Produced in Los Angeles, the film won the Kodak Shoestring award in 1971. It was shown on Public Television and screened only several times in the last half century. It is a testament to the first decades of early 20th century Jewish cultural production by one of its earliest and most prominent dance theatre artists.

Narrated by Zemach, this rarely seen film is a work of art and an important historical document for several reasons. It is the only record of Zemach dancing. We see the essence of his style of integrating the authentic gestures and themes of Eastern European Jewry that he had in his bones with the flow, expansiveness and formal concerns of modern dance and the attention to detail of his Russian theater training with Stanislavsky, Vakhtangov and Meyerhold. We also see the span of time and place the choreography represents. It takes us from early 1920’s Moscow (“Beggar”), 1931 New York (“Farewell to Queen Sabbath”), to mid-century New York and Los Angeles in “The Travels of Benjamin the Third” based on the Mendele Mocher Sforim novella, and “Joyous” in which he dances and speaks Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Dance of Death,” written both in Yiddish and Hebrew.