In Dani Rosenberg's 2008 film Bet Avi (Homeland), two men's distinct ways of embodying Jewishness at a desert outpost during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War/Israeli War for Independence define the early–mid-twentieth century cultivated physical differences between Jews in the Yishuv (ancestral Land of Israel in Palestine) and in the Diaspora. One, the Commander, a Hebrew soldier, is shirtless, sun-kissed, and tough. The other, Lolek, a Holocaust escapee who stumbles upon this outpost while searching for his wife's family, is pale, physically and emotionally weak, and out of place in the desert in his button-down shirt and slacks. These men represent the ideologies associated with the divergent physiques of the effeminized Jewish European man versus the tough, masculine New Jew of Hebrew-Israeli creation. The camera's glimpse of the number tattooed on the Commander's arm shows that he, like Lolek, is a Holocaust survivor who ostensibly arrived in the Yishuv pale and speaking Yiddish instead of Hebrew. The soldier tells Lolek that no one will know where he is from once he learns Hebrew and gets into top physical shape. This scene shows how the Yishuv transformed pale galut men (Diaspora; here, Eastern European) into suntanned, masculine New Jews ready to leave behind the anti-Semitism, pain of persecution, and weaknesses associated with the European Diaspora.

Two recent publications in the growing literature of Jewish dance studies address this contrast and other ways in which Jewishness is marked upon and performed through the body within the geographical and political boundaries of Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. In her monograph, Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics, and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine, Nina S. Spiegel argues that physical culture and dance defined Hebrew identity and built Hebrew nationalism in British Mandate Palestine (1917–1948).Footnote ¹ Judith Brin Ingber also engages Jewish identity in her anthology Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, in which she brings together eighteen essays that focus on Jewish dance, identity, and culture across countries and centuries.Footnote ²

Rosenberg's film introduces a common conception of Europe as the Diasporic half of a binary between Israel and the Jewish Diaspora. The Spiegel and Ingber books add nuance to this discussion by attending to the complexities of myriad Jewish regions in and outside Israel. Spiegel focuses on Jewish nationalism as part of Yishuv traditions, addressing the struggles between East and West among Jews of Ashkenazic (European), Sephardic (Spanish/Mediterranean), and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) descent displayed through dance and physical culture events. In doing so, she challenges a teleological narrative of building Israeli nationalism via components of imagined community (see Anderson Reference Anderson1983). Ingber's anthology includes dance from many traditions in and outside the geographical region of Israel. The essays address how folk and theatrical dance in Israel and the Diaspora manifest Jewishness, as well as ethnic and racial difference among Jews. Spiegel and Ingber follow Jewish studies literature that argues for embodied ways of being Jewish and the centrality of physicality to Jewish Diasporic and Israeli culture (see, among others, Eilberg-Schwartz Reference Eilberg-Schwartz1992; Moore and Troen Reference Moore and Troen2001). At the same time, they build on dance studies literature that investigates Jewish and Israeli choreography while highlighting how these themes play out in social, traditional, and theatrical dance (Galili Reference Galili2012; Graff Reference Graff1997; Jackson Reference Jackson2000; Ross Reference Ross2007).

In Embodying Hebrew Culture, Spiegel organizes her historiographic study around four sets of events that defined Hebrew physicality through what she calls “the development of a national public culture”: Purim beauty pageants from 1926–1929; the 1932 Maccabiah Games (“Jewish Olympics”); the 1937 theatrical, concert dance-based National Dance Competition; and folk dance festivals at Kibbutz Dalia in 1944 and 1947 (4). The first three events took place in the Tel Aviv metropolis, while the Dalia Festivals occurred in the rural area of socialist kibbutzim (agricultural collectives). Spiegel's impeccable archival work, with the majority of her primary sources in Hebrew, shows how physical culture was central to building Hebrew nationalism and a sense of Israeli identity in Mandate Palestine. Spiegel's analysis of physical culture, incorporating the values of the New Jew, relies as much on visual as written material. These sources include a 1930s Jewish National Fund propaganda poster that announces triumphantly “A Nation Reborn on Its Ancestral Soil,” and features a healthy, muscular worker rolling up his sleeve as he prepares to toil the rich fields behind him (10). In addition to building a prominent public culture through physical competitions valuing beauty, strength, and artistry (that went against socialist Zionist values of unity), as well as folk dance festivals that celebrated community, these events revealed binary conflicts in Hebrew society that Spiegel notes defined contemporary Israeli culture.

