23069906

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah
Author(s): Rebecca Rossen

Source: Feminist Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, RACE AND TRANSGENDER STUDIES (Summer 2011), pp.
334-364
Published by: Feminist Studies, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23069906
Accessed: 25-01-2016 16:18 UTC
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/
info/about/policies/terms.jsp
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content
in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.
For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Feminist Studies, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Studies.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 198.91.32.137 on Mon, 25 Jan 2016 16:18:13 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Hasidic Drag:
Jewishness and Transvestism
in the Modern Dances of
Pauline Koner and Hadassah
Rebecca Rossen
On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S.
concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York Town Hall.

City's
For this who was Chassidic
occasion, Koner, Jewish, premiered Song and
in which the a young Hasidic
Dance, choreographer portrayed Jew.1 To a
certain extent, the folksy and mystical Chassidic Song and Dance was not so
different from the other dances that constituted Koner's in the

repertory
early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born
soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening

into a bouquet of foreign typesHindu Moorish Javanese
goddess, gypsy,
temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian
peasant girl. However, Chassidic Song and Dance offered one critical distinc
tion. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner female characters; in

portrayed
Chassidic Song and Dance, she presented herself as a boyin Jewish drag.
Koner was not the only female dancer in Jewish on
performing drag
New York stages in the 1920s and 1930s. In Bar Mitzvah(1929), Belle Didjah
depicted an Orthodox boy on the verge of manhood; YeshivaBachur(1932)

was one of several dances in which Dvora a Talmudic
Lapson portrayed
student; Benjamin Zemach, a male choreographer, adorned an ensemble
of Jewish women and men in Hasidic outfits for a 1931 concert; and Lillian
Shapero offered a more abstract rendition in her Hasidic Sketches (1936).
Jewish drag was also prevalent on U.S. and European Jewish stages and
FeministStudies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc.
334
Rebecca Rosseti 535
screens in the early-twentieth century. The Viennese choreographer

Gertrud Kraus cross-dressed in The Jewish Boy and Song of the Ghetto in the late
1920s and early 1930s, and Judith Berg danced in drag throughout Poland
in Menachem Mendel and Pilpul Tants in the years to World War II.2
leading up
The most famous female-to-male drag performer was Picon, an
Molly
influential figure in Yiddish theater and film who cross-dressed
frequently
in such Second Avenue hits as Yankele and the films Ost
stage (1922-1925)
und West(East and West; 1923) and Yidl mitnFidl (Yidl with His Fiddle; 1937),
presaging Barbra Streisand's Yeshiva "boy" in Yentl (1983). Feminist schol
ars working in Jewish cultural studies have discussed Picon's Jewish trans
vestism, but there are no studies that consider this substantial trend in
U.S. concert dance more broadly.3 Koner did not perform on

Although
Yiddish stages in Manhattan, of her did, that
many peers demonstrating
performers, choreography, and representational modes flowed sinuously

across town and genre. In these performances, of Jewishness
drag stagings
became entangled with choreographies of gender and nation, resulting in
ethnically ambiguous and androgynous figures who simultaneously

bolstered and evaded the frameworks that defined them.
The role of gender in the of Jewishness in U.S. modern dance

staging
cannot be underestimated. Indeed, Jewish American have
choreographers
not only struggled with the ethnic and racial histories that have been in
scribed on their bodies but also with their gendered histories.1 When
choreographers such as Koner staged Jewishness, they inevitably staged
gender as well.
This article considers the provocative intermingling of gender,
Jewishness, and embodiment in U.S. modern dance the interwar

during
and immediate postwar years in the dance works of Koner and the Pales
tinian-born Hadassah, who, like Koner, perpetuated, and even capitalized

on, an exotic persona. However, in Hadassah's 1947 signature work, Shuvi
Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul),5 she replaced with cross

cross-dressing
gesturing. Instead of presenting Jewish this dances

drag, choreographer's
effectively appropriated and recontextualized ritual gestures restricted to
Jewish men. Both Koner and Hadassah undeniably reproduced certain
stereotypes about the East and Eastern European Jews. Nonetheless, their
ethnic (and gestural) transvestism essentialist notions of

challenged
336 Rebecca Rossen
gender and ethnicity and, in Hadassah's case, dramatically undermined
the androcentrism of traditional Judaism.

To a certain degree, this article aims to coalesce feminist studies,
Jewish cultural studies, and dance studies in order to more fully investi
the abundant in which discourses of gender, ethnicity, and

gate ways
unite in representations of Jews. Key scholars in Jewish
corporeality
cultural studies have examined the performance of Jewishness in a
number of media, but the field has almost entirely overlooked stagings of
Jewishness in dance. Similarly, contemporary dance scholarship is rich in
studies that how the body choreographs identity, but few

explore dancing
foreground Jewishness. Still, the convergence of dance studies and femi
nist has led to particularly useful ideas about the role dance can
theory
play in the production of cultural meanings and specifically how dance
can function as a significant platform for the rescripting of gender and sex
roles. As feminist dance scholars Ann Cooper Albright, Sally Banes, and
Susan have dances make meaning on more than one

