When the father of sixteen-year-old Annabelle Leigh (Billie Burke) is killed in a fight, miner John Rawson (Herbert Rawlinson) snatches her away from the scene and takes her to his cabin for the night. In the morning, she insists she was "compromised" by the situation, so he marries her. But after a spat, he tells her to leave and she goes to another city. Annabelle doesn't even know the name of the man she married; however, he strikes it rich and sends her money, which she spends on frivolous entertainment.

When a young girl who has grown up as a music hall entertainer is brought to live in a stodgy New England town, the quiet town life is changed forever.

This 1919 silent is the first American film based on the same Sholem Aleichem stories as Fiddler on the Roof, but produced 50 years before the blockbuster musical. Unlike most adaptations of Aleichem’s work, Broken Barriers (Khavah) focuses not on Tevye the milkman, but on his daughter Khavah, who falls in love with the gentile boy Fedka and must navigate the reverberations from this with both her community and her family.