Joan Micklin Silver, director of ‘Hester Street’, passes away at 85

January 4th, 2021

Awake Goy

Joan Micklin Silver, a pioneering filmmaker who directed two of Hollywood’s most Jewish films, has died at 85. The cause was vascular dementia, according to The New York Times.

Silver was best known for directing Crossing Delancey, the Lower East Side rom-com involving a pickle maker, and Hester Street, an influential low-budget tale about Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants. But she was also recognized as one of the only female directors working in Hollywood through the 1970s and ’80s.

After moving to New York in 1967, Silver began making short educational films for children. One of them was titled The Immigrant Experience, about Polish immigrants in the United States.

Hester Street, released in 1975, was based on a story by Abraham Cahan, an influential socialist writer who helped found the Forward newspaper. The script’s dialogue was entirely in Yiddish, something that Silver said turned off Hollywood producers. Most studios at the time did not want a wide distribution of the film, saying that it was too “narrow and ethnic,” suggesting there was no market for the film.

“Nobody wanted to release it,” Silver recalled in a visual history interview for the Directors Guild of America in 2005. “The only offer was to release it on 16 to the synagogue market,” she added, referring to 16-millimeter film. Her husband, Raphael D. Silver, a commercial real estate developer, helped to finance, produce and even distribute the film. He was even successful in selling it to some international markets while attending the Cannes Film Festival.

The film garnered rave reviews and earned $5 million at the box office, a significant haul at the time. Jewish actress Carol Kane was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of the protagonist Gitl.

In 1988, Silver directed Crossing Delancey, which was written by Susan Sandler. Amy Irving starred as a New Yorker descended from but detached from her Jewish immigrant heritage. Peter Riegert played her love interest, a pickle seller named Sam who represents a more modern incarnation of the Jewish Lower East Side. It remains one of Hollywood’s most quintessentially Jewish romances.

Silver gained a respected reputation when Hester Street debuted, although she still faced sexist and antisemitic remarks from Hollywood executives. This did not hinder the tenacious filmmaker in making other films depicting Jewish characters.

Silver also directed several TV movies and wrote multiple musicals that were staged off Broadway.

“I had such blatantly sexist things said to me by studio executives when I started,” she said in a 1979 American Film Institute interview, adding that one man one told her: “Feature films are very expensive to mount and distribute, and women directors are one more problem we don’t need.”

Silver’s husband died in 2013. He was the son of Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, an American rabbi who was a key figure in the early Zionist movement.

Silver eventually released seven feature films and more than half a dozen movies made for television. She is survived by three daughters and five grandchildren.

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