Jerry Blumenthal

Jerry Blumenthal (1936-2014) worked as a maker on a team that made HSA Strike ’75 (Kartemquin, 1975) in Chicago. He was one of the founders of Kartemquin, working with them until his death in 2014. He began as one of the makers of Shulie (1966), the groundbreaking film about Shulamith Firestone. His film, Golub: Late Works are the Catastrophes (2004), revisited the great American artist thirteen years after the award-winning Golub (1988). Vietnam, Long Time Coming (made with Gordon Quinn, Peter Gilbert, and Adam Singer) aired on NBC, earning a national Emmy and the Directors Guild of America Award for Best Documentary of 1999. Among his over twenty-five films, Blumenthal listed The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976), The Last Pullman Car (1983), Taylor Chain (1980), Taylor Chair II: A Story of Collective Bargaining (1984), and the Palestinian story in Kartemquin's seven-hour PBS series, The New Americans (2004) as the most personally and politically significant.