The Newsreel Theater was Newark’s only all-news movie house and a place where national politics, world events, sports, and family instruction converged. For the Roth family, it was both a regular source of news and a setting in which Herman Roth taught Sandy Roth and Philip Roth to understand current events as part of history unfolding around them.

A newsroom on Broad Street

Opened in 1935, the Newsreel Theater ran a one-hour program of news clips, short films, and The March of Time every day from early morning until midnight. Shepsie Tirschwell, a boyhood friend of Herman Roth, worked there as one of four projectionist-editors. Each Thursday, the editors chose stories from thousands of feet of film supplied by companies including Pathe and Paramount, then spliced them into an up-to-date show. In the radio era, championship sports moments that customers could watch on film were available nowhere else but a movie theater.

The theater served customers who wanted to keep pace with events beyond Newark. Herman Roth’s office on Clinton Street was only a few blocks away, and he tried to make time for a full show each week. At dinner afterward, he recounted what he had seen and the prominent figures in the news. His lists ranged across countries and conflicts; he told his family that these were people and events they would one day remember as history worth passing on to their children.

A family classroom

On weekends when Shepsie Tirschwell was working, he left free passes at the box office for Herman Roth and his sons. After a show, Herman brought Sandy and Philip up to the projection booth, where he named the parts of the film projector. He explained that keeping abreast of current events was a citizen’s most important duty in a democracy and that children could never begin too early to learn about the news.

The theater’s opening was also preserved in framed photographs on the booth walls. They showed the black-tie ceremony at which Newark’s first and only Jewish mayor, Meyer Ellenstein, cut the ribbon across the lobby and welcomed the guests. Shepsie pointed out the pictured visitors, including a former U.S. ambassador to Spain and the founder of Bamberger’s department store. The images made the theater’s civic standing part of the boys’ tour: the news was not only something arriving on film, but something the city had publicly gathered to receive.

Herman’s lessons extended beyond the projector and the daily headlines. He told his sons that history included what happened in Newark, on Summit Avenue, and in an ordinary person’s home. The theater therefore linked faraway events to the family’s own neighborhood and life, resisting the idea that history belonged only to famous people or distant places.

The theater’s remembered details

Philip’s recollection of the theater includes its practical comforts: the seats allowed adults to pass without making others stand, the projection booth was said to be soundproof, and motion-picture reels formed a design in the lobby carpet. These details give the place a child’s scale. The theater was not merely a screen for national affairs; it was also a room to enter, a booth to explore, and a carpet whose pattern could be stepped on while coming and going.

Looking back on two consecutive Saturdays in 1942, Philip recalled being nine and Sandy fourteen when Herman took them specifically to see newsreel coverage of the German-American Bund rally one week and Franklin D. Roosevelt addressing the anti-Ribbentrop rally at Madison Square Garden the next. The political gatherings took place elsewhere; the Newsreel Theater brought their images and sounds before a Newark audience. For Philip, much of what he could later summon from those afternoons was the narration of Lowell Thomas, who introduced most of the political news, and Bill Stern’s enthusiastic sports reporting. The Bund rally, however, remained vivid because of the hatred he associated with the Bundists chanting Joachim von Ribbentrop’s name as though von Ribbentrop were the president.

A divided audience

The second Saturday’s footage made the theater itself feel like a site of political confrontation. When Franklin D. Roosevelt denounced Lindbergh’s yielding to Nazi friends, roughly half the audience booed and hissed while the rest, including Herman Roth, clapped as loudly as they could. The split transformed a news screening into a visible measure of disagreement: the audience was not simply watching a political dispute but displaying its own divisions in the darkened room.

Philip feared that the conflict might break out right there on Broad Street. He imagined leaving the theater to find downtown Newark reduced to rubble, with fires burning everywhere. The contrast between the ordinary moviegoing setting and the possibility of sudden violence gave the newsreels a force that the projector alone could not contain. In the Newsreel Theater, distant political conflict became immediate enough to unsettle a child’s sense of safety, while Herman’s lessons framed the moment as part of the history that would someday be remembered.