Hester Street at Segal Centre for Performing Arts

A Segal Centre presentation of a Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre production
A Play with Music by Sharyn Rothstein
With Original Music and Songs by Joel Waggoner
Based on the film by Joan Micklin Silver and the novella Yekl by Abraham Cahan

A love story caught between tradition and reinvention
Based on the landmark film Hester Street, this Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre production plunges us into the Jewish immigrant experience on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1890s, where survival, ambition, and identity collide inside the smallest of homes.

When Gitl arrives from Europe to join her husband, she expects the man she married. Instead, she finds a stranger who has reinvented himself, ashamed of his roots and hungry for acceptance in a new world. Trapped between tradition and reinvention, their marriage becomes a test of loyalty, desire, and endurance.

Praised as “even deeper than the beloved 1975 movie version” by The Washington Post, this powerful stage adaptation brings urgency, intimacy, and emotional force to a story about assimilation that still resonates today.

How much of yourself would you give up to belong? Find out, on Hester Street.