Between the end of the 19th Century and World War II, many Jews emigrated to the United States. From old Europe’s shtetls to Broadway theatres, from choirs in synagogues to chorus lines in musicals, from rags to riches, a number of them make a name for themselves in the music and theatre worlds. Their creativity changed the face of America. The heroes of this odyssey are Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Benny Goodman, Jerome Kern, Larry Hart, Al Jolson, the Marx Brothers, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Molly Picon, Eddie Cantor, Abraham Goldfaden, Artie Shaw, the Barry sisters etc.

On a continent with an entirely different culture from their own, on this uncharted planet whose language they did not yet speak, music was their only means of communicating, their uniting factor. These children of the ghettos built their American dream from scratch — the dream of an ideal community of equal opportunity.

Their dream was expressed on musical pages, on theatre stages, on movie screens, on Broadway, on Tin Pan alley, in Hollywood. With two universal keys, emotion and a sense of humor, they barged into the puritanical and protestant Anglo-Saxon America and opened wide the doors to other influences.

Built around archival footage filmed between 1896 and 1940, this documentary traces a cultural and musical journey — an extraordinary metamorphosis from traditional melody to popular songs, from Yiddish theatre to musical comedy, from klezmer to ragtime.