JTS Co-Hosts Screening of New Documentary About Untold Civil Rights Story at Riverside Church

May 14, 2025

JTS recently co-hosted, together with several local faith-based institutions, a screening of a remarkable film by Ilana Trachtman, Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round. The film tells the previously untold story of the fight, in 1960, to end the exclusion of Black Americans from a popular amusement park near Washington, D.C. The documentary tells the story exclusively through voices of those who were involved in the picket line outside the park, including Black students from D.C.’s famed HBCU Howard University and stroller-pushing Jewish and Quaker housewives from suburban towns near the park. Partnerships across religion and race, including the deep involvement of Jews in the struggle for civil rights, are familiar aspects of civil rights history. But Trachtman’s film tells this story through uncovering the power not of famous ministers, rabbis, and politicians, but the power of the invisible housewives and students that was integral to that struggle.

An audience of 100 people, an intergenerational and diverse crowd, including young children and older adults with firsthand memories of some of the events narrated in the film, came to Riverside Church on the afternoon of Mother’s Day to watch this film in community. Following the film, Rev. Adriene Thorne, Senior Minister at Riverside Church, joined a panel discussion moderated by JTS’s Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay, together with filmmaker Ilana Trachtman, and Dr. Judith Willner, a retired professor from Coppin State University, an HBCU in Baltimore.

The event was co-sponsored by Riverside Church, The Jewish Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, The Episcopal Diocese of NY, and The Interfaith Center of NY, institutions that partner with JTS for other interreligious initiatives, including Multifaith Mondays. Stay tuned for more events that emerge from this wonderful partnership.