Manning argued,
level, and it is critical not only to consider the representational or cultural
frameworks that dances enliven but also to reflect on the potential of
dance's kinesthetic properties for innovation. In Albright's words, dances
may offer a "double moment of representation," projecting contradictory

that and support dominant discourses at once.6 In
meanings transgress
other words, bodies may reinforce the ideologies that act on and
dancing
through them, but they also have the capacity to issue a dynamic chal
lenge to static and repressive notions.
Thus, in order to fully understand the complex, and contradictory,
messages that Koner and Hadassah offered in their Jewish dances, it is crit
ical to root their works in dance and Jewish history in the United
history
States. the lenses of both dance and
Scrutinizing Jewish drag through
studies reveals for subversion that other modes of
Jewish possibilities
analysis have overlooked.
Exotic Dance and the Jewish Other
the when Koner made her debut, modern dance had

During period
as a field in which women were more prominent than
already emerged
men as dancers, and consumers. U.S. and European
choreographers,
Rebecca Rossen rr
female choreographers were making great strides in re-envisioning roles
for women both onstage and off. In fact, modern dance functioned as a
revolutionary site for the generation of radical new possibilities. Female
created dances that portrayed women as autonomous and

choreographers
and that presented the female body not as sexual object but as
powerful
subjecta representative of modernity and humanity. However,

symbolic
as Naomi Jackson and Ellen Graff have argued, the purist, Americanist
elements of modern dance, as defined by John Martin (the influential
dance critic for the New York Times from 1927 to and other main
1962)
stream critics, masked a racist, nationalist that favored "white
ideology
Anglo-Saxon choreographers." Despite the fact that Jewish performers

and have roles in the field, none
choreographers always played significant
of the women considered to be the founders of U.S. modern
generally
danceIsadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, Martha Graham, and Doris
Jewish. Resurrecting the works of artists left out of the

Humphreywere
canon demonstrates how ideologies of race and ethnicity informed
aesthetic and resulted in historical records that only show

categorization
of the picture. As Graff wrote, "The canonical figures in the develop
part
ment of American modern dance . . . were Americans, they did not have to
become American."7
In fact, at the same moment that modern dance was materializing as a
concrete the U.S concert was inundated with dance perform

genre, stage
ances based on the cultural materials of nonwhite or non-Western peoples.
However, these performers were not all presented in the same way.
Venues, critics, and sometimes the dancers themselves helped create a
between modern and ethnic dance. In recent years, dance

dichotomy
historians have examined the in which Euro-American modern
ways
dancers drew upon the cultural expressions of various "Others" in order to
legitimate the white female body in performance. Even into the early
twentieth century, female dancers were associated with sexual availability.
Women choreographers employed a number of strategies to desexualize
the female body in performance including the invocation of spirituality,
association with "high art," and use of abstraction. Jane Desmond, for
instance, has demonstrated how the early modern dance pioneer St.
Denis's works on Indian and Asian themes invoked mysticism in

copious
338 Rebecca Rossen
order to situate the (white female) dancer as an incarnation of spiritual
ecstasy and rejuvenation and drew upon Orientalism to clearly distinguish

herself from the exotic types she was portraying.8 The emerging ideology
of modern dance suggested that (white) modern could
choreographers
encapsulate the essence of an ethnic or racial group and universalize this
material for the theatrical stage, whereas (non-white) ethnic dance artists
merely presented an unadulterated, authentic enactment of their

heritage.
The modern/ethnic binary ultimately reinforced divisions between "high"
and "low," "white" and "not white," and "American" and "Other."
This dichotomy especially impeded the progress of African American
dance artists. Still, Jews were not immune. Although Jewish Americans
have achieved whiteness today, in the first half of the twentieth century
they teetered between outsider/insider, off-white/white, foreigner/native

born. From the late 1900s until 1924, when the Johnson Reed Act curbed
the influx of "undesirable" groups such as Jews, massive numbers of
Eastern European Jews immigrated to the United States. Speaking Yiddish
and emerging primarily from shtetl communities, they not threat

only
ened to disrupt the ethnic makeup of white America but also to destabilize
the still-tentative status of Western Jews, mostly German

European speak
ing, who had emigrated decades earlier. These now middle-class, modern
Americans wanted to distance themselves from their Yiddish-speaking

kin, whose Jewishness seemed excessive and inordinately apparent.
Representations of Jews were not only racialized but also rendered in
specifically sexualized and gendered terms. The most ubiquitous symbols

for Jewish difference were the "effeminate male Jew" and the "exotic
Jewess." According to Daniel and Sander L. Gilman, the effemi

Boyarin
nate male Jewscholarly, passive, weakstood in counterpoint
physically
to normative Gentile virility and served as a primary trope for anti-Semitic
configurations of Jewishness.9 The Hasidic Jew exemplified this

stereotype.
With his old-world dress, long side curls (peyes), and a body weakened by
study, the Hasid was not easily assimilated into modern life or compatible
with Western conceptions of masculinity. But Jewish men were not the
only symbols of Jewish difference. In the nineteenth the exotic

century,
Jewess emerged in art, literature, and theatrical performance as an orien
talized figure who combined stereotypes about Jewish difference and
Rebecca Rossen 539
with Victorian fears about female sexuality. Dangerously

degeneracy
attractive and adept, the exotic Jewess functioned as a foil
kinesthetically
to bourgeois notions of femininity.10 On the European dance stage, she
a Russian heiress who

was best personified by Ida Rubenstein, Jewish
became an icon of decadence and Jewish both onstage and
perversity
in the 1900s. Rubenstein's career included danc
offstage early fascinating
the lead as the of two versions of Oscar Wilde's
ing (and acting producer)
Salome Russia in 1908 and in Paris in she was also the star of the
(in 1912);
Ballets Russes' and Scheherazade (1910), prompting the poet
Cleopatre (1909)
Cocteau to dub her "the ibex of the Jewish Ghetto."11 Although
Jean great
she was not an innocent in her her typecasting as a
party framing,
dominatrix revealed turn-of-the-century anti
Jewish/Oriental growing
Semitism and the in which about Jewishness have been
ways stereotypes
inseparable from gender.

