“Jewishness is not a matter of essences,” Rebecca Rossen argues, “but rather a repertory of images, themes, and frames that signify ‘Jewish’” (3). With this claim, Rossen situates her new book boldly within an exciting new wave of dance scholarship that is exploring the intersections between movement and Jewish identity. Writers such as Hannah Kosstrin (Reference Kosstrin2011), Dina Roginsky (Reference Roginsky2006), Janice Ross (Reference Ross2015), Nina Spiegel (Reference Spiegel2013), Henia Rottenberg (Reference Rottenberg2004), and Hannah Schwadron (Reference Schwadron2013) are some of the predominantly female voices shaping this new discourse. They are interested in shifting the discussion away, as Rossen states it, from a traditional question of “what is Jewish dance?”—which suggests a static, fixed, universal, trans-historical response—to the question of what it means to be perceived as “dancing Jewish.” For Rossen, this move entails considering the “artistic, ideological, political, and racial implications of this term over time” (3), and recognizing that it “embraces the fluidity and complexity of Jewish identity” (2).
The importance of shifting the focus of dance studies in this arena cannot be over-emphasized. For much of the twentieth century, choreographers and writers on dance such as Benjamin Zemach (Reference Zemach and Berk1972), Fred Berk (Reference Berk1975), Felix Fibich, Hadassah, Naum Rosen (Reference Rosen1934), and Pearl Lang, who related to Jewish culture, seemed intent to distill quintessential gestures, body postures, and themes that mark “Jewish dance.” Such gestures included rocking backward and forward, as if in devout prayer, stroking one's beard like a Chassid deep in thought, or raising one's arms up high in joyous celebration of the Sabbath. Body postures embraced asymmetry, with the upper body reaching upward, and the lower body pulling down with bent knees, toward the ground. Themes were drawn from a select number of sources: the Bible, Eastern European life in the shtetl, working the land on the kibbutzim in Palestine, or the Holocaust. These were the parameters drawn by Jewish choreographers and writers of “Jewish dance,” and they negated not only the complexity and variety of actual lived Jewish experience, but limited what could be achieved creatively by choreographers working with this material.
Rossen's perspective provides a more richly nuanced understanding of what many older, as well as more recent, Jewish choreographers and dancers have undertaken, by recognizing their efforts as part of a broader project to affirm the “significance of dance and dancing bodies to the formation of American Jewish identity” (2). It is within a duet between the “Americanization of Jews and the Jewification of American culture” (6) that Rossen deftly traces how her subjects historically and more currently achieve(d) their significance. By recognizing “dancing Jewish” as a complex, constructed act, she is able to illustrate how inventively Jewish dancers and choreographers have used the concert stage as a “site for building multifarious identities and have attempted to dance a balance between seemingly conflicting positions—American and foreigner, insider and outsider, white and off-white, masculine and feminine, modern and traditional—achieving an impression of solidity while in constant flux” (3).
Indeed, the 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. This is in large part because of the two other choreographed movements that accompany the written text and exist in confluence with it. One of these is a meticulously compiled companion website of video clips and photographs that accompanies the book and provides valuable visual illustrations of her written analyses of rare dance works. The other is a dance piece Rossen herself conceived and performed, titled Make Me a Jewish Dance, as she was conducting her research. This thirty-minute work was created in collaboration with postmodern choreographers Dan Froot and Victoria Marks. Rossen performed it on a variety of stages between 2000 and 2005. David Dorfman also performed the piece for a concert produced by the Society of Dance History Scholars in 2005 when Rossen was pregnant and restricted from dancing. Rossen references Make Me a Jewish Dance in a written Prelude, Entr'acte, and Curtain Call. Two main “Acts” comprise the five-chapter body of the book, thereby making it part of a broader performative gesture on Rossen's part. This is a compelling feature of other recent Jewish dancer-scholars, such as Hannah Schwadron, who is equally at home on the stage and on the page in her complex rendering of Jewish experience.
As an embodied dancer scholar, Rossen very self-consciously approaches her subject matter. It is with her own body, as much as through the bodies of the women and men she writes about, that she challenges the stereotypical image of Jews as “people of the book,” in order to illuminate the multiple ways in which throughout the twentieth, and into the twenty-first centuries, Jewish dancers have tackled themes of immigration, assimilation, the Holocaust, and Israel. As Rossen stresses (and what is so appealing about this book), she is interested in “connections” rather than “differences” in how different generations have reused or reinterpreted common themes (14). As such she tackles the topic of Jewishness and dance in America in a manner that is at once thoughtful, reflexively humorous, politically progressive, community-oriented, and deeply embodied—reflecting the qualities of many of the individuals she discusses.
