The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance

by Jackson, Naomi M.; Pappas, Rebecca; Shapiro-Phim, Toni

• ISBN13: 9780197519516
• ISBN10: 0197519512
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-11-30
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Responding to recent evolutions in the fields of dance and religious and secular studies, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance documents and celebrates the significant impact of Jewish identity on a variety of communities and the dance world writ large. Focusing on North America, Europe, and Israel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this Handbook highlights the sometimes surprising, often hidden and overlooked Jewish resonances within a range of styles from modern and postmodern dance to folk dance and flamenco. Privileging the historically marginalized voices of scholars, performers, and instructors the Handbook considers the powerful role of dance in addressing difference, such as between American and Israeli Jewish communities. In the process, contributors advocate values of social justice, like Tikkun Olam (repair of the world), debate, and humor, exploring the fascinating and potentially uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities that characterize this robust area of research.

Author Biography

Naomi M. Jackson is Associate Professor in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She is author or co-editor of Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights, and Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish
Culture at the 92nd Street Y.

Rebecca Pappas is Assistant Professor of Dance at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and Guest Faculty in the Masters in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis. She choreographs dances that address the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her work has toured nationally and
internationally, and she has received residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Clorox Foundation, and Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME).

Toni Shapiro-Phim is Associate Professor of Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation and Assistant Director of the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at Brandeis University. She is a cultural anthropologist and dance ethnologist whose research, writing, community work, and teaching focus
on the history and cultural contexts of the arts in discrete regions of the world, particularly in relation to violence, genocide, migration and refugees, conflict transformation, and gender concerns. Her first documentary film, Because of the War, premiered in 2018.

Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface
Liz Lerman

Introduction
Naomi M. Jackson


Part I: Honoring and Transforming Traditions

Chapter 1. Into the Light
Philip Szporer

Chapter 2. (Not Just) Az der rebbe tantst: Toward an Inclusive History of Hasidic Dance
Jill Gellerman

Chapter 3. Felix Fibich and Torqueing as a Central Motif in Modern Male Subjectivity
Naomi M. Jackson, Joel Gereboff, and Steven Weintraub

Chapter 4. Send Off
Jesse Zaritt

Chapter 5. From Victimized to Victorious: Re-Forming Post-Holocaust Jewish Embodied Identity through Dance
Gdalit Neuman

Chapter 6. Mapping a Mizrahi Presence in Israeli Concert Dance: Representations and Receptions of Yemenite Jewish Life on Stage from 1920 to the Present
Nina S. Spiegel

Chapter 7. From the Other Side: An Interview with Ethiopian-Israeli Dance Artist Dege Feder

Chapter 8. Believing Body, Dancing Body: Dance and Faith in the Religious Sector in Israel
Talia Perlshtein, Reuven Tabull, and Rachel Sagee

Chapter 9. My Body is Torah
Efrat Nehama

Chapter 10. Trance-forming the Nation: Trance-Dance Parties for Orthodox Singles in Israel Joshua Schmidt

Chapter 11. HaMapah/The Map: Navigating Intersections
Adam W. McKinney


Part II: Making the Invisible Visible

Chapter 12. I, You, We: Dancing Interconnections and Jewish Betweens
Hannah Schwadron and Victoria Marks

Chapter 13. Then in What Sense Are You a Jewish Artist? Conflicts of the ?Emancipated? Self
Marion Kant

Chapter 14. The Godseeker: Akim Volynsky and Ballet as a Jewish Quest
Liora Bing-Heidecker

Chapter 15. The Nearness of Judaism
Judith Chazin-Bennahum

Chapter 16. Raising Cain: Dancing the Ethics and Poetics of Diaspora Flamenco
K. Meira Goldberg

Chapter 17. Forbidden Movements and Degenerate Bodies: Personal Reflections on Black Social Dance and Jewish Resistance
Christi Jay Wells

Chapter 18. Reclaiming my Jewish Yemenite Heritage
Ze'eva Cohen

Chapter 19. It Was There All Along: Theorizing a Jewish Narrative of Dance and [Post-] Modernism
Douglas Rosenberg

Chapter 20. Anna Halprin's Radical Body: Ethics, Empowerment, and the Environment
Ninotchka Bennahum in Conversation with Anna Halprin

Chapter 21. Jewish Roots and Principles of Dance Therapy
Miriam Roskin Berger, Marsha Perlmutter Kalina, Johanna Climenko, and Joanna Gewertz Harris


Part III: Confronting Legacies

Chapter 22. The Micro-Gestures of Survival: Searching for the Lost Traces
Laure Guilbert

Chapter 23. Three Reflections on the Holocaust
Rebecca Pappas, Alexx Shilling, Yehuda Hyman, and Suzanne Miller

Chapter 24. Excavating Holocaust History: Site, Memory, and Community in Tamar Rogoff's Ivye Project
Rebecca Rossen

Chapter 25. Choreographing Livability after Oslo: Israeli Women Choreographers and Collective Responsibility
Melissa Melpignano

Chapter 26. The Cultural Politics of Practicing Israeli-ness in Gaga
Meghan Quinlan

Chapter 27. Arkadi Zaides - An Israeli Choreographer?
Dana Shalev

Chapter 28. Embodied Identification and Social Exchange: Israelis and American Jews Dancing in New York City
Dina Roginsky

Chapter 29. Unfixed Folk Dance: Community, Continuity, and Reinvention
Rebecca Pappas and Avia Moore

Chapter 30. Joy Vey: Choreographing A Radical Diasporic Israeliness
Hadar Ahuvia

Conclusion
Hannah Kosstrin

Glossary

Index