Hester Street is a 1975 American comedy drama film[2] based on Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, and was adapted and directed by Joan Micklin Silver.

In 2011, Hester Street was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Though a television producer told her not to center Jewish subjects in her film, feeling it would then be "too atypical", Silver maintained an interest in telling a story that reflected her own heritage.

Eventually, she decided to finance the film independently with the help of her husband, real estate developer Raphael "Ray" Silver, who provided her with a budget of $370,000 through fundraising.

[11] In 2021, Hester Street was given a 4K re-release by the Cohen Film Collection, completing the restoration work that Joan Micklin Silver had yet to finish prior to her death earlier that year.

[17] Writing for The New York Times in October 1975, critic Richard Eder praised the film, noting that, though he felt its subject matter wasn't particularly groundbreaking, the performances from its cast elevated it to "loveliness".

[19] Pauline Kael of The New Yorker was similarly unimpressed; though she noted that the film's "narrative simplicity" was "defenselessly appealing", she criticized Silver's characterization, writing that "[t]he aggressive characters don't have enough sensitivity—or juice—to come to life".

Writing for Hyperallergic, Charles Bramesco praised the film, stating, "The richness of Silver’s filmmaking lies in her attention to detail and texture, as she recreates a world that had largely vanished by the time she made New York her home.

[...] She fills her frugally constructed slice of the past with snatches of quotidian life, her camera passing over people playing cards, buying fish, and talking about their plans for the Sabbath.

In a New York Film Festival review for The Playlist, critic Mark Asch described her performance by saying, "She’s a marvel here, a figure genuinely out of the past, looking in her wigs and headscarves both like a little girl and like someone who was never young.

She moves with a tentativeness that conveys the future shock of this moment in history while her eyes take in the world in marvelment and implore her husband for acknowledgment and connection.

[22] In 2011, Hester Street was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for the National Film Registry.

[26] In making its selection, the Registry state that the film was "a portrait of Eastern European Jewish life in America that historians have praised for its accuracy of detail and sensitivity to the challenges immigrants faced during their acculturation process".

[3][5] Writing for Hey Alma, Mia J. Merrill noted the film's surprisingly nuanced take on assimilation in immigrant communities: “Hester Street” presents assimilation as an inevitable reality, the good and the bad — the nice new clothes reserved for upper classes back in Poland that anyone can wear in New York; the open space of the Lower East Side streets; the realization that the cloistered, segregated New York of the turn of the century can isolate Jews as much as any shtetl; the way that English first feels foreign in Gitl’s mouth before it slowly overtakes her, replacing words and phrases in Yiddish until she can express herself fully in either language.

But it’s a violent assimilation as well, one filled with cries as Jake pushes past Gitl with scissors to cut off their son’s peyos (sidelocks), insisting that he not be called Yossele anymore, but Joey.

They tread the same bumpy cobblestone path of the film’s title, one named after Queen Esther, who, in securing the love of a king, ensured the continuity of the Jewish people.

She also remarked on the film's groundbreaking usage of Yiddish, which had previously only been used sporadically in popular culture as comedic relief, such as in the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles.

[27] She has theorized that her delivery of Yiddish dialogue in the film helped her obtain what is now one of her most recognizable roles, Simka Dahblitz-Gravas, in the sitcom Taxi, since her character partially speaks a fictional language with a vaguely Eastern European accent.

For the article, Bilge Ebiri wrote of the film, "Silver’s direction combines a melodramatic, silent-movie sensibility with an indie-film austerity that makes it hard to pinpoint the period to which the picture belongs.