Dancing Jewish: Jewish Identity in American Modern and Postmodern Dance

by Rebecca Rossen

Overview

While Jews are commonly referred to as the "people of the book," American Jewish choreographers have consistently turned to dance as a means to articulate personal and collective identities; tangle with stereotypes; advance social and political agendas; and imagine new possibilities for themselves as individuals, artists, and Jews. Dancing Jewish delineates this rich history, demonstrating that Jewish choreographers have not only been vital contributors to American modern and postmodern dance, but that they have also played a critical and unacknowledged role in the history of Jews in the United States.

A dancer and choreographer, as well as an historian, author Rebecca Rossen offers evocative analyses of dances while asserting the importance of embodied methodologies to academic research. Featuring over fifty images, a companion website, and key works from 1930 to 2005 by a wide range of artists - including David Dorfman, Dan Froot, David Gordon, Hadassah, Margaret Jenkins, Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, Liz Lerman, Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and Benjamin Zemach - Dancing Jewish offers a comprehensive framework for interpreting performance and establishes dance as a crucial site in which American Jews have grappled with cultural belonging, personal and collective histories, and the values that bind and pull them apart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780199791774
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	06/03/2014
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Rossen, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin

Table of Contents

Introduction
Prelude: Make Me a Jewish Dance
Act I: Dancing the Jew
Chapter 1: The Dancing Jew(ess): Ethnic Ambiguity and Hasidic Drag
Chapter 2: Biblical Heroines and Anti-Heroines
Chapter 3: The Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick
Entr'acte: Make Me a Jewish Dance
Act II: Dancing Jewish
Chapter 4: Dancing Folk: Jewish Memory and Amnesia
Chapter 5: Dancing Zionism, Embodying Conflict
Conclusion: Dancing Jewish, Dancing American
Curtain Call: Dance Me My Jewish Dance
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Recipient, Special Citation from the de la Torre Bueno Prize, Society of Dance History Scholars

2015 Oscar G. Brockett Book Prize for Dance Research, Congress on Research in Dance

"She describes and annotates, with relish and care, selected Jewish-themed dances by Jewish choreographers (some early character pieces, some classic modern dances, some less known postmodern works), decoding markers of Jewishness and analyzing how they have evoked, transmitted, and modified ethnic and gender identity from the 1920s to the present. This is clearly a labor of love and sweat, dynamic balancing, and discovery." —Diana Scott, Jewish Currents

"Rossen's deft interweaving of beautifully-written movement descriptions with rigorous scholarship produces a multifaceted analysis of the role of Jewish identity within the development of modern and postmodern dance. Dancing Jewish is an important original contribution to dance studies." —Ann Cooper Albright, author of Engaging Bodies: the Politics and Poetics of Corporeality

"Rebecca Rossen's highly readable Dancing Jewish is a major contribution to both Jewish studies and dance/performance studies. Drawing on a rich mix of archival work, interviews with performers, and the author's personal experience as a dancer and choreographer, the book is a shining example of how performance-centered research can take us places that scholarship could not otherwise reach." —Henry Bial, University of Kansas, author of Acting Jewish: Negotiating Ethnicity on the American Stage and Screen

"[T]he totality of Rossen's book project is a beautifully crafted testament to the multilayered, interdisciplinary, consciously constructed, communally achieved nature of the topic she tackles."—Dance Review Journal

"This excellent book is simultaneously a performance history, an ethnic history, and a timely reminder to all who might forget that Jewishness still matters in the United States, not only to those who identify as Jewish, but to the vast majority of the population which doesn't. . . . Rossen's book reminds us, if we needed reminding, that Jewishness matters in America, and in American history too, especially in those histories written with our bodies, like dance."—Jane Desmond, Studies in Theatre and Performance

"Rossen's volume is a significant addition to the literature as it offers the fruits of valuable new research that enhances understandings of the interrelationships between American Jewish and dance history. This important book can be utilized for courses in a range of fields, particularly in the context of Jewish studies, including American Jewish history, Jewish dance history, American Jewish visual arts and cultural history, and Jewish gender history, among others. By providing a complex and multidisciplinary analysis, Rossen's monograph serves as an important contribution to many fields and enhances the growing intersection of Jewish and dance studies." —Images

From the Publisher