The negotiation of opposing tensions is endemic to Jewish culture and emerges in many aspects of Yishuv dance and physical culture.Footnote ³ These conflicts in turn created an aesthetics that came to define the Israeli nation. The nature of competitions, for example, went against the founding ideology of socialist Zionism, because they introduced a class divide, heightened one winner over the group, and, in the case of the beauty pageants, treated women as objects instead of subjects (38). Spiegel defines further tensions within the Jewish community to include an old/new dichotomy, in which “the desire to be both ancient and modern simultaneously” resulted in clashes among religious and secular factions of the Jewish community (12–13). This tension between ancient and modern generated the invented traditions on which Hebrew cultural mores in the Mandate were based (see Hobsbawm Reference Hobsbawm, Hobsbawm and Ranger1983). A friction between socialist versus bourgeois sensibilities, which traced similar lines as those in revolutionary dance and modern dance in the U.S. during the 1930s (see Graff Reference Graff1997, 10–13), was, as Spiegel asserts, “connected to tensions between the communal and the individual and between the rural and the urban.” This also challenged the hierarchy of so-called high art in opposition to the collective unity valued in socialist Zionism (18). A strain between East versus West, in which the European-dominant Yishuv Jewish community struggled to incorporate the non-Western elements of Sephardic and Mizrahi culture into a larger Hebrew cultural whole that ideally represented all Jews, pervaded the Hebrew community. Finally, a tension of celebration versus sorrow, which negotiated a history of Jewish trauma at the hands of oppressors (with the Holocaust an immediate reference point) versus the desire to celebrate the new Hebrew society, was also present (19). These tensions led to what Spiegel terms aesthetics of togetherness, fusion, toughness, and defiance that created a Hebrew embodiment and continues to define an Israeli sense of being (177–81). These conclusions come together in Spiegel's final analysis in which she addresses the complications of a contemporary Israeli society that has undergone increased Westernization and globalization while retaining these underlying conflicts.

Spiegel's third and fourth chapters address the 1937 National Dance Competition in Tel Aviv and the 1944 and 1947 Dalia Festivals at Kibbutz Dalia. These dance events provide avenues for understanding how the tensions between East and West, socialist and bourgeois, religious and secular, and old and new play out on a national stage while revealing complex divides within the Mandate Jewish community. Many choreographers in the dance competition trained in German expressive dance or ballet; those who did not, or were steeped in Yemenite or other non-Western traditions, found themselves at the mercy of critics who labeled their dance ethnic or low art. Yet within the resultant aesthetic of fusion, all choreographers strove to avoid seeming too European or too Eastern, as they worked toward a theatrical dance that appeared, as Spiegel notes, “both authentic and original” (97–8). The clashes between religious and secular interests come to a head most compellingly in Siegel's explanation of the 1947 Sabbath controversy regarding the Dalia Festival. Here, the two head Yishuv Orthodox rabbis and representatives of the religious-political party, Mizrahi, criticized the Dalia Festival for holding secular dancing festivities on the Sabbath (162–72). This event drives home the struggle between those who would decide what Jewish way of life, Orthodoxy or secularism, would prevail in the Yishuv. It placed the dancing bodies of the New Jews at the center of the controversy and called into question the very nature of a reinvented Jewish physical culture.

In Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, Ingber brings together previously published and updated pieces along with new essays to address a wide range of issues relating to Jewishness in dance. The volume includes revised essays from the Jewish Dance issue of the Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review (2000), the Jewish Wedding Dances issue of Dance Research Journal (1985/1986), and the Shorashim volume of Dance Perspectives (1974), which Ingber initially edited, along with new essays by additional contributors. The collection of all these articles in one place, coupled with a detailed glossary of terms, makes this volume a valuable resource. While the anthology is not encyclopedic, it offers a broad examination of Jewish dance in Israel and throughout many regions of the Diaspora.

Reading through the volume, one can see the journey and development of dance in myriad Jewish communities and theatrical contexts across many points on the globe and through generations. Compelling visual elements are hallmarks of the essays, from evocative movement description to 182 detailed images from public and private archives in locations including Tel Aviv, Sarajevo, Rome, New York, and Buenos Aires. The anthology weaves back and forth between traditional dances and dances for the stage—and dances for the stage based on traditions—in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe, Israel and the Middle East, North Africa, and North and South America. Ingber organizes the essays under section titles that highlight individual twentieth-century choreographers, changing traditions within the Yishuv and Israel, moments in European history, contemporary Hasidic dance and Israeli folk dance in international contexts, and theoretical pieces about Jewishness in American and Israeli theatrical dance.

