Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

April 4, 2019

A Day Consulting Hollywood Producers about Traditional Jewish Dress

Ḥasidic hats for The Frisco Kid.

In the 1979 film The Frisco Kid, Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford star as, respectively, a greenhorn Polish rabbi and an American bank robber who together make their way from Philadelphia to San Francisco. The musicologist and composer Velvel Pasternak relates his brief stint as the movie’s wardrobe consultant, tasked with obtaining some ḥasidic garments, including a tall hat trimmed with beaver pelts known in Yiddish as a biber-hitl:

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