symphony. These works have been performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Chamber Orchestra, and the Ostrava Philharmonic of the Czech Republic. He has composed original music for the Denver Center’s production of Tony Kushner's The Dybbuk ; as well as composing all the original music for the National Public Radio series, Fiddlers, Philosophers & Fools: Jewish Short Stories from the Old World to the New, hosted by Leonard Nimoy. In addition, Strom has composed music for The History Channel, ESPN, and countless other TV offerings. Yale’s thirteen CDs run the gamut of traditional klezmer to "new" Jewish jazz. His CD's have received major rave reviews and been featured on Top Ten Album of the Year lists. In 2006, he was appointed artist-in-residence in the Jewish Studies Program at San Diego State University. Prior to this appointment, Strom taught for many years at New York University.

As a collaborator Strom has had numerous world-renowned partners, including Andy Statman, Mark Dresser, Marty Ehrlich, Mark O'Connor, Alicia Svigals, Joel Rubin, Hankus Netsky, Peter Sprague, Samir Chatterjee, Salman Ahmad, Gavin Rossendale, Damian Draghici and Kalman Balogh, to name but a few. With Salman Ahmad, Strom is cofounder of the world music ensemble Common Chords and together performed at the United Nations General Assembly in the recent "Concert for Pakistan". He is also the first klezmer violinist to be invited to instruct master classes at the Mark O'Connor Fiddle Camps.

Strom has directed seven award-winning documentary films: "At the Crossroads"; "The Last Klezmer" (winner best ecumenical film at the Berlin International Film Festival); "Carpati: 50 miles, 50 Years" (Emmy award); "L'Chayim, Comrade Stalin!"; "Klezmer on Fish Street" (Special Jury Selection, Palm Beach International Film festival; "Man From Munkatsh" (produced for Hungary's Duna TV). He was the first documentary filmmaker in history to be given his own run at Lincoln Center's prestigious Walter Reade Theatre, where his films broke box-office records. Currently, Strom is in pre -production on the feature film "Canaries" and the documentary "Detroit: In Black and White". He co-directed the feature documentary “The Harry Agganis Story”, now in post-production.

Strom 's original stage play . . . from man. . . to beast... to crawling thing , was given a fully-staged workshop in June of 2001 by the Streisand Festival ( La Jolla , California ). His play "The Education of Hershel Grynszpan" was workshopped by the San Diego Rep and the North Coast Rep as well as in New York City , Connecticut and Los Angeles . Yale was featured in the May 31, 2004 issue of Time Magazine for this play, and the scholarship behind it.

As a photographer, Strom has exhibited extensively. His solo photo exhibit The Roma of Ridgewood , about Gypsy communities in Queens, New York, was mounted at the Queens Museum of Art and was the first of its kind in NYC. He has had numerous solo and group photo exhibits (depicting Jewish and Roma life) throughout the U.S. and Europe. His photos are part of many collections including Beth Hatefusoth, The Skirball Museum, The Jewish Museum of NYC, The Frankfurt Jewish Museum and the The Museum of Photographic Arts.

Strom was the guest curator for the Eldridge Street Project's "A Great Day on Eldridge Street". Strom conceived this idea for a musical and photographic celebration of the newly restored landmarked Eldridge Street Synagogue in October 12-14, 2007 with a parade, a historic archival photo shoot, numerous panels and performances and a New York state-wide tour. The historic photo is now available as a poster from the Eldridge Street Synagogue in NYC.

Strom is a dedicated educator and has lectured extensively all over the world. His lectures and concerts at schools across the United States have ranged from how kids can use art to further their understanding of their ever changing world, to an examination of how music can be used to reach across various cultural, ethnic, racial and religious divides, and how to be a professional artist.

Strom's work as an author includes "The Book of Klezmer: The History, The Music, The Folklore" ( Chicago Review Press, 2002), a 400-page history with original photos and sheet music gathered by Strom during his sixty-plus ethnographic trips to Central and Eastern Europe. "A Wandering Feast: A Journey Through the Jewish Culture of Eastern Europe" written in collaboration with his wife, Elizabeth Schwartz, is part cookbook, part travelogue (Jossey-Bass, 2005). He is also the author of "The Absolutely Complete Klezmer Songbook" (URJ Press, 2006). His Young Adult books: "Uncertain Roads: Searching for the Gypsies" and "Quilted Landscapes: Immigrant Youth in America Today" have been critically used in schools throughout America. His first illustrated children's book, "The Wedding That Saved A Town" (Kar-Ben, 2008) won the Best Children's Illustrated Book award from the San Diego Library Association. Additionally, he was the author of the klezmer edition of the prestigious "Music Minus One" series of instructional books with accompanying CD's, as well as numerous other photo documentary books. Strom’s music and gregarious personality has been able to reach the multi-ethnic youth of America today and make a genuine difference in opening up their ears, eyes, and hearts.