JTA — I knew that the folk singer Arlo Guthrie’s mom was Jewish in the same way that I knew that jazz great Louis Armstrong spoke some Yiddish. “Guess who’s Jewish (even a little)” is the Jewish national pastime.

But I couldn’t have guessed how deeply Arlo’s father, the legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie, was enmeshed in Jewish culture before seeing “Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie.” Steven Pressman’s engaging new documentary has just begun its rounds on the Jewish film circuit, with screenings this month in Wilmington, North Carolina, on August 5 and in Nashville on August 18.

Best known as the bard of the Dust Bowl, the Oklahoma-born Woody Guthrie gave voice to migrants, laborers and the dispossessed, and his “This Land is Your Land” has become something close to an alternative national anthem. His second wife (and Arlo’s mom) was born Marjorie Greenblatt, a Martha Graham dancer whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. I knew she inspired him to write a few Hanukkah songs and that’s about it.

The film, however, makes the case that Guthrie’s extended Jewish family was not incidental but integral in his artistic and personal evolution. It is a story that stretches from Oklahoma to Coney Island to the Yiddish literary world, and from the folk revival’s Jewish impresarios to one remarkable immigrant woman whose influence has largely gone unrecognized.

That would be Aliza Greenblatt, Marjorie’s mother. A doting grandmother known to Arlo and his siblings as “Bubbie,” she was a Yiddish poet and lyricist of some renown, and what the Jewish Women’s Archive calls “an early, committed leader in Zionist and Jewish women’s organizations.”

Greenblatt is hardly a household name outside Yiddish cultural circles. Yet Pressman’s film suggests that she deserves a place in the Guthrie story alongside Pete Seeger and a young Bob Dylan.

The relationship is striking precisely because it resists stereotype. As Aaron Lansky, founder of the Yiddish Book Center, puts it in the film, “Some people aren’t Jewish. And some people really aren’t Jewish. That was Woody Guthrie.”

But after moving to New York from California and meeting Marjorie, Guthrie did not merely come to enjoy Jewish food, sprinkle a few Yiddish words into conversation or pick up a holiday tune. Through Greenblatt, he entered an immigrant family steeped in Yiddish language, music, poetry and left-wing........

© The Times of Israel