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Dubbed a “deep-cut gem” by the New York Review of Architecture’s Grace Byron and lauded as “endlessly, addictively rewatchable” by the New Yorker’s Rachel Syme, Joan Micklin Silver’s lodestar rom-com Crossing Delancey crossed more than an East-West thoroughfare upon its release — it also crossed deeply entrenched professional limitations placed on aspiring women directors by a stubbornly patriarchal film industry.

Silver’s fourth feature stars Amy Irving as a lovelorn bookstore clerk who falls for both a fancy guy and a regular guy — so much rom-com boilerplate — but it also stars two very different versions of Jewish Manhattan: the Upper West Side and the Lower East Side. From Zabar’s and Harry’s Shoes to Yonah Schimmel’s Knishes and Guss’ Pickles (RIP), Silver gives us a tale of two superimposed eras — from the 19th-century landing strip of fresh-from-the-shtetl immigrants squeezed into the densest tenement district in history to what later developed into the epicenter of Gotham’s literary and academic Jewish cognoscenti. The tug-of-war between these two versions of her diasporic community is the core conflict that Irving’s character has to contend with, the big-shot writer and the humble pickle peddler merely standing in for this tension.

Low is proud to partner with Romantic Urbanism for this special one-night-only event. Romantic Urbanism’s Louise Yeung will introduce the screening, after which Daphne Lundi will moderate a panel discussion with housing policy expert Samuel Stein and writer Grace Byron about Jewish identity, the history of the Lower East Side, and the changing class and economic character of the city’s neighborhoods.

https://lowcinema.com/tickets/p/contact-yyj2f-3bktr-h3nlw