Sound, Memory and Jewish Identity: The Music that Inspired UnBroken
Using the award-winning documentary UnBroken as a case study, this multimedia session explores how sound shapes Jewish identity in nonfiction film. The program combines discussion, live musical
demonstration and score excerpts to examine how music carries memory on screen. Composer Jonathan Snipes created an original orchestral score using instruments and sounds common in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, building a world native to the era the film inhabits. Our
collaboration grew out of earlier work together in the theater, and in returning to that partnership, we became deeply attentive to how timbre, harmony and restraint convey inherited memory, dislocation, resilience, and the subtle textures of Jewish life. Together we will consider how historically grounded composition shapes audience perception
and how sound interacts with both archival and present-day images. We will also reflect on the responsibility of scoring histories marked by rupture and erasure, and on how music can awaken what I think of as a muscle memory of hope—an embodied continuity that survives displacement. Framed within broader conversations about Jewish presence in screen media, the session demonstrates how documentary sound can reanimate a vanished world for contemporary audiences.

BETH LANE

Beth Lane is the award-winning director, producer, and writer of UnBroken. An actress, singer, and dancer, she is a second-generation Holocaust survivor. Beth’s driving force has always been to create spaces to exercise our collective capacity for empathy through storytelling, design and meditation. Building bridges for a better future is paramount to her work. She has been a keynote speaker, curated and served on panels nationwide and hosted over 40 episodes of a weekly Instagram Live on-camera podcast, Banter with Beth. The Weber Family Arts Foundation is the culmination of many thoughtful years of experience as an actress, artist, and activist who has served on philanthropic boards and volunteered. The mission of WFAF is to combat antisemitism, bigotry and hate by driving awareness, engagement and activism through the arts, across a wide variety of mediums by sharing stories of hope. UnBroken is Beth’s directorial debut and The Weber Family Arts Foundation’s inaugural project.