Kaufman, David

David Kaufman, a native of Montreal and resident of Toronto, is Canada’s most active film documentarian of Jewish history and culture. David worked for eighteen years as a producer/director on two of the CBC’s top programs, The Journal and The Fifth Estate. As an independent filmmaker, he started in 1980 with a film biography of the renowned Canadian poet, A. M. Klein, and has produced three films about the Holocaust, including his latest, Song of the Lodz Ghetto, and one of the only films about the Klezmer revival, The New Klezmorim, filmed at KlezKanada and broadcast both in Canada and the United States. In tandem with his film career, David is an active fine-art photographer, majoring in large-format architecture-based imagery with a minor in music. His work has been published in a number of books (including Sara Ferdman Tauben’s Traces of the Past) and he has had several exhibitions in Montreal and Toronto. His exhibited work encompasses early synagogues in downtown Montreal, historic Jewish sites in Poland and early 20th century industrial and commercial buildings in Montreal and Toronto. His current project is documentation of Jewish cemeteries in Poland, and he has been an ongoing photographic chronicler of the Yiddish music scene and its players as “official” photographer both at the KlezKanada and Ashkenaz festivals.