Revisiting “Hester Street”

April 27 2022

In 1896, Abraham Cahan, the longtime editor of the socialist, Yiddish-language daily paper the Forverts, published a short story, titled Yekl. Its title character, like Cahan himself, moved from Russia to America as a young man and left the traditional Judaism of his childhood. In 1975, Joan Micklin Silver made a film adaption of Yekl, titled Hester Street, which has recently been restored and released in select theaters. Devorah Goldman contrasts it to many more recent works about religious defectors—including such popular television series as Unorthodox and My Unorthodox Life—that ridicule religion while glorifying the decision to leave it. Yekl’s choice is not so easily vindicated:

Stories about leaving religion tend to be told by those who have left, and so they often emphasize the bravery of that choice. Hester Street, by contrast, acknowledges both the temptation to leave and the commitment required to stay. The religious figures in Cahan’s fiction are rarely caricatures; in Yekl, they are noble. Hester Street depicts a blunt encounter between traditionalism and modernity, but one in which religion is not the enemy and its defectors are not heroes. This is a testament to the insight and empathy of Cahan.

Directed by Silver and filmed in black and white—the better to evoke its 1896 source material—Hester Street often feels like a silent movie. There are long stretches with no dialogue, only ragtime-style music. The handsome and restless Yekl (played by Steven Keats) lives in the Lower East Side of New York, attends dances with a rotation of girlfriends, and does his best to forget the wife and child he has left behind in Russia. In an effort to rid himself of any hint of Jewishness, he shaves his beard, removes his skullcap, and changes his name to Jake. Jake does not pray or observe Jewish law; he ruthlessly mocks those who do.

When Jake is compelled to send for his wife following the death of his father, he treats her like a bad dream he’d like to shake, or like an unpleasant, lingering smell. Gitl, played by the luminous Carol Kane, is every inch the woman he has left behind: she arrives not knowing a word of English; her hair covered by a stiff, unfashionable wig; her person shrouded in a heavy peasant’s cloak. Worse, she believes in the religion Jake has abandoned. She is exactly the sort of person the heroines of Unorthodox and My Unorthodox Life are eager to escape, a bad memory made flesh.

Read more at American Purpose

More about: American Jewish literature, American Jewry, Assimilation, Film, Lower East Side

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023