Sweet Pickle

There’s a genre of rom-com that, yes, makes New York its main character. Not the real New York but a cinegenic, perennially autumnal isle of brownstones and boutique bookstores, where every white woman works in publishing and love lurks in the checkout line at Zabar’s. Historically, the pillars of this genre have squeezed New Yorky authenticity from floating signifiers of Jewish culture—see the aforementioned Zabar’s cameo in You’ve Got Mail (1998) or Katz’s in When Harry Met Sally (1989), both canonical classics by Nora Ephron. A deep-cut gem in this lineage has just received a Criterion reissue with an essay by The New Yorker’s Rachel Syme, rhapsodist of fountain pens and tuna melts. Set on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and released a year before Sally’s orgasmic encounter with sliced turkey (Harry orders pastrami on rye), Crossing Delancey captures the twilight of an earlier, actually Jewish milieu. Directed by Joan Micklin-Silver, the film follows Amy Irving as Isabelle Grossman, a thirty-three-year-old bibliomane whose bubbe wants her to get married, and a sn…