Such icons have originated in anti-Semitic European contexts,
may
but were reproduced in Jewish American self-representa
they frequently
tions. Erdman has observed that fin-de-siecle U.S. theater was
Harley
with of the Jew as "Oriental exotic." "The immigrants," he
replete images
wrote, "were often constructed as exotic Others, foreigners living in the
West of it." he noted that

modern industrial yet somehow not Moreover,
and circulated Jews and were

these characters, produced by both non-Jews,
oriented": to the and represented a trave
"ocularly "they appealed eye
exoticism."12 themselves from these
logue By discursively distinguishing
"Others," Jews strove to construct American identities for them

Jewish
selves.
As I have shown elsewhere, some Jewish female choreographers, such
as Anna Sokolow, Helen Tamiris, and Sophie Maslow, managed to strate
use the aesthetics of modern dance to Americanize their Jewish

gically
bodies and Jewish and U.S. history.13 In contrast, Koner and Hadassah
align
offered more exoticized versions of Jews that emphasized Jewish difference
over a period when Jews aimed to fit in and not

compatibility. During
stand out, these female moved between being the "Other" and
performers
the themselves up, sometimes purposefully, to
doing othering, opening
confusion with their exotic subjects.
340 Rebecca Rossen
Pauline Koner's Hasidic Drag
In her autobiography,
Solitary Song, Pauline Koner (1912-2001) revealed a life
long fascination and identification with the East: "The Orient had always
been my first love. ... In private world, I was an
my Egyptian princess."
Born in New York Koner was the of Russian immi
City, daughter Jewish
grants who came to the United States in 1905 to Her

escape pogroms.
father was a lawyer, and despite their Eastern the family
European heritage,
quickly assimilated into the middle class. Koner identified herself as a Jew,
but because her parents were she received no

nonpracticing, religious
training. In her she likened her occasional childhood

autobiography, trips
with her to a Lower East Side to visiting an exotic
grandfather synagogue
foreign land: "To me it was all wondrous theater."14
Koner began her career as a solo artist, and her earliest concerts dis
played her love of the exotic. Whether she was as an Indian

performing
priestess in Nilamatii (1930; fig. 1), a Javanese dancer in Altar Piece

temple
or a Hasidic in Chassidic
(1930), boy Song and Dance, she separated herself from
the ethnic material she used her work as creative

by presenting interpreta
tion and not authentic She detailed this process as follows: "I
replication.
think that one can best an ethnic for artistic
approach style purposes by
trying to absorb the characteristics of the people themselves. . . . Even if the
real movement and are not used, it begins to look real, it takes on the
steps
flavor rather than the fact."15 Koner's to this exotic material was
approach
unquestionably Orientalist. Evoking St. Denis, she aimed to demonstrate
her or, her to skillfully a variety of Others.

universality, ability represent
Such spectacular performances on the audience's
hinged understanding
that underneath the costume and Koner's essence was white and
makeup,
American. However, critical to her work reveals that her race and
response
nationality were not necessarily assured.
In a 1930 New York Times review, John Martin described Koner as "strik
ing in appearance, with the rich charm of the Orient." In 1934 he con
cluded that she was of a rich emotional

"obviously possessed
temperament, admirably externalized in a dark and exotic beauty." Falling

into the stereotype of the exotic Jewess, Koner could not tran
successfully
scend the ethnic of her own Martin did not
specificity body. evidently
know how to her work in terms of genre, either. Of her diverse
classify
Rebecca Rossen 341
Fig. 1. Koner in Nilamani, 1932. Photo by Aram Alban. Courtesy of the Jerome Robbins Dance
Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.
342 Rebecca Rossen
repertory, he deemed one or two abstract solos to be the most successful,
and he concluded that the dancer's infatuation with ethnic material
confined her to a creative ghetto. In 1930 he wrote, "Perhaps it would do
her a world of good to obliterate herself in the ranks of a dance group such
as Martha Graham's or Doris Humphrey's. . . . She is still playing about
with pseudo-Oriental subjects, for which she is strikingly equipped in
appearance, but which are considerably beneath her potentialities." Martin
did not perceive her ethnic solos as "authentic," but he did suggest that
unless she "obliterated" herself by training with the nation's most famous
Gentile choreographers, she would not assimilate into American dance. A
passage from a 1934 review further emphasized this point of view: "Until
she has readjusted her approach to creative dancing Miss Koner will no
doubt continue to be seen to her best advantage in character dances, such
as her 'Russian . . . and 'Chassidic and Dance.'. . . Here, if

