Washington Jewish Film Fest and Jewish Music Fest collide at JxJ

For 29 years, the Washington Jewish Film Festival has curated the best of Jewish cinema, while the Washington Jewish Music Festival has championed top Jewish tunes for the past 20 years.

This year, the two collide into one giant celebration at the first-ever “JxJ” from May 8-20.

“It’s two art forms slamming together, multiplying and hopefully refracting into something deeper than each individual art form,” festival director Ilya Tovbis told WTOP. “We were running these two concurrent festivals for quite a while. … We thought that by putting the two forms together we could get something more resonate and have cross-conversations.”

Presented by Edlavitch DCJCC, this year’s films will mostly screen at E Street Cinema, AFI Silver Theatre and Bethesda Row, while the music events will mostly take place at City Winery.

“It’s really grown from small festivals that were community driven, just a couple of events, a couple hundred people, both some of the first festivals of their kind,” Tovbis said. “They’ve since grown to have a really large local, and I’d like to think national, profile where they’ve become some of the more prestigious exhibitions of film and music in the Jewish world.”