Many people, especially those unfamiliar with Jewish history or dance, see Jews as the “people of the book”—a people dedicated to study and reflection. What is absent from this image is the dynamic davening (rocking back and forth motion) accompanying traditional Jewish male prayer, and swarms of dancing ultra-orthodox Jews (including women) at weddings and other special occasions. There are also many rich dance traditions from other important strands of Judaism, such as Sephardic, Mizrahic, and Ethiopian, that have existed for centuries and continue to evolve in contemporary settings.
This essay and series of accompanying images emphasize that Jews could also be known as the “people of the body,” an observation made by renowned choreographer Liz Lerman. Most of the material accompanying this text is drawn from an exhibition I co-curated with Judith Brin Ingber held as part of an international conference in 2018 at Arizona State University, titled “Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World.” The exhibition featured two walls of panels, and three glass cases of artifacts, focusing on the breadth of the connections between dance and Jewish culture. Its purpose was to mirror and supplement the same range of the conference, which I also oversaw with the collaboration of Liz Lerman, with its over 40 presentations, performances, and other special events.
As I observe in my introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance (2022), which followed the conference and contains many of its edited presentations, the term “Jewishness” is deployed for a very specific reason. The term “Jewishness” is used to refer to, as Rebecca Rossen has described it, “social meanings that have been historically ascribed to Jews and to Jewish bodies, behaviors, and cultural productions, or that Jews attribute to themselves.” It is a concept that arose in dance studies at the turn of the twenty-first century to suggest that there is no single set of distinct, trans-historical, universal characteristics that make a dance Jewish or not Jewish. The concept implies, instead, connections with Jewish identity or experiences as relative to times and places, and within specific socio-political-economic conditions. Research in dance since this time has focused on, as Hannah Kosstrin explains, the “ways in which Jewishness is marked upon and performed through the body within the geographical and political boundaries of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora.”
The word “Jewish,” then, is also employed here in a similar non-essentializing manner to “describe an ethnic, cultural, and sometimes racial identity, a descriptor for people who self-identify or have been identified as Jews, and a repertory of images, practices, beliefs, and rituals that are used to represent Jewishness, Judaism, or Jews.” In this sense, “Jewish” and “Jewishness” are differentiated from “Judaism,” which refers to specifically religious practices and beliefs. In other words, although a traditional religious identification is recognized as playing an important role in Jewish history, culture, and artwork, it is also not assumed as the basis for a dance to be considered Jewish; indeed, many secular Jews are recognized as creating dances through which they have expressed their Jewishness—or on which Jewishness has been bestowed externally, whether intentionally or not.
These points are especially relevant as they relate to a rich heritage of dancing by Jews that: 1) challenges tyranny, injustice, and discrimination, and 2) advocates for healing individuals and communities, especially as it connects to the notion of Tikkun Olam (“repairing the world”). Many of the individuals involved in these activities are largely secular, nor is there any single set of movements or approaches that they all share. Rather the important role of Jews in creating dances addressing discrimination and injustice—as well as in developing movement systems and choreography that focus on healing—reveals that these activities in and of themselves have been important ways that certain Jews have expressed their Jewishness, whether consciously or not, especially in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What follows, then, is a glimpse of some famous figures involved in these actions of resistance and healing though dance and movement.