Rhythms' Song
ever is an authentic talent . . . [who] could transform . . . into one of the
most interesting dancers in the American Field.'"6
Koner presented Chassidic Song and Danceone of the works that, in
Martin's view, held her back from entering the "American field"in both
dance and Jewish venues in New York from 1932 to 1934. She also
City
performed the solo in 1933 throughout Egypt and Palestine, where she
traveled to find her Jewish roots. Unfortunately, as is the case with many
dances of this era, the actual choreography of Chassidic Song and Dance is not
documented. Nevertheless, Koner provided a brief description in a pro
gram note that helps reconstruct her approach: "The chassidic dance
portrays the ecstatic mood of the old chassidic cult to whom song and
dance was a means of reaching a state of religious exaltation."17 Thus,
Koner the Eastern European Jewish mystic from the same vantage
staged
point as she the Orientalfrom a distance that fixed the

staged privileged
Hasid in the ancient past.
Koner's solo is particularly interesting in relation to an essay by the
Jewish writer Naum Rosen published in 1934 in Dance Observer entitled "The
New Jewish Dance in America." Rosen argued that, like the "open
mouthed, spread-fingered" Negro, or the earthy American Indian, "rattle
in one hand, in the other," the old Jew, "with white

pine-branch flowing
beard and prayer shawl" represented one of the "oldest and most colorful
Rebecca Rossen 343
strains in American life." Rooting these intriguing figures in a primitive
and American past, Rosen concluded that these figures were

imagined
them matter for
"no longer agitated by the present," making ideal subject
U.S. dancers. aligning Jews with "Negroes" and American
By racially
Indians, Rosen seemed to echo the anti-Semitic viewpoint that Jews are
not "white."18 But, he succeeds in eradicating the taint of recent

ironically,
immigration by implying that the Jew was a legitimate, well-established
U.S. icon. This article is significant not only because it reveals how Jews
to revise understandings of what constituted
sought strategically
Americanness but also because it conveys the role dance could play in
Jewish and American culture.

aligning
Rosen's also illustrates how Jewish American representations of
essay
Eastern Jews sometimes approximated Western depictions of
European
the Orient. Just as Western intellectuals and artists borrowed Eastern
and as a tactic for rejuvenating the West,

philosophies, images, styles
Jewish Americans sometimes looked to Hasidism as a symbolic locus for
"authentic Jewishness." In fact, the Hasid's expressive mysticism actually

meshed with the expressionism of modern dance, making Hasidism (like
African an appealing source for modern creations.19 Hasidism
primitivism)
was bonded to Eastern and not the United States. Yet the festivity,
Europe
and spirituality of this sect could replace depressing images of immi
joy,
with a positive portrait of Judaism, as long
grants infesting squalid ghettos
as the Hasidic Jew remained a quaint symbol locked safely away in the
distant past. According to Rosen, Jewish dancers could embody the
ancient "Jew" and maintain modern Americanness but only if they took a
"creative," rather than authentic, approach to the material.
In certain ways, it is ironic that Rosen designated the Hasid as an ideal
of Jewish American culture, because, as discussed above, the

representative
feminized male Jew has functioned to indicate difference. I
historically
would contend, however, that drag played a key role in fulfilling Rosen's
for creativity over authenticity, because drag gave the female

prescription
an extra measure of distance from the Jew she portrayed.
performer
Indeed, it did not seem to matter to Rosen whether a woman or man
the Hasid. Instead, it was critical that Jewish dancers not

performed
the "Jew" too convincingly. Interestingly, Rosen criticized
perform
1-H Rebecca Rossen
Koner's Chassidic Song and Dance, concluding that she "contented herself
with the authentic" and merely "exhibited the material" without trans
forming it. In contrast, Koner saw the solo as a modern impression of
Jewishness and was even nervous about the dance in Palestine

performing
where, she wrote, "people knew the real thing."20
Koner did not think of herself as the "real thing," and a closer look at
her Hasid demonstrates that this dance was no straightforward portrayal

of Jewishness. A rather stunning photograph of the dancer in costume for
Fig. 2. Koner in Chassidic Song and Dance, 1932. Photo by Aram Alban. Courtesy of the Jerome
Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and
Tilden Foundations.
Rebecca Rossen >45
the solo her in drag a stark or angular shadows

displays against backdrop
and
'fig. 2).21 She is dressed as a Hasidic boycomplete with peyes, black cap,
^lack suit. But she does not as a boy or, for that matter, as a
really "pass"
[ew; her and seem Koner had

gender ethnicity purposefully ambiguous.
Billed in and extended her with dark to appear more
eyebrows pencil
masculine, and she had dark around her to accentu

applied makeup eyes
ite the of her nose and the of her expression. At
length intensify pathos
the same time, she countered and by donning false
Jewishness masculinity
her the bulk of her suit hides
eyelashes and deepening lip color. Although
the line of her breasts, her wide collar reveals the slenderness of her neck.
Koner also the orientalness of her holding her

emphasized persona by
hands in an that looks Moreover, the curly
angular pose pseudo-Asian.
tendril around her ear looks more than it does Jewish.
wrapped Spanish
Koner was not cross-dressed but also "cross-ethnick-ed." As Jennifer
only
Robertson observed in relation to Takarazuka performance in Japan,
"Gender is constructed on the basis of physical and behavioral stereotypes
about females and males; the theatrical construction of ethnicity

similarly
is based on reified images of 'us' and 'them.'"22 Chassidic Song and Dance
offered an androgynous, character whose very phys
ethnically ambiguous
confirmed that Jews were "Other."
icality
Still, Koner's Hasid cannot be reduced to an expression ol

simply
self-hatred. For Butler, is a parodic that repro
[ewish Judith drag style
duces but also has the potential to denaturalize,
hegemonic meanings
recontextualize, and mobilize static identities.23 Koner's cross-dressed Jew
was not fact, the dance was meant to be sincere. But it

parodyin quite
was also not Her succeeded in undermining es
convincing. Jewish drag
sentialist notions about and by drawing attention to the
Jewishness gender
artifice both identities. She certainly replicated stereotypes
sustaining
about and her works were infused with Orientalism.
Jewish effeminacy,
However, excessiveness to a Jewish male and an un

by linking body,
American at that, she undermined the stereotype of the exotic
body
Koner's dance that it was the Jewish man, not the Jewish
Jewess. implied
woman, who was "too Furthermore, the dance suggested that