Given that she is a Jewish feminist dancer and scholar, it is not surprising that the first major topic that Rossen tackles is how specific female Jewish choreographers explored their ethnicity, especially through “Hasidic drag.” This is the term Rossen uses to discuss the ways certain women (in a tradition running from Molly Picon to Barbra Streisand) assumed the guise of a religious male Jewish character, or reference ritual practices of male Eastern European Jewry, in their choreography. In her deeply perceptive analysis of the works of Pauline Koner, Dvora Lapson, and Hadassah, along with Anna Sokolow and Pearl Lang, Rossen reveals that while they replicated certain stereotypes, they also importantly critiqued the “limited roles that females could play in both Jewish and American spheres” (14). As she rightly demonstrates, these women offered images of Jewish women as complex and multifaceted; later in the book, postmodern choreographers like Victoria Marks and Liz Lerman are discussed as part of this reformist tradition, albeit bringing a more blatant and sharply critical examination of organized Judaism and their relation to it as women and artists.
Rossen also considers individual perspectives of male dancers and performers in the third chapter of Act One, “The Jewish Man and His Dancing Shtick.” Here she focuses on the ways Benajmin Zemach, David Gordon, Dorfman, and Froot “have encoded and deconstructed particular stereotypes about Jewish men through the tradition of Jewish stock characterization and physical comedy” (15). Her close readings of their work trace the ways in which they address stock types such as the beggar, rabbi, and Jewish businessman. In particular, she considers how they utilize humor to “comment on marginalization, identity, relationships, the past, and performance itself” (96). Again, her insightful inquiry and clear writing elucidate a body of work—such as the brilliant Froot and Dorfman piece Shtuck—that is rarely addressed in dance scholarship, demonstrating just how important it is to the evolution of American modern dance as well as to our understandings of Jewish American ideas of masculinity.
Individual expressions of Jewishness populate the first part of the book, while Act Two addresses themes of “collective memory, history, migration, family, and politics” (15). Two chapters comprise this section: one addressing how Jewish community has been conceived by certain choreographers in “Dancing Folk: Jewish Memory and Amnesia,” and the other, considering relationships of American Jews to Israel, in “Dancing Zionism, Embodying Conflict.” These chapters recognize the ways in which Jewish American choreographers have variously striven to document, reclaim, commemorate, critique, and challenge their Jewishness. Rossen is particularly bold and courageous in her willingness to illustrate cases where there is not only a spirit of celebration, but also confusion, discomfort, and frustration, again acknowledging just how important shifts in postmodern dance and contemporary dance studies have been to opening spaces for more varied perspectives of Jewish identity in the United States.
In the chapter on “Dancing Folk,” for instance, Rossen analyzes Sophie Maslow's The Village I Knew, Helen Tamiris' Memoir, Liz Lerman's The Good Jew, and Margaret Jenkins' Breathe Normally to explore how the ensembles “represented the community and dance functioned as a site for the (re)presentation and display of Jewish heritage and collective memory” (143). Rossen's personal experience performing in Breathe Normally, in particular, provides a powerful example of how she brings her embodied perspective to her subject matter, combining ethnography with performance analysis. Jenkins is a prominent, but rarely discussed, Bay Area choreographer, whose work deserves closer academic attention. In her rich analysis of this work, Rossen examines its conflicted themes of personal versus collective history, continuity and loss, remembering and forgetting, to demonstrate just how much “Jewishness infused this full-evening work” (178).
Consideration of the conflicted nature of Jewish American identity extends from time to place when Rossen addresses the ways American Jewish choreographers have “consistently created works that embody, and sometimes critique, the shifting role of Zionism and Israel in American Jewish life” (190). In this fifth chapter, Rossen examines the extent to which choreographers such as Lapson supported Jewish nationalism, and how the symbolism found in Maslow's spectacles for the Annual Chanukah Festivals for Israel Bonds, from 1951 to 1970 at Madison Square Garden, “underscored the role of American Jews as the new state's chief benefactors” (191). Rossen proceeds to consider Lerman's disconnected feelings about Israel in Fifty Modest Reflections on Turning Fifty, and then Attempts, a 2002 duet by Kristen Smiarowski and Tom Young that strove to present opposing viewpoints on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict “while deftly communicating their ambivalence about whether or not they had a right to take a stand” (231).
Given the generous, yet radically questioning spirit of Rossen's perspective, it is rewarding that she concludes her book with a rigorous questioning of the Foundation of Jewish Culture's choice in 2004 to commission Paul Taylor to make a major work to commemorate the achievement of the Jewish community over 350 years. Resonating the deeper message of this beautifully written and meticulously researched book, Rossen illuminates just how limiting this move was, not so much in the choice to have a non-Jew choreograph the dance, but by selecting someone who created a piece so reactionary in its sentimental, folksy imagery, when so many richly layered voices and bodies are “dancing Jewish” in ways that more profoundly portray the multiple points of view that make up American life.
