In 1975, a largely unknown 23-year-old actor named Carol Kane starred in Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street as Gitl, an Eastern European Jewish immigrant in Manhattan’s Lower East Side around the turn of the 20th century. While her husband preferred speaking in English, Gitl persisted in Yiddish; their son was “Yossele” to his mother and “Joey” to his father. With her girlish voice and voluminous pre-Raphaelite hair, the young Kane seemed a figure out of time—and though Gitl eventually becomes an independent American woman, the film was tinged with a real sadness over the ties to the old country severed in her triumphant assimilation.
When, at the end of the film, Gitl corrects an acquaintance’s mention of her Yossele—“His name is Joey”—she begins a transformation that her portrayer would have understood innately. Kane’s grandmother was a Yiddish speaker but, after emigrating, never spoke the language to her granddaughter; for Hester Street, Kane had to learn Yiddish from a dialect coach. Over the decades that followed, Kane carved out a space for herself in Hollywood as a daffy and neurotic character actress who generally read as Jewish—but, crucially, culturally Jewish. She’s “New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the father with the Ben Shahn drawings,” as Woody Allen says to her character in Annie Hall. “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype,” is her reply—a comment, perhaps, on how easily heritage can be boiled down to a set of showbiz tropes.
This bittersweet absorption into America—a past traded in for a future—unfolds over many generations, for many populations. Questions of how central Jewishness should be to Jewish American identity—and what parts of Jewishness should be central to Jewish American identity—have long divided older and younger family members, who may share a broadly liberal outlook while having different habits of religious observance, experiences of anti-Semitism, and feelings about Zionism. Such questions have taken on more urgency since the October 7 attacks, as many parents and children find themselves freshly alienated from each other’s understanding of Judaism. How is a cultural birthright to be passed on, when so much of it might seem like a burden to its inheritors? Similar anxieties resound through Between the Temples, in which Kane plays Carla O’Connor, née Kessler, a retired music teacher who decides, in her elder years, to have her bat mitzvah. As she prepares for the rite with her synagogue’s Millennial cantor, who is very much mired in his own personal crises, the director Nathan Silver’s hopeful film demonstrates the adaptability of tradition, and the possibility of reconciliation and continuity across the generations.