Jewish."
and are neither stable nor genuine. With her peyes, long
ethnicity gender
and nose, black and dark suit, she could on and take off
eyebrows cap, put
346 Rebecca Rossen
her Jewishness and gender at will (or at least very efficiently backstage,
between dance numbers).24
Most importantly, Koner's Chassidic Song and Dance employed the lan
guage of modern dance to subtly express dissatisfaction with roles for
women in Jewish spheres and in the United States more This

broadly.
dynamic is especially apparent when comparing Koner's solo to Jewish
drag performance in other mediain particular, the films of Molly Picon.
At first glance, there are between Koner's and Picon's

stunning parallels
physicalities, styles, and approaches to Jewish drag. Both performers were
petite, with dark hair, large facial features exaggerated by makeup, highly
emotive faces, and a talent for bold When Picon
physical expressiveness.
put on Hasidic drag, as she did in the 1923 film Ost und West, her resem
blance to Koner was uncanny. But there are equally distinctions be

key
tween their styles and the contexts in which their works were presented.
Michele Aaron and Eve Sicular have written about Picon's roles
drag
in Yiddish film, in the 1937 Yidl rnitn Fidl, which was made in
particularly
Poland but received wide distribution in the United States.25 In this film,
Picon portrayed a young woman who dressed as a boy in order to help her
widowed father make a living as an itinerant musician. Both Aaron and
Sicular have argued that Picon's transvestism seems to undermine

initially
traditional gender roles and even to offer possibilities for queer spectator
ship (particularly when Yidl falls for Joseph, a fellow musician who is
unaware of her true identity). concluded that Picon's

Ultimately, they
films denigrated Jewish effeminacy and bolstered normative middle-class
notions of femininity. As Sicular wrote, "Picon's 'trouser roles' cast her as
boyish, not mannish. While her repertoire included so many instances of
putting on pants, these were fundamentally pranks rather than chal
lenges to the sexual status quo. Picon rarely experimented with the male
privilege that can come with wearing these clothes, and even then, only
ever so tamely."26 Similarly, Aaron posited that Picon presented a satire of
Jewish effeminacy that acted as a comic foil to the male protagonist's

manliness (Joseph saves Yidl from holds his well, and
drowning, liquor
teaches her to use a saw). She concluded that Yiddish cinema to
sought
counter anti-Semitism with misogyny; Picon's drag vilified in
effeminacy
order to offer a new model for Jewish masculinity.
Rebecca Rossen 347
Fig. 3. Molly Picon in Ost und West,1923. Courtesy of the National Center for Jewish Film.
I concur with Aaron's and Sicular's However, a dance studies

analyses.
perspective on Picon's films not reveals the dissidence of her embod

only
ied actions but demonstrates how modern dance offered a
ultimately
more radical platform for Jewish women than films such as Yidl mitn Fidl.
Picon wore Hasidic garb only for only a brief scene in Ost und West, yet the
effect of the actress's in this earlier film was much

transgression stronger
than in Yidl mitn Fidl. As the title the film Eastern
suggests, pits European
Jews against Westernized Jews, old-world Judaism against new-world secu
larism. Gender was one of the filters which these

primary through
tensions were expressed. Picon played Mollie Brown, the brash, athletic
U.S.-born daughter of a well-to-do merchant, Morris Brown, who had
shortened their surname from the Americanized Brownstein.

already
When Mollie and her father travel to the old to attend a family
country
wedding, her modern ways clash with the staunch

dramatically family's
traditionalism. I do not know whether Koner saw Ost und West,
Although
which was distributed in the United States in 1924 and Chassidic
preceded
Song and Dance by eight years, the film nevertheless was a direct precedent
348 Rebecca Rossen
for Koner because of its employment of Hasidic drag and its presentation
of dance as a rebellious act.27
Mollie never actually dances in drag, dance and drag are

Although
two of the means by which she asserts a modern American identity and
resists the strict gender and sex codes of Hasidism. She dons men's clothes
a family celebration so that she can sit with the boys (fig. 3). In
during
another scene, she invades the homosocial milieu of the cantor's choira
that excludes women. In response to the young men's davening

setting
their bodies in prayer), she exclaims, "You guys dance like a
(rocking
chair. Shake it up, and proceeds to teach them the
rocking gang!"
a form derived from African American vernacular dance that
shimmy,
was of rapid shoulder isolations and set to jazz music.28 In The
composed
A1 Jolson's Jackie Rabinowitz used blackface to
Jazz Singer (1927), minstrelsy
distance himself from his Jewish roots and claim whiteness. Similarly,
Picon's Mollie suggests that Hasidic men could update their archaic, and
Jewish, movements with a popular U.S. dance form appropriated

