Join the Muse­um of Jew­ish Her­itage for a screen­ing of Hes­ter Street and a dis­cus­sion with author Dr. Julia Wag­n­er and film­mak­er and Colum­bia pro­fes­sor Ira Deutch­man. 

Joan Mick­lin Silver’s ground­break­ing debut fea­ture film, Hes­ter Street (1975), vivid­ly por­trays the immi­grant expe­ri­ence through the eyes of Gitl (Car­ol Kane), a young, Ortho­dox Jew­ish woman who arrives in New York City from East­ern Europe at the end of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Reunit­ed with her already-assim­i­lat­ed hus­band, Gitl finds they now have lit­tle in com­mon and she is forced to adjust to a new way of life in the Low­er East Side. Hes­ter Street defied expec­ta­tions on its release, and shines today as a tri­umph of inde­pen­dent, fem­i­nist film­mak­ing that changed the face of Jew­ish Amer­i­can cinema. 

Mark­ing the film’s 50th anniver­sary, Dr. Julia Wagner’s land­mark BFI Film Clas­sics book about Hes­ter Street is the first to focus exclu­sive­ly on Mick­lin Silver’s film. Wag­n­er will intro­duce the film and fol­low­ing the screen­ing, she will be in con­ver­sa­tion with Ira Deutch­man about Joan Mick­lin Silver’s lega­cy and the impor­tance and impact of Hes­ter Street. 

Run time: 90 minutes. 

Signed copies of Hes­ter Street will be avail­able to pur­chase after the screening. 

Dr. Julia Wag­n­er is a lec­tur­er and writer spe­cial­is­ing in Jew­ish-inter­est film and tele­vi­sion, based in Lon­don, UK. She holds a PhD in Film Stud­ies from UCL and is author of Hes­ter Street (Blooms­bury 2025), a BFI Film Clas­sics study of Joan Mick­lin Silver’s debut fea­ture film. Her writ­ing has been pub­lished wide­ly, and she is a mem­ber of the Lon­don Film Crit­ics’ Cir­cle. Julia is pas­sion­ate about media edu­ca­tion and pub­lic engage­ment. You can find out more about her work at: www​.juli​awag​n​er​film​.com 

Ira Deutch­man has been mak­ing, mar­ket­ing, and dis­trib­ut­ing films since 1975, hav­ing worked on over 150 films includ­ing some of the most suc­cess­ful inde­pen­dent films of all time. He was one of the founders of Cinecom and lat­er cre­at­ed Fine Line Fea­tures — two com­pa­nies that were cre­at­ed from scratch and, in their respec­tive times, helped define the inde­pen­dent film busi­ness. He was also a co-founder of Emerg­ing Pic­tures, the first dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion net­work in the Unit­ed States and a pio­neer in deliv­er­ing live cul­tur­al events into movie the­aters. His cur­rent projects include serv­ing as director/​producer of the fea­ture doc­u­men­tary Search­ing for Mr. Rugoff, pro­duc­er of the stage adap­ta­tion of Joan Mick­lin Silver’s Hes­ter Street, pro­duc­er of Nick­el & Dimed, based on the book by Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich and direct­ed by Debra Granik, and exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of the mini-series based on the nov­el Radio Girls by Sarah-Jane Stratford. 

This event is cospon­sored by Jew­ish Book Council