32 | JANUARY 21 • 2021 

A

fter decades making movies star-
ring characters — often women 
— bristling against social strictures 
and navigating romance in ways that tended 
to surprise even themselves, Jewish film-
maker Joan Micklin Silver has died at 85.
Silver, who died Dec. 31, 2020, was best-
known for 1988’s Crossing Delancey, a sur-
prise hit. The film finds Isabelle Grossman 
(Amy Irving), a 30-something Manhattan 
bookseller, navigating romance amid the 
pressures of not just various men — as is 
typical — but the influence of the older 
Jewish women she grew up with, who prove 
eager to find a match for her. These forces 
clash against Grossman’s own feminist-in-
formed expectations of herself, of how she 
should find love and her desire to see herself 
as an independent person.
In Delancey, as in 1975’s Hester Street, 
which was set in a close-knit Polish-Jewish 
enclave (many potential distributors dis-
missed it as “too ethnic,
” leading her to 
self-finance), Silver — herself the daughter 

of Russian-Jewish immigrants, though she 
grew up in Omaha, Nebraska — showed 
the compromises, frustrations and tensions 
common to New York Jewish life.
Jewish neighborhoods in each film are 
what they so often really are: symbolic spac-
es rich in sometimes associations with iden-
tity, heritage, class and culture. Silver’s work 
tended to focus on romantic aspirations and 
struggles between characters who are caught 
between romance and independence, tradi-
tion and contemporaneity, and often Jewish 
and American identity.
Though she worked on a small scale, 
Silver had an accomplished eye for casting 
and directing actors, a broad grasp of social 
reality, and a sharp eye for details of spaces 
ranging from newsrooms to publishing par-
ties and Jewish weddings.
And there are many sweetly realized, 
quite disarming details across her work 
through which Silver showed a grounded, 
firsthand understanding of Jewish identity. 
In Delancey, it’s Irving’s dense halo of curls, 

the tables overflowing with Jewish cuisine, a 
friend’s fainting spell at a bris and the warm 
depiction of Grossman’s bubbie by Reizl 
Bozyk (previously a Yiddish theater star), 
which draws out generational shifts over 
time in Jewish-American life.
In Hester, flashpoints between traditional 
norms and assimilation are more point-
ed and dramatic — as when, at a picnic, 
Jake (Steven Keats) demands of his more 
reserved, recently arrived wife (Carol Kane): 
“
Am I a Jew or a gentile? Just by what you 
see.
” Anxious to pass freely as a white gen-
tile, he clearly wishes for her to say the latter.
Though Hester’s scope is modest, it speaks 
— like Delancey — to the struggles of many 
in finding the best route among an over-
whelming many in approaching diasporic 
existence and the complex ways personal 
aspiration often grates against social mores. 
(Both films are available for VOD rental on 
iTunes. Hester is also available on streaming 
service Fandor.)
While Silver distinguished herself as a 
great director of actors early on (Carol Kane 
netted a Best Actress Oscar nomination for 
Hester Street), and she collaborated with 
many big names (Gena Rowlands, Sissy 
Spacek, Rita Wilson), she struggled through-
out her career to secure funding for projects, 
a difficulty attributable to persistent indus-
trial bias against women creators. In light 
of this, her body of work — populated by 
characters whose aspirations and self-con-
ceptions seem at odds with the lives they’ve 
managed to build and the expectations of 
those around them — seems all the more 
impressive. 

GEORGE ELKIND CONTRIBUTING WRITER

JEWISH WOMEN’S ARCHIVE

ARTS&LIFE
FILM

Joan Micklin Silver 
Remembered

Joan Micklin Silver 

with Amy Irving in 

Crossing Delancey 

(1988).

Filmmaker portrayed the romantic and 
cultural struggles of Jewish women.

IMDB

Joan Micklin Silver 

couldn’t interest 

a Hollywood stu-

dio in doing a film 

about early Eastern 

European immigrants 

to New York, which 

would incorporate 

some Yiddish. So she 

wrote, directed and 

co-produced Hester 

Street (1975) herself.

