Episode 24 - Hester Street with Miriam Borden

Off-Campus History

On today's episode, we’re discussing the 1975 film Hester Street and its depiction of Jewish immigration to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century!

Hester Street is based on an 1896 novella by Abraham Cahan named called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. The film follows a Jewish immigrant family in 1890s New York who come into conflict over the extent to which they should adopt aspects of American culture and the extent to which they should maintain aspects of the culture they grew up with in eastern Europe. The film stars Carol Kane and Steven Keats; Kane was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. Also worth mentioning is that much of the film is in Yiddish, which gives us an opportunity to talk about the history of the Yiddish language!

Today we dig into the history behind Hester Street, discussing the role of Yiddish in Jewish-American life at the time, how Jewish immigrants to the United States navigated the process of acculturating in America, how the Jewish immigrant experience compared to those of other immigrant groups like the Irish, and much more.

To discuss all this with me, I’m joined by Miriam Borden. Miriam is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto specializing in Yiddish Studies. She’s an expert in the history of the Yiddish language in North America as well as Jewish culture and history. Check out some of her awesome Yiddish history finds on Instagram over at https://www.instagram.com/bikher_chick/ and every Friday at https://www.instagram.com/ontariojewisharchives/!

For those interested in the lives of turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants, check out Susan A. Glenn’s Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). For those who’d like to learn more about Yiddish in the United States, have a look at Reuben Iceland’s From Our Springtime: Literary Memoirs and Portraits of Yiddish New York, trans. Gerald Marcus, 1st English ed. (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2013).

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