WinterFest Feb. 25-26, 2023 San Francisco (Jewish Film Institute)

[Chris Knipp]

THE LEVYS OF MONTICELLO (Steven Pressman 2022)

This little film (70 minutes) explains how the Levy family, among the first Jews in colonial America, held the Thomas Jefferson estate of Monticello for 89 years, preserving the property and saving it from ruin twice. Jefferson had died heavily in debt in 1826 and the house was in a dire state when Capt. Uriah Phillips Levy, a retired naval officer and reformer of punishment practices, as well as a philanthropist and real estate investor and admirer of the Jeffersons, bought the place from a Charlottesville druggist in 1834. Slavery and anti-semitism play key roles in this story. The building and maintenance of the property under Jefferson and its restoration under Uriah Levy were both carried out using enslaved people. Control of the property was lost during the Civil war. Uriah's nephew Jefferson Monroe Levy, a Congressman and wealthy businessman, got it back. Ironies abound. We learn that the statue of Jefferson white racists rallied around in front of the University of Virginia in 2017 chanting "Jews will not replace us" was the work of a Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel. When Monticello went into public care we learn every effort was made to erase all signs of the Levys' already self-effacing stewardship despite their having lived there longer than the Jeffersons. During Jefferson Levy's lifetime a woman called Maud Littleton waged a national campaign to wrest Monticello from "alien" and "oriental" hands. More recently tour guides at Monticello, director Pressman found, still did not mention the Levy family: their narrative jumped from Jefferson's era to 1923, when Monticello was purchased by the private nonprofit Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Nor did they dwell on the role of Jefferson's slaves; but a large number of their descendants have reunions at Monticello: we see a still photograph. (Sadly, many are overweight.) Talking heads of this excellent, if conventional, film include Melvin Urofsky, author of The Levy Family and Monticello, and Niya Bates, Senior Fellow of African American History of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.