A still from the movie "Hester Street". Series presented by the Watertown Living History Project. Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Hester Street tells the story of Jewish immigrants who come to the Lower East side of New York City in 1896 from Europe and who live on Hester Street in Manhattan. The film is noteworthy for its detailed reconstruction of Jewish immigrant life in New York at the turn of the century?much of the dialogue is delivered in Yiddish with English subtitles?and was part of the wave of films released in the late 1960s and through the 1970s which began explicitly to deal with the complexities of American Jewish identity. In addition, the lead character posed a still-provocative synthesis as she discovers her own self-assertion on behalf of her right to maintain a traditional identity in an aggressively modern setting.
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