Jacky Comforty is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, oral historian and media creator who has worked for over thirty-five years creating films and videos in the United States, Germany, Israel, and Bulgaria. He has worked on groundbreaking films in Holocaust Studies, Inclusive Education and Applied Media. He is the owner of a large photographic, film and audio archives of historical and scholarly significance to Holocaust Studies, the history of World War II and more specifically the Jews in Bulgaria and their heritage. Recently, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum purchased his oral histories about the Holocaust in Bulgaria and Europe for archiving.
He is the director, editor, producer and distributor of three full-length documentaries and a dozen short videos about the Holocaust. Two full length documentaries are about Bulgaria’s Jews during the Holocaust: The Optimists and Balkan Jazz ; another major documentary about the Holocaust is In the Shadow of Memory about multi-generational effects of Holocaust related trauma. Currently, he is editing a new, multi-part documentary series about Bulgaria and its Jews. The Optimists won: the 2001 Peace Prize, Honorable Mention at the International Forum of New Cinema Berlin International Film Festival; the 2001 CINE Golden Eagle; the 2001 Best Documentary, Hope and Dreams Film Festival; and the 2000, First Prize, Jerusalem Film Festival, The Jewish Experience.
Martha Aladjem Bloomfield is an award-winning author, oral historian, artist and independent scholar, who has written several books about immigrants, migrants and the formerly homeless. In an effort to help dissipate prejudice and discrimination and foster civic engagement through positive dialogue, she conducts oral histories to discover peoples’ voices and stories to share with others.
Her first book, The Sweetness of Freedom, Stories of Immigrants (co-author, Steve Ostrander) (Michigan State University Press, 2010) based on oral histories won a national IPPY Award (an Independent Publisher Book Award, Silver Medal for Multicultural Adult Non-Fiction) and a Michigan Notable Book Award, 2011. My Eyes Feel They Need to Cry, Stories from the Formerly Homeless (Michigan State University Press, 2013) is also based on oral histories as well as Hmong Americans in Michigan, (Michigan State University Press, 2014) a first book about Hmong people in Michigan. Romanies in Michigan (Michigan State University Press, 2019) is groundbreaking as it is the first book in the United States to include oral histories of Romanies.