Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in American Jewish culture. This book delineates this rich history, demonstrating how, over the twentieth century, dance enabled American Jews to grapple with identity, difference, cultural belonging, and pride.
Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression. Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.
A comprehensive survey of historical and contemporary Jewish dance. In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, choreographer, dancer, and dance scholar Judith Brin Ingber collects wide-ranging essays and many remarkable photographs to explore the evolution of Jewish dance through two thousand years of Diaspora, in communities of amazing variety and amid changing traditions. Ingber and other eminent scholars consider dancers individually and in community, defining Jewish dance broadly to encompass religious ritual, community folk dance, and choreographed performance. Taken together, this wide range of expression illustrates the vitality, necessity, and continuity of dance in Judaism. This volume combines dancers' own views of their art with scholarly examinations of Jewish dance conducted in Europe, Israel, other Middle East areas, Africa, and the Americas. In seven parts, Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance considers Jewish dance artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; the dance of different Jewish communities, including Hasidic, Yemenite, Kurdish, Ethiopian, and European Jews in many epochs; historical and current Israeli folk dance; and the contrast between Israeli and American modern and post-modern theater dance. Along the way, contributors see dance in ancient texts like the Song of Songs, the Talmud, and Renaissance-era illuminated manuscripts, and plumb oral histories, Holocaust sources, and their own unique views of the subject. A selection of 182 illustrations, including photos, paintings, and film stills, round out this lively volume. Many of the illustrations come from private collections and have never before been published, and they represent such varied sources as a program booklet from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and archival photos from the Israel Government Press Office. Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance threads together unique source material and scholarly examinations by authors from Europe, Israel, and America trained in sociology, anthropology, history, cultural studies, Jewish studies, dance studies, as well as art, theater, and dance criticism. Enthusiasts of dance and performance art and a wide range of university students will enjoy this significant volume.
This acclaimed graphic memoir that Kirkus calls “cathartic and uplifting” is the tale of losing a parent and what it feels like to grieve and to move forward. “I can’t recommend this kind, funny, and poignant memoir enough. It’s an intimate, life-affirming story of resilience that feels like a good friend.” —Mari Andrew, author of Am I There Yet? Tyler Feder had just white-knuckled her way through her first year of college when her super cool mom was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. Now, with a decade of grief and nervous laughter under her belt, Tyler shares the story of that gut-wrenching, heart-pounding, extremely awkward time in her life—from her mom’s first oncology appointment to her funeral through the beginning of facing reality as a motherless daughter. She shares the sting of loss that never goes away, the uncomfortable post-death firsts, and the deep-down, hard-to-talk-about feelings of the grieving process. Dancing at the Pity Party is a frank and refreshingly funny look at what it’s like to grieve—for anyone struggling with loss who just wants someone to get it.
He tossed her into the air as if she were weightless, and just for a moment she seemed suspended there, defying gravity. I couldn't take my eyes off her. I knew what she was feeling. It was in every movement of every limb. Here was a power I had never seen before, a kind of haunting loveliness I had never imagined. Seeing it made me long for something, I didn't know what . . . Ditty was born to dance, but she was also born Jewish. When her strictly religious parents won't let her take ballet lessons, Ditty starts to dance in secret. But for how long can she keep her two worlds apart? And at what cost? A dramatic and moving story about a girl who follows her dream, and finds herself questioning everything she believes in.
Why did dance and dancing became important to the construction of a new, modern, Jewish/Israeli cultural identity in the newly formed nation of Israel? There were questions that covered almost all spheres of daily life, including “What do we dance?” because Hebrew or Eretz-Israeli dance had to be created out of none. How and why did dance develop in such a way? Dance Spreads Its Wings is the first and only book that looks at the whole picture of concert dance in Israel studying the growth of Israeli concert dance for 90 years—starting from 1920, when there was no concert dance to speak of during the Yishuv (pre-Israel Jewish settlements) period, until 2010, when concert dance in Israel had grown to become one of the country’s most prominent, original, artistic fields and globally recognized. What drives the book is the impulse to create and the need to dance in the midst of constant political change. It is the story of artists trying to be true to their art while also responding to the political, social, religious, and ethnic complexities of a Jewish state in the Middle East.
To outsiders, Rikki Kasnett is a model student; co-dance head for the upcoming school production; a fun-loving friend. But on the inside, Rikki and her older sister Daniella are struggling to cope with their desperate home situation, which they must keep hidden at all costs. When their mother's mental illness reaches new depths, the facade that the two sisters have worked so hard to build is shattered. The girls valiantly attempt to keep their lives afloat, guarding their horrifying secrets from well-meaning friends and teachers who want to help. They're worn out by the deception, but can't imagine any other solution. Will Rikki and Daniella be able to transcend the secrecy that has ruled their lives and find the help they need to recover?
When Paul Glaser discovered his Aunt Rosie’s remarkable wartime diaries, photographs and letters he was shocked: he had been raised as a Catholic, and had no knowledge of his Jewish heritage. But the story he was to uncover and reconstruct was one far larger and more dramatic than he could have ever imagined. Rosie Glaser was a magnetic force – hopeful, exuberant and cunning. An emancipated woman who defied convention, she toured Western Europe teaching ballroom dancing to high acclaim, falling in love hard and often. By the age of twenty-five, she had lost the great love of her life, married the wrong man, and sought consolation in the arms of another. Then the Nazis seized power. After operating an illegal dance school in her parents’ attic, she was betrayed by both her ex-husband and her lover, taken prisoner by the SS and sent to a series of concentration camps. Of the twelve-hundred people who arrived with her at Auschwitz, only eight survived.
What does it mean to be Jewish? What are the struggles and joys Jewish people face? Through personal memoirs, fictions, and fables, this collection of stories provides a glimpse into the Jewish spirit that has been dancing on the edge of the world.
This unique encyclopedia chronicles American Jewish popular culture, past and present in music, art, food, religion, literature, and more. Over 150 entries, written by scholars in the field, highlight topics ranging from animation and comics to Hollywood and pop psychology. Without the profound contributions of American Jews, the popular culture we know today would not exist. Where would music be without the music of Bob Dylan and Barbra Streisand, humor without Judd Apatow and Jerry Seinfeld, film without Steven Spielberg, literature without Phillip Roth, Broadway without Rodgers and Hammerstein? These are just a few of the artists who broke new ground and changed the face of American popular culture forever. This unique encyclopedia chronicles American Jewish popular culture, past and present in music, art, food, religion, literature, and more. Over 150 entries, written by scholars in the field, highlight topics ranging from animation and comics to Hollywood and pop psychology. Up-to-date coverage and extensive attention to political and social contexts make this encyclopedia is an excellent resource for high school and college students interested in the full range of Jewish popular culture in the United States. Academic and public libraries will also treasure this work as an incomparable guide to our nation's heritage. Illustrations complement the text throughout, and many entries cite works for further reading. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography of print and electronic sources to encourage further research.
