One of the few
Women film-makers working in
Hollywood in the 1970 and 80s was best known for her Jewish-themed films set in New York’s Lower East Side
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.