markedly
from black However, the young cantors are unable to change
performers.29
their ways. At the end of the scene, Mollie ends up shimmying on a table as
the men dance the around her, a position that objectifies and
grapevine
exoticizes her dancing body (fig. 4). Despite the sexual and racial politics at
dance in this context nonetheless functioned as a mutiny, a stunning

play,
intervention into traditional Judaism and Ashkenazi dance practices.
On the one hand, Mollie's insubordination of Hasidic strictures high
lights the confines of traditional gender roles and issues a challenge to old
world On the other, Mollie's mostly deplorable actions throughout

ways.
the film present the modern Jewish woman as immature, selfish, material
istic, and (presaging the "Jewish American Princess" of the later

aggressive
twentieth In addition, in the roles Picon played, her transgres
century).30
sions were undone heterosexual resolutions.
inevitably by staunchly plot
all of Picon's characters rejected Jewish drag and the freedoms
Ultimately,
that the settling into traditional marriage and normative
garb symbolized,
femininity. Ost und West established a plot that reinforced the necessity for
and this standard union emphasized duali

female/male coupling through
ties between new- and old-world Jews.31 In the end, Mollie falls in love
with Jakob, a Talmudic student who renounces Hasidism, shaves his
Rebecca Rossen 349
Fig. 4. Molly Picon in Ost utidWest,1923. Courtesy of the National Center for Jewish Film.
beard, moves to Western and becomes financially successful. This

Europe,
would have assured Western Jewish audiences that they could assimilate
and that modern would up to become well

feisty, girls eventually grow
behaved Jewish wives.
no for a heterosexual
Koner's Chassidic Song and Dance offered possibility
narrative to undermine its potentially emancipatory message. It was a solo.
Banes has that the women who founded modern dance performed
argued
solos as a means to what she termed the "marriage
rhetorically reject
or compulsory heterosexuality, in favor of a mode of performance
plot,"
in which female dancers claimed the stage alone and were able to "literally
and sever dependencies from men." Presenting the solo

metaphorically
female as a metonym for Banes wrote that "the new
body modernity,
modern dance did not only reflect changing values surrounding marriage
and It actually constructed new social relations, because it
sexuality. partly
a new, female audience."32 Koner may have
produced predominantly
550 Rebecca Rossen
found it difficult to situate her work as modern dance at first, but she
mostly performed her dances in theaters, not Yiddish theaters,

Broadway
and employed a modern dance method and aesthetic. However, she
initially presented Chassidic Song and Dance to an audience of Jewish women.
She premiered the solo at a benefit the seventh of

supporting anniversary
the Pioneer Women's of America, an association that
Organization merged
Zionist and feminist ideologies in order to encourage Jewish women,
particularly those of the working class, to participate more actively in
Zionist associations.33 The role that modern dance has in U.S.

played
Zionism is tremendous but the of this
beyond scope particular essay,
which focuses on how Jewish female choreographers were able to advance
feminist agendas despite their reiteration of particularly problematic
images of Jews.34 Nonetheless, context and framing and

necessarily impact
even shape the meanings that dances make and, in this case, contributed
significantly to the revolutionary function that these dances

particular
ultimately served.
To a certain degree, the Pioneer Women's choice of

Organization's
Koner to celebrate their anniversary was an odd one. At this time, a
number of Jewish dancers (such as Dvora Lapson) were creating overtly

Zionist dances or (like Miriam Blecher, Sophie Maslow, and Edith Segal)
advancing through their choreography adamantly socialist and commu
nist that more resembled the Pioneer Women's

agendas closely Organi
zation's propagandistic approach. Nonetheless, the organization presented
Koner and liked what she offered enough to produce her second solo
concert in 1934. The rebuffed the chauvinism of Zionist

group organiza
tions by creating their own association to Jewish women and
support
advance their As the benefit's main entertainment, Koner's
agendas. drag
performance undermined Jewish traditions and gender codes and helped
project new social and political possibilities for Jewish female viewers.
The Hasidic Priestess
In contrast to Koner, who eventually took John Martin's advice to heart
and transformed herself into a modern dancer with the of the

help
Gentile choreographer Doris with whom she to work
Humphrey, began
in 1945, Hadassah, the other focus of this built a lifelong career of
essay,
Rebecca Rossen 351
Oriental and Jewish dances. As a result, her work has largely

performing
been excluded from mainstream modern dance history. Like Koner,
Hadassah was an ethnic chameleon with the ability to mold her biogra
and movements to suit the characters she portrayed. For
phy, body,
Hadassah, the exotic Jewess was a marketable a role that she

persona,
both and off. This enabled her to claim a measure of
played onstage
and in to her creations. Hadassah's methods
authority expertise regard
and differed from Koner's despite the fact that both
pieces significantly
delved into Hasidic material and engaged in some measure of cross-dress
In Hasidism, however, as she did in her 1947 signature

ing. embodying
work, Shuvi Nafshi, Hadassah neither of Jewish effem

replicated stereotypes
nor performed in female-to-male drag.
inacy
1947 Jewish Americans had come a long way toward assimilation,
By
and dances the exotic Jewess or dancing Hasid fell out of fashion.
depicting
Instead, female responded to the end of World War

