Made in late 1928 and early 1929, and released on March 4, the day President Herbert Hoover was inaugurated, The Younger Generation was, like The Jazz Singer, a part-silent, part-talking picture about a Jewish immigrant family in New York. It was shot first as a silent, but when Columbia belatedly decided to join the rush into talkies, several sequences were reshot with dialogue, with several cameras being used at once to obtain all the necessary angles with the sound in synchronization. Despite all the mechanical encumbrances, The Younger Generation (based on Fannie Hurst's 1927 play It Is to Laugh, with a screenplay by Sonya Levien and Howard J. Green) has more emotional power than any of Capra's other pictures of the 1920s. Capra obviously felt a strong identification with the story of a Jewish immigrant (Ricardo Cortez) who grows up in the ghetto of New York's Delancey Street and feels he has to deny his ethnic origins to rise to success in America. Despite Capra's denials, The Younger Generation abounds with parallels to his own life.