Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"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
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