Tales of the Immigrant City – HESTER STREET with Special Guest Molly Haskell
HESTER STREET
Joan Micklin Silver, 1975, 89 min
With Carole Kane, Steven Keats
About the film:
In this newly restored independent classic adapted from Abraham Cahan 1896 Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, a newly arrived Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe struggles to find her footing on Manhattan’s Lower East Side as her husband embraces American life with gusto. Shot in evocative black and white, Hester Street captures the tension between old traditions and new dreams in turn-of-the-century New York. Carol Kane earned an Academy Award nomination for her powerful performance as Gitl, a woman forging her own path in the face of cultural displacement and personal upheaval.
About Molly Haskell:
Molly Haskell is a writer and film critic in New York City whose most recent book is My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation. Her first job in New York City was at the French Film Office, writing and editing publications on French films. Since then she has written and lectured widely on film and women in film, and is the author of four previous books: the classic From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movie; the memoir Love and Other Infectious Diseases; a collection, Holding My Own in No Man’s Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminists; and, in 2009, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited. She is currently working on a short biography of Steven Spielberg for Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series.
Haskell has taught at Columbia, Barnard, and Sarah Lawrence, served as film critic for The Village Voice, New York magazine and Vogue, and written for many publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, Town & Country, and The Nation. She wrote monthly columns for both The Guardian U.K. and The New York Observer, and served as co-host with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies.
Haskell received, with Andrew Sarris, the 2008 William K. Everson Award for Film History, from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures. Her work was featured in The Library of America’s 2006 American Movie Critics, edited by Philip Lopate, and she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2010, and she won the Athena Award for criticism in 2012.
TICKETS:
$12/adult
$10/seniors & students
$2 discount with Community partner code
Co-sponsors: BAiP, LiLY, W. 90s Neighborhood Assn., W. 102nd & 103rd Streets Block Assn., W. 104th St. Block Assn., JCC Manhattan