Bernice Silver

Bernice Silver (October 7, 1913 – April 18, 2020) was an American performer, puppeteer, and activist born in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the eldest of eight children of Samuel Silver and Frances Resnikoff Silver. Her parents were Jewish, and her father worked as a salesman and operated a candy shop.

Before establishing herself as a performer, Silver held a variety of jobs, working in schools and factories and selling encyclopedias and other goods door-to-door. She became involved in workers' theatre during this period, joining groups such as Theatre Advance and taking part in demonstrations and strikes. Her single Broadway credit came in 1938, when she appeared in the original cast of Thornton Wilder's drama Our Town.

By the 1960s, Silver had turned her focus to puppetry, a practice she described in a 2013 Philadelphia Inquirer interview as one of the oldest professions in the world, encompassing many artistic disciplines. She toured New York State alongside Pete Seeger and others under the billing "Vagabond Puppeteers," and became an active member of the Puppetry Guild of Greater New York. Her open-mic performances blended puppetry, storytelling, folk songs, costumes, and political commentary, earning her the nickname "the Queen of Potpourri." For decades she entertained at children's events throughout the New York area, and in her later years she incorporated her advanced age into her comedy. She appeared in the 2008 documentary Puppet Rampage, and in 2011 went kayaking for the first time with the NYC Friends of Clearwater. She also spoke at a Hudson River Sloop Clearwater fundraiser in 2016. The Puppeteers of America established a Bernice Silver Festival Grant to fund senior attendees at the organization's national festivals.

Silver broke her hip and underwent a foot amputation in 2014, and in 2016 she moved to the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey. She died there on April 18, 2020, from respiratory failure associated with coronavirus, at the age of 106. In October 2020, the Puppeteers of America held a Virtual Puppet Con during the week of what would have been her 107th birthday, dedicated to her memory.