Rebecca Rossen notes that, like ‘acrobats’, Jews move through history (p. 3). Rossen's unexpected analogy challenges historians’ tendency to prioritize Jewish intellect, frames Jewish identity as a liminal balancing act, and resonates with dance studies methodologies. Dancing Jewish, Rossen's first monograph, inserts Jewish bodies into American-Jewish history and modern and postmodern dance scholarship. To investigate choreographic constructions of American Jewish identity from the late 1920s to the present, Rossen analyses a vast performance repertory and destabilizes the boundaries between modern dance and physical theatre, considering wide-ranging representations and interpretations of secular and Ashkenazic Jewishness. By means of embodied scholarship, or the use of performance training to address archival absences, Rossen shows how choreographers engage with an embodied repertoire to signal and re-enact Jewish identity. In combination with a companion website, Rossen strategically pairs performance scholarship with practice to ‘make research dance’ (p. 13).
Structurally, Dancing Jewish balances historical analysis with an insider's reflections. Following the Introduction, a Prelude acquaints the reader with a collaborative performance project during which Rossen invited an artist duo to make her a ‘Jewish dance’. Two additional self-reflexive sections – an Entr'acte between the book's halves and a post-conclusion Curtain Call – offer insight into Rossen's experiences of dancing with and through the themes that her subjects address, such as bridging the folk with the modern, reimagining stock characters and negotiating the gendered expectations that Jewish and American cultures script. These analytic interludes underscore Rossen's claim that Jewishness is constructed, choreographed and performed.
Organized thematically, ‘Act I: Dancing the Jew(ess)’ traces how choreographers leverage Hasidic drag to reimagine Jewish ritual, defy categorization and forge hybrid identities. Next, Rossen compares stagings of biblical heroines to reveal how choreographers advocated for change in women's places in American and Jewish spheres, and to show how the figure of the exotic Jewess moved from ‘ethnic type to archetype’ (p. 63). The end of Act I considers how male choreographers reinforce and transgress stereotypes to reveal the ‘art, or artifice’, of ethnic performance (p. 107).
‘Act II: Dancing Jewish’ transitions from the construction of individual bodies to the conception of shared identity, in light of experiences such as assimilation and exile. Rossen connects postmodern compositional strategies with the fluidity of collective memory. After analysing performances that invoke Eastern European folklore to understand the present, Rossen critiques dance's evolving representation of Israel's role in American-Jewish identity. The conclusion raises provocative questions about the identity politics of dancing Jewish; against the ‘Americanization of Jewish culture and the Jewification of American culture’, who can stage Jewishness, and what does Jewishness stage (p. 241)?
Dancing Jewish yields fruitful insights for continued research on the relationship between movement and meaning making in faith-based and secular settings. Across Jewish studies, dance studies and gender studies, scholars will benefit from considering the capacities of embodied analysis to respond to archival gaps and decentre dominant historical narratives.