Jewish choreographers
II and the Holocaust dances on folkloric or
by creating Jewish primarily
biblical themes that were mediated by modernist aesthetics as well as by
the desire of Jews at mid-century to retrieve certain aspects of Jewish cul
ture without compromising their hard-won status as modern Americans.
For Sophie Maslow's The Village I Knew (1950) presented nostalgic

example,
of European Jewish life that merged Jewish culture with
imaginings
Americana and Jews into the fabric of a culturally plural
subtly integrated
a biblical hero
nation. Similarly, Pearl Lang's Song of Deborah (1949) depicted
ine whose struggles and triumphs over evil complemented patriotic
themes that were in the United States during and after World
prevalent
War II. established themselves as modern dancers before
Having firmly
into Jewish material in the postwar years, Maslow and Lang
delving
avoided the of ethnic dance. In contrast, Hadassah walked a thin
stigma
line between the ethnic and modern, and her revival of the Jewish exotic
in the late 1940s might seem regressive at first glance. Yet, her postwar
solo, Shuvi Nafshi, which most critics classified as an "authentic" portrayal

of Jewishness, succeeded in destabilizing binaries of East/West, ethnic/
modern, and male in a way that these other works did not.
female/
to her own releases, Hadassah (1909-1992) was born
According press
"in Jerusalem of an old Rabbinical family, at the cross roads of the ancient
552 Rebecca Rossen
world." Measured by Koner's criteria, Hadassah was as close to the "real
thing" as possiblea credential that she used to her advantage throughout

her career. In her youth, she witnessed the ecstatic dancing of family patri
archs and credited these improvisations with shaping her art. But as a
young girl growing up in Jerusalem under British colonial rule, she was
also influenced by the culture of her "neighbors": "Moors, Arabs, Hindus,
and other people of the Oriental world." The family moved to the United
States in 1921, more financial When she decided upon a

seeking stability.
career in dance, an improper path for a Jewish woman, her father, a rabbi,
banished her from home.35
Hadassah's identification with the East led her to study Javanese and
Indian dance, and she began her career in the United States as a performer
of Hindu and Oriental pieces 5). In addition to her repertory, Hadas

(fig.
sah's ambiguous nationality and ethnicity distinguished her from her
contemporaries and situated her solidly in the realm of ethnic dance. She
frequently performed in the "Around the World with Dance and Song"
series at New York's American Museum of Natural History, sharing her
first concert there in 1945 with the Haitian dancer Josephine Premice and
the African American performer Pearl Primus. This fascinating mid
century dance series very clearly perpetuated racial and aesthetic distinc
tions. For instance, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn were billed as creative
inventors of dances on ethnic themes, while non-white and/or "foreign"

dancers such as Premice, Primus, and Hadassah were considered bona fide
practitioners of dances from other lands.
Dance critics were confused about how to categorize Hadassah and
her work. For example, a reviewer for Dance Observer saw her as an exotic
whose dancing "pulls the observer quite under the spell of the mysterious
obliqueness of the Orient." Occasionally, however, she was

half-smiling
discussed as a "white modern dancer." Another critic for Dance Observer
saluted Hadassah for her "high artistry and her illuminating power to
transcend the authentic materials of the east into a contemporary theatre
form." In the Borzoi Book of Modern Dance, a key mid-century dance history
primer, Margaret Lloyd explained that although Hadassah's Indian dances
featured traditional materials presented "intact," her Jewish works came
"nearer to actual creativity, to composition in the modern sense." Still,
Rebecca Rossen 553
Fig. 5. Hadassah in Dur^a Tala, ca. 1945. Photo by Marcus Blechman. Courtesy of the Museum of
the City of New York. Gift of the estate of Marcus Blechman.
354 Rebecca Rossen
Lloyd included the performer in a chapter called "Ethnic Forms" and
described her as "a striking, black-haired who to life the

girl" brought
"dance cultures and gorgeous costumes of the east."36
Hadassah's ethnic indistinctness was further when she

complicated
performed for Indian and Jewish audiences. While India and Israel
touring
in 1959, she was described by Indian critics as a "Jewish-American" who had
a feeling for Indian movement but was at her best when Jewish
performing
dances.37 In contrast, while some Israeli critics her as an Israeli
positioned
native returning to her homeland, others her dances as quintes
perceived
sentially American. One Israeli reviewer condemned her program as expos
ing the "deep American need to choreograph vulgarity," demonstrating

that divisions between East and West, and artful, also existed in
vulgar
Israeli culture. On the other hand, Jewish critics in the United States did
not always consider her one of their own. As one writer it: "Hadassah's
put
heritage is Oriental," not American.38 Still, she was invited to

frequently
perform for Jewish events such as the Jewish Dance Festival of 1947, spon
sored by Hunter College's Jewish studies program.
No matter where she performed, Hadassah's most work was
popular
Shuvi Nafshi, which she presented to critical acclaim countless times
between 1947 and 1974. Walter Terry, a dance writer for the New York Herald
Tribune and author of a number of books on dance, called the solo a "dance
of Biblical power in its projection of ecstatic reverence for the divine." In
an earlier review, he argued that the work succeeded in fusing "modern
dance's expressional qualities with Oriental movement idioms."39 The
critic Doris Hering, however, saw the dance as the essence of Jewishness:
"If someone were to ask us, 'What is Jewishness?'" she wrote, "we'd be
hard put to qualify it precisely. Yet Hadassah's 'Shuvi Nafshi' . . . was com
pletely, beautifully, transcendentally Jewish."40

