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16:21 PST 01/01/2021
by
Katie Kilkenny
The pioneering writer-director fought to bring Jewish stories to the big screen at a time when some of her projects were seen as an “ethnic quirk,” she said.
Joan Micklin Silver, the pioneering freelance director behind Hester Street and Cross Delancey, among many other titles, which fought to bring Jewish stories to the big screen, has passed away. She was 85 years old.
Silver died of vascular dementia at her Manhattan home Thursday, Silver’s daughter Claudia said. The New York Times.
Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, to Russian Jewish parents, Silver left home to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Shortly after graduating in 1956, Silver married the son of a Cleveland-based Zionist rabbi, Raphael D. Silver, and the couple settled in Cleveland, where Silver taught music lessons and wrote plays. theater while working to raise three children.
Silver made her film debut after the family moved to New York City in 1967, and Silver began writing scripts for educational children’s films. With The Learning Corporation of America, Silver wrote, produced and directed films such as the 1972 short The Immigrant Experience: The Long and Long Journey. Silver ventured into the studio system after an original screenplay called Limbo was picked up by Universal Pictures, but it wasn’t a positive experience: she refused to “soften” the female lead character in the screenplay, and the studio ordered a rewrite without her.
Experience informed his work in the years 1975 Hester Street, adapted from the novel by Abraham Cahan Yekl, which Silver wrote and directed. “I came of age in film at a time when the sexism was pretty strong and although I could find work as a writer, I couldn’t work as a director at all,” Silver said of the time when she realized Hester Street in an interview with Directors Guild of America. “And I had the experience of watching young men who had made shorts, like me, award-winning shorts, like me, moving on to making films and I couldn’t do that.
Her husband got mad at the lack of opportunities, Silver said, and agreed to fundraise for the film. He ended up funding, producing, and distributing low-budget indie, which Hester says was dismissed by every major Hollywood studio as an “ethnic quirk,” but ended up making $ 5 million at the box. -office and was nominated for a writer. Guild of America Award. Silver once again worked with her husband to produce and distribute her next feature film, Between the lines (1977); she finally collaborated with a major distributor, United Artists, on her third feature film, Cold winter scenes (1979).
1988 Cross Delancey saw her again bumping into the Hollywood system on Jewish characters: Silver told the New York Times which the studios described as “too ethnic”. Steven Spielberg, who was married at the time to film star Amy Irving, recommended that Silver send the script to a Warner Bros. executive. that he knew and the studio eventually released the film.
Along with directing seven feature films during his career, Silver has directed theatrical titles, including 1992 A … my name is still Alice and 1982 Maybe i’m hurting and a radio series for NPR, Great Jewish stories from Eastern Europe and beyond. For television, she directed the films How to be a perfect person in just three days (1983) and No hunger (2003), among others.
Silver is survived by her daughters Claudia, Dina and Marisa; his sister Renee; and five grandchildren.
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