Some essays in Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance are in dialogue with Spiegel's study in terms of Jewish nationalism. Many essays go beyond Israel into the Diaspora, and pose larger questions of how Jewishness manifests broadly in theatrical, folk, and social dance, and what dancing can tell us about being Jewish. Jewish learning is based on the act of asking questions. Ingber places this tenet of Jewish culture at the heart of the anthology when she layers question upon question to open points for discussion. She begins with a central inquiry: “Who are the Jews dancing, and how does dance enhance Judaism and Jewish identity?” She responds that the anthology's contributors “in classic Talmudic fashion, answer those questions by asking others” (1). Ingber raises questions that have surfaced in panels about Jewishness in dance at conferences and are now making their way into print: “What, then, makes dance Jewish? Does the word Jewish pertain to the dancers, the choreographer, the purpose and content of the dance, or the places and circumstances in which it is performed?” (5).

The essays show the overlap and cross-influence of Jews in the Diaspora. They show, too, how the dancing took on characteristics of the parent culture, from Yemen to Kurdistan, Morocco to Russia, and Europe to the Americas. Some, such as Ayala Goren-Kadman's “Feet on the Ground: Experiencing Kurdish Jews through their Dance,” Dawn Lille's “Ethiopians in Israel: Their History and Their Dance from Ethnic to Contemporary,” and Sara Levi-Tanai's “From Street Urchin to International Acclaim: A Personal Testimony,” highlight Jewish ethnic minorities within Israel and their negotiations of Ethiopian or Yemenite traditions within a Europeanist concert dance frame.

One of the most poignant essays is Ingber's own, “Vilified or Glorified? Nazi Versus Zionist Views of the Jewish Body.” In it, she discusses how two groups of Jews, Yishuv dancers who performed Israeli folk dance for Holocaust survivors in a 1947 tour of European displaced persons camps, and those refugees in the audience, did not recognize each other as Jews across their physical, experiential divides. Ingber's heart-wrenching discussion of the disconnected kinship between these two groups of Jews brings the body differences of the galut and the New Jew visualized in Bet Avi, and the divergent life experiences of Jews in Europe and Palestine during World War II, into stark relief. These people may have had similar geographical origins in Europe, but due to their recent locations via voluntary or forced migration, some were sun-kissed and vibrant while others bore the decrepit physicalities of persecution.

In his deeply moving short essay “Three Hasidic Dances: A Personal Journey,” Yehuda Hyman articulates his discovery of a generations-old body knowledge he found in three experiences with Hasidic dance spread over thirty years: one, from his father who had never spoken of his dancing or other experiences before the Holocaust; two, from an internationally known klezmer musician; and three, in a Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to Odessa, Ukraine. Hyman articulates how Hasidic dancing became a way of discovering himself, his family history, and his Jewishness, even though Hasidism was far from his own lived experience as a secular American Jew.

Additional essays address thematic and aesthetic issues in concert dance in the U.S. and Israel. Naomi Jackson's “Searching for Movement Metaphors: Jewishness in American Modern and Postmodern Dance” traces religious, secular, and cultural Jewish themes in the work of choreographers such as Anna Sokolow, Meredith Monk, Liz Lerman, and David Dorfman. In “Naming It Jewish: The Dichotomy Between Jewish and Israeli Dance,” Gaby Aldor productively furthers this discussion by arguing that Jewish dance (which she defines as concert dance in the Diaspora) engages themes of uprootedness and memory that Israeli theatrical dance covers over due to the pain of the Holocaust, in favor of pushing forward in the New Jew spirit of progress and invention.

Spiegel and Ingber's two volumes articulate some of the most pressing contemporary questions relating to Jewish and Israeli dance. They show how dance and physical culture embody Jewishness, and how dance studies methodologies inform the ways in which we view elements of Jewish culture. Embodying Hebrew Culture provides an in-depth study of a specific time and place, while Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance offers a wide selection of historical and contemporary moments of knowing one's Jewishness through dance, or to borrow Rebecca Rossen's term, for dancing Jewish (Rossen Reference Rossen2014). Both books offer a level of discourse appropriate for advanced students and scholars, yet both are written accessibly for general audiences in dance and Jewish studies. These volumes fill a void in contemporary dance literature about Jewishness and pose openings for further studies to come.