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The pioneering writer-director fought to bring Jewish stories to the silver screen at a time when some of her projects were considered an ethnic oddity, she has said.
Joan Micklin Silver, the pioneering independent female director behind
Hester Street and
Crossing Delancey, among many other titles, who fought to bring Jewish stories to the silver screen, has died. She was 85.
Silver died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan of vascular dementia, Silver s daughter, Claudia, told
Born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska to Russian Jewish parents, Silver left home to attend Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Not long after her graduation 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 classes and wrote plays as she worked to raise three children.
Joan Micklin Silver, boundary-breaking director of Crossing Delancey, dies at 85 Tyler Aquilina
Crossing Delancey and the boundary-breaking independent film
Hester Street, died Thursday of vascular dementia at her Manhattan home, according to her daughter. She was 85.
Silver helped break barriers for female filmmakers and for Jewish representation on screen, with
Hester Street, her 1975 debut, telling the story of a young Russian Jewish immigrant couple on New York s Lower East Side in the 1890s. Silver’s husband Raphael D. Silver, a commercial real estate developer, raised the $320,000 budget himself to help support his wife s burgeoning career in an industry rife with sexism.
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