REWIND 20-21: The Comedy of Jewish Assimilation in the 80's

REWIND: the Shenson Retrospective Film Series is jointly offered by Stanford University Libraries and the Taube Center for Jewish Studies. In 2020-2021, the subject of the series is Jewish American Women filmmakers.

The Comedy of Jewish Assimilation in the 80's

By the 1980s, Jews had made it. Awkward suburbanization and Americanization had given way to a more upscale, mostly suburban Jewish life. Yet something seems to have been lost in this exchange. Both Susan Seidelman's Desperately Seeking Susan and Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey turn the disappearance of Jewish difference into high comedy. In Desperately Seeking Susan, as an ode to classic screwball comedies, Roberta Glass lives vicariously through Susan before becoming Susan. She trades the New Jersey suburbs for the excitement of Lower Manhattan.

Izzy, the heroine of Joan Micklin Silver's Crossing Delancey, never left the city. Her uptown life, however, isn't quite proving as fulfilling as she imagined it would be. So her Lower East Side grandmother seeks to bring her back to the Lower East Side, to a world of matchmakers, hats, and pickles.

As part of the program, we spoke to Susan Seidelman about her career. A recording of that conversation is available here.

Desperately Seeking Susan (1985)
Susan Seidelman followed up her punk rock debut, Smithereens , with a New Wave, neo-screwball masterpiece. The film is available to stream via Swank Digital Campus
Crossing Delancey (1988)
A love letter to the Lower East Side, and a love letter to love. The film is available to stream via Swank Digital Campus.
Sex and the City - Pilot Episode (1998)
As a director, Susan Seidelman is a master of visual style and what can be conveyed wordlessly. In the late-1990s she was brought on to direct the pilot to Sex and the City and to help establish the show's signature look. The show is available on DVD and BluRay from Stanford Libraries.