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One of the most active periods of dance as a rejection of oppression is the 1930s in the realm of modern dance. In Europe, a key figure was Gertrud Kraus (1901–1977), a pioneer dancer and choreographer who created in the style of expressionist dance (example 1). Her career began in Vienna during the 1920s, and she performed her solo and group recitals throughout Central Europe, becoming a prominent modern dance artist. One of her students was Fred Berk (1911–1980), who won a bronze medal at Vienna’s International Dance Competition in 1934 at the age of 23. His solo The Tyrant (example 2) was a social statement about Hitler, although he couched his criticism in universal terms by making the central figure of his dance Pharaoh. While Kraus ended up escaping the Nazis by emigrating to British Mandate Palestine in 1935, Berk eventually settled in the United States in 1941, contributing greatly to the growth of what he termed “Jewish Dance” through various programs at the 92nd Street Y and elsewhere. For him, Jewish Dance involved a conscious engagement of traditional themes from Jewish rituals and daily life, and later focused on Israeli folk dance.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the 1930s saw a shift in modern dance away from the styles popularized by Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis as it became focused on political and social injustice. Many involved in this movement were young Eastern European female immigrants of Jewish background. As one such dancer, Miriam Blecher (1912–1979), observed, “in our dances, we do not chase a butterfly across the stage.” Blecher was a co-founder of the New Dance Group, which was created “for the purpose of developing and creating group and mass dances expressive of the working class and its revolutionary upsurge.” The group created pieces like Strike, Hunger, and Parasite, and performed at rallies and marched during protests. Blecher’s Van der Lubbe’s Head (example 3) was an anti-Nazi work. It focused on the beheading of Marinus van der Lubbe after he was blamed for the Reichstag fire which later was used to eliminate the Communist Party and for the Nazis to gain full power. The work was set to a poem written by Alfred Hayes and was praised for transcending the more typical agitprop that had characterized the radical dancers and creating a truly unique and new form of artistic expression in political dance.
During the 1950s and through the 1970s, a new group of dancers with Jewish roots dominated the post-modern dance movement with their radical questioning of ballet and traditional modern dance. One of its main leaders was Anna Halprin (1920–2021), the Jewish daughter of Eastern European refugees, who had an unwavering belief in the moral capacity of dance to transform human society and effect social change. From World War II through the civil rights, anti-war, and climate justice movements, she drew on Jewish influences garnered during her undergraduate experience from Rabbi Max Kadushin and Justice Louis Brandeis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that emphasized public advocacy, social justice, and individual freedom. Her one hundred-page undergraduate thesis, completed in 1942, was titled “Hebrews: A Dancing People: The Historical Development of Jewish Dance,” demonstrating that, although many of her works did not appear to explicitly address Jewish themes, the philosophy driving them was heavily rooted in research and Jewish influences from her family and college education.
In the late 1940s, she and her husband Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009), an environmental architect, settled on the West Coast where their house had an outside deck. There dancers could explore their relation to nature and improvisation along with the creation of socially aware dances. One of these was Blank Placard Dance (example 4) originally performed in 1967 in San Francisco in reaction to the Vietnam War and social unrest in America. It is a silent walk performed by some twenty dancers (at that time, those of the San Francisco Dancers Workshop, the group Anna Halprin founded) carrying blank placards and silently marching down the busy streets of the city. When people asked, “What are you protesting?”, the marchers answered, “What do YOU want to protest?” and collected their answers.
Meanwhile, in Russia, the Jewish ballet choreographer Leonid Yacobson (1904–1975), whose career spanned the 1920s to the 1970s, constantly struggled to stage his ballets during the Soviet era. They were often controversial, and he was either censored or banned from the major companies because of the unique style and content of his work, as well as anti-Semitism. His most controversial work was the 1970 Jewish Wedding (example 5) set to music by Dmitri Shostakovich. It demonstrated his minority cultural identity by creating a choreographic style that opposed the dominant method of Socialist Realism and the choice of a Jewish subject. The piece eluded the government censors, who did not realize that the bride and the impoverished beloved represented the suffering Jewish community in the Soviet Union.
Recently, with the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States, Jewish dancers have begun to take impromptu steps to draw attention to problems of memorials in Austria and Germany to commemorate the history of the Jews who were decimated in the area. In the summer of 2017, the American Yehuda Hyman performed Jew in the Pool (example 6) in a shallow pool installed over the site of a synagogue in Freiberg, Germany, that was destroyed in 1938 during Kristallnacht. Local members of the community and tourists had taken to using it as a wading pool in which to frolic. Hyman wore his bar mitzvah tallit and a Jewish star painted on his back in a serious and passionate improvised dance of protest against the frivolity he observed in a place intended for reflection and remembrance.
