Published: 5 January 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
JOAN MICKLIN SILVER, the American film-maker best known for the Jewish-inflected romcom Crossing Delancey and the largely Yiddish-language immigrant romance Hester Street, has died aged 85. The New York Times reported that Silver’s daughter Claudia said the cause of death was vascular dementia.
Silver was both one of the few female directors operating in US cinema in the 1970s, as well as one of the few film-makers that tackled specifically Jewish material – still a rarity in a Hollywood that had traditionally been dominated by Jewish figures in production and studio roles.
Having made a series of documentary shorts and gained a credit as a writer on the Hollywood picture Limbo (1972), about the wives of soldiers serving in Vietnam, Silver attempted to get her feature debut off the ground. Hester Street, adapted from Abraham Cahan’s novel Yekl, detailed the experiences of Yiddish-speaking immigrants to New York; it was named after the street that was then part of the Jewish Lower East Side.
Hollywood studios were notoriously reluctant at the time to back a female director; instead the film, which provided an early role for Carol Kane, was produced by Silver’s real-estate developer husband Raphael, who raised over $300,000 for the budget.
FULL STORY Joan Micklin Silver, Crossing Delancey director, dies aged 85 (Guardian)
Photo: Crossing Delancey stars Peter Riegert and Amy Irving, with director Joan Micklin Silver (inset)
