Joan Micklin Silver

Joan Micklin Silver (May 24, 1935 – December 31, 2020) was an American director of films and plays. Born in Omaha, Silver moved to New York City in 1967 where she began writing and directing films. She is best known for Hester Street (1975), her first feature, and Crossing Delancey (1988). Early life and education Joan Micklin was born on May 24, 1935, in Omaha, Nebraska, the daughter of Doris (Shoshone) and Maurice David Micklin, who operated the family-founded lumber company. Her parents were Russian Jewish immigrants. She received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in 1956. That same year, she married Raphael D. Silver, a real estate developer. They had three daughters, and remained married until his death in 2013. One of their children, Marisa Silver, is herself a film director and author. Raphael's father was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Joan and Raphael lived in Cleveland from 1956 to 1967, where she taught music and wrote and directed plays. Career Silver's film career began when she moved to New York City in 1967. She was a writer for The Village Voice before she started her career in film. In the 1960s, she began writing scripts for children's educational films produced by Encyclopædia Britannica and the Learning Corporation of America, for which she directed three short films: The Case of the Elevator Duck, The Fur Coat, and The Immigrant Experience: The Long Long Journey. The Immigrant Experience, about Polish immigrants to America, was well received and is considered to be the immediate predecessor to Hester Street (1975). She reflected in one interview that the barriers to women's entry into filmmaking were so steep in the early 1970s that "I had absolutely no chance of getting work as a director." In a 1979 American Film Institute interview, she quoted a studio executive who told her bluntly, "Feature films are very expensive to mount and distribute, and women directors are one more problem we don’t need." Before beginning her career as a director, Silver worked as a writer; she sold a script entitled Limbo to Universal Pictures in 1972. Limbo, a collaboration with Linda Gottlieb, was about the wives of Vietnam War prisoners of war.