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On the other side of dance and its engagement as a means of rejecting oppression is the work that has been done regarding healing of individuals and communities. The exhibition in 2018 focused on efforts in the United States and Canada. This included Jewish individuals who have developed unique systems of individual healing that have gained worldwide recognition. It also covers the unique role of many American Jews in the evolution of the formal practice titled dance/movement therapy (DMT), and, finally, it discusses well-known choreographers who have done extensive community building with mixed populations.
One of the best-known developers of his own mind/body movement modality was Moshé Feldenkrais (1904–1984). He was a Ukrainian-Israeli engineer who founded the Feldenkrais Method, intended to improve quality of life through gentle exercises and manipulation of the body. Feldenkrais’ theory is that “thought, feeling, perception and movement are closely interrelated and influence each other.” He developed the method as a form of self-healing after suffering a soccer injury during his mid-twenties. He studied Ju-Jitsu and judo, the latter scientifically, along with the body/mind practices of others at the time interested in forms of healing such as Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869–1955), developer of the Alexander technique (example 7).
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (example 8) is another pioneer and leader in the field of somatics (a field within bodywork which emphasizes internal perception and experience of movement for health and self-empowerment purposes). She is known for developing Body-Mind Centering® which is an extensive training method in a mind/body approach to movement. She graduated from Ohio State University in Occupational Therapy in 1963 and went on to study dance therapy, neuromuscular reeducation, Neurodevelopmental Therapy, and Laban Movement Analysis. She also danced from a young age with a close connection to the work of Erik Hawkins. She has described the Body-Mind Centering® approach to embodied movement and consciousness as an “ongoing journey in the alive and changing territory of the body.”
In the area of DMT, an exceptional number of the early generation of dance therapists in the United States have been Jewish. The majority of the first generation of leading dance therapists, who began working in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s had Jewish backgrounds, although those were diverse in nature from observant to anti-religious. Regardless, two of the common themes that come up repeatedly are the framing of their dance therapy work as a spiritual or mystical practice and healing art, and through the Jewish language of Tikkun Olam. Through this latter frame, these women describe their work as helping people who are suffering, ill, disabled, or experiencing painful emotions, and link it to a larger Jewish project of fighting for social justice and social change.
For example, Donna Newman-Bluestein (example 9) is a dance/movement therapist and founder of Dance for Connection. She has extensive experience spreading the joy of movement to a variety of populations from ages 3 to 109, including those in Jewish nursing facilities of various kinds. These include cognitively impaired seniors, children with physical disabilities, and those who live with mental illness, chronic pain, and coronary artery disease. She has been doing this work since 1978, though, since 2002, her focus has been on the culture of care through dance and embodied expression for people with dementia.
Halprin was not only a major innovator in the theatrical realm, but a founder of the expressive arts movement which centered movement and dance as a mode of healing, especially of communities. Over her long career, she worked with people with HIV, the elderly, and with those striving to reclaim connections to the environment. One of her famous projects, In and On the Mountain (1981), was a two-day event that confronted a major community issue—reclaiming Mt. Tamalpais from the grip of a murderer stalking the mountain’s trails (he was later caught). The dance continued for five years every spring, each time “deepening participants’ understanding and expanding their vision.” In 1985, the dance was renamed Circle the Earth. Where participants had once danced to reclaim a small measure of peace on the mountain, they now danced to restore health and peace to the planet. People from countries worldwide came to participate—helping the dance live up to its name—circling the Earth. People around the globe wanted to share in Circle the Earth, and so it was simplified to “Planetary Dance” (example 10), which is built around one of the sections from Circle the Earth. People are invited to choose a local theme and add their own preparation and their own reflection. The Planetary Dance continues to engage communities throughout the world, from the Americas to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.
Judith Marcuse (example 11) is a driving force in Canada for the arts as a means of social change. Marcuse comes from a tradition of social activism, growing up in Montreal with parents who were deeply involved in the peace movement. Marcuse has been a dancer, choreographer, and producer, with her own company from 1980 to the mid-1990s. For the last two decades, her work has focused on community-engaged art for social change (ASC). Under her guidance, a six-year national research study (2013–2019) was conducted of community-engaged art, involving six universities, fifty researchers, and creation of a website as a global resource for the sector.
My co-organizer of the 2018 conference, Liz Lerman, is also a choreographer who embraces the value of community-engaged, intergenerational dance/movement as well as theatrical performances. For her, these exist on a horizontal continuum, where neither is superior or inferior. She has worked in hospitals and Jewish communities among other locations across her long career. Lerman has also led workshops in synagogues, such as the Dance of Worship movement workshop at Temple Micah, in Washington, D.C.
In 1998, Lerman and her then-company the Dance Exchange developed “Moving Jewish Communities: A Training Initiative for Jewish Artists,” a week-long workshop held at the Dance Exchange’s Takoma Park studio to instruct Jewish artists in methods of bringing creative work to Jewish communal organizations, synagogues, Hebrew schools, and Sisterhoods, to name a few. Lerman’s work and her methods were intended to reinvigorate Jewish communities. Part of the workshop involved dancing in the sanctuary, on the pulpit, in the hallways, and galleries of synagogues. Dr. Ron Wolfson, vice president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, said of the workshop:
Liz is able to make people comfortable with the idea that movement is a possibility and she expresses it in a non-threatening way to people who have never believed they could move… What better way to be moved than through dance? Personally my prayer experience has been changed forever.
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Conclusion
As demonstrated by this essay and its accompanying images, there is no such thing as monolithic “Jewish dance.” The dance styles represented vary from modern dance to ballet to pedestrian movement, as do the choreographic approaches, from highly structured to improvised. Rather, it is the intention and subject matter that is significant. Since the 1930s, Jews in Europe, Israel, Russia, and the United States have created dances that challenge anti-Semitism and discrimination and involve healing of individuals and communities.
Though many of the individuals discussed here were/are not particularly religious, their activities form a larger pattern of action that connects them as expressions of Jewishness, even when not explicit. Research suggests that these tendencies stem from conditions of persecution, love of debate, and Jewish values. In this way, dance and movement have become important ways Jews have embodied their values that can be extremely powerful, especially for those whose knowledge of Jewish history, philosophy, and culture have been founded in words and verbal arguments. The hope is that this brief look into dance/movement will inspire readers to further research the topic of the convergence of dance, Jewish culture, and identity.
Epilogue
Perhaps the most radically challenging and healing approaches to dance are those that result from profound shifts in a person’s personal relation to their Jewish identity. One of the individuals who presented her work at the 2018 conference, along with her husband, is an example of this. Efrat Nehama (example 12) is a dancer and poet who grew up in a highly observant household in Israel.
Through her exposure to dance as an artform and then as an independent dance maker, she and her husband have challenged traditional texts and attitudes towards women and women’s bodies that preach modesty and restriction. Her personal statement, made in the pages of The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, provides a moving example of the potential of dance to become meaningful within a Jewish spiritual context. What follows is an excerpt from her essay “My Body is My Torah”:
I always clung to my body as one holds close to a secret. The body was to be concealed and covered up, to be protected and kept modest, as were speech, thought and expression. The small window that opened for me as I matured led me to the world of dance, to finding a connection to the body, to exploration and discovery, to a feeling of home. I think that without dance, I would not be able to grasp and reconcile with my Jewish identity, or with my identity as a woman. The simplicity of being who I am without fearing myself is, for me, my connection to freedom. It is an infinite internal liberty. To be, to breathe, to write and erase material, to put together a reality for myself. To connect with God. To be in control. Physical discovery is a conversation with reality, a tool for communicating with man and with the Creator. It is an ongoing testing of boundaries. The formation of a bridge in one’s consciousness. An agreement to change. Dance is, for me, a tool for reinterpreting ancient texts that in my childhood were passed on to me as though they could only be interpreted in one way. Through physical study of ancient Jewish sources, I feel I am able to connect anew to the foundations out of which I was built, to give them new interpretation, and instead of hacking at the roots, I am able to embrace and be merciful toward the hidden richness that is contained in those texts.