One can understand the conclusions of both critics when at
looking
the dance itself. Hadassah's final performance of the solo, at age sixty-five,
was videotaped. Resurrected for the one hundredth of the
anniversary
92nd Street Young Men and Women's Hebrew Association in New York
City in 1974, the work was introduced by Terry, who could not help but
note its suitability for the venue. One can tell from this rather blurry
video that Hadassah must have been a remarkably powerful performer in
Rebecca Rossen 355
her prime. A later reconstruction of the work (danced by Ellen Kogan) is a
clearer document, and my analysis is based primarily on this version.41
Set to a haunting rendition of Psalm 116 by a cantor, Shuvi Nafshi begins
slowly and The first section, of strong

mournfully. composed prayerlike
motions, beautifully conveys the solemnity and authority of the cantor's
voice. Feet firmly planted in the ground and arms extending upward, the
dancer's female body functions as a conduit for the divine. In the second
section, she increases the tempo and extends the range of her gestures
through a more direct incorporation of modern dance movement. The
dance's conclusion expresses the ecstasy of Hasidic dancing through its
upbeat rhythm, vibratory torso movements, and rapturous spins. Here
too, the choreography combines the folkloric with the modern. Near the
end of the solo, for example, the dancer projects her body upward in a
series of stunning vertical jumps. In contrast to Koner's (and Picon's)
boyish Hasids, Hadassah, who performed her solo into late middle age,
must have seemed the embodiment of a biblical matriarch.
But how "Jewish" was Shuvi Nafshp. Marilyn Danitz revealed in an intri
cate analysis of the piece that the solo actually comprised hundreds of
gestures drawn from numerous religions and a variety of folk forms.42
Only a few of the movements derived from Jewish ritual. Indeed, the work
incorporated numerous motifs from both Hinduism and Indian dance
forms. In a lecture entitled "Dance Themes of Hassidism and Hinduism,"
Hadassah argued that Hasidism and Hinduism have much in common,
including the use of dance as a means to reach a state of ecstatic transcen
dence. Hadassah justified this fusion by pointing out that Jews originated
in the Middle East, and therefore "it is obviously not strange for a Jew to
move in the kinesthetic coloration of an Asiatic or Oriental, or Mid
Easterner." The one difference she highlighted between the two forms is
that Hasidism, unlike Indian dance, "has no set choreography" and there
fore dances are not preserved, leaving room for artists like herself to
construct their own versions. She concluded: "If the Hebraic chants and
cantillations resemble the Hindu chants is it not to assume that the

logical
Hebrew dances, had they been preserved, would have resembled the
Indian dances?"43 recent has that "classi

Interestingly, scholarship argued
cal" and "authentic" Indian dance is in fact a postcolonial construction or
356 Rebecca Rossen
a contemporary reinterpretation of a traditional form. In the wake of
Indian independence from British colonial rule in 1947, Indian classical
dance was selected as a means to validate Indian civilization and promote

the country's new independence.4'1 Hadassah's Shuvi Nafshi was also
composed in 1947, just one year before the establishment of Israel as a
nation-state. Thus, it is not surprising that she looked to Indian models
for constructing her own form of Jewish dance. Hadassah even structured
her concerts to present a direct line from Hindu to Jewish dance. They
began with a series of Indian pieces, such as a solo in which she portrayed
the Mother-Goddess Durga, and ended with Jewish dances.
What was Hadassah looking for in Hinduism and Indian dance?

really
Her approach to the diverse cultural materials she classified as "Hindu"
and "Indian" certainly discloses a certain amount of Orientalism,
although her Indian dances were based on of serious with

years study
respected teachers in the United States and India. I would argue that
Hadassah was attracted to the presence of goddesses in Hinduism and to
the importance of the female dancer in Indian dance and religion because
similar roles for women did not exist in organized Judaism in 1947.
Although women who were affiliated with the reform movement in
the 1940s frequently performed "good works," such as charity and educa
tion, in the public realm, their participation in Jewish ritual largely

remained limited to the domestic sphere. In Conservative and Orthodox
Jewish circles, the most common rite women performed was lighting the
Sabbath candles.45 One promotional portrait of Hadassah in Shuvi Nafshi
shows her in profile with a shawl covering her head, lit candles in the
backgroundjust the kind of image that would bolster normative notions
of Jewish femininity and domesticity (fig. 6). The most circulated photo
graph of Hadassah in Shuvi Nafshi, however, undermines this

dramatically
representation (fig. 7). The same pair of Sabbath candles figures in this
portrait as well, but Hadassah is definitely not enacting the role of the
archetypal Jewish wife and mother. The gesture commonly performed

when lighting the candles is to wave one's hands three times over the
flames. Here, however, Hadassah stands with her left arm her
crossing
chest and her right arm raised to the side. Both hands form a distinctive
gesture: the little and second fingers joined, the middle and index fingers
Rebecca Rossen 357
Fig. 6. Portrait of Hadassah, ca. 1947. Photo by Marcus Blechman. Courtesy of the Museum of the
City of New York. Gift of the estate of Marcus Blechman.
joined, and both pairs of fingers separated from the thumb. Most com
associated today with Leonard Nimoy's Dr. Spock on Star Trek, this
monly
gesture is actually performed by a Cohen (or priest) when delivering the first
blessing on Shabbat. The Cohanim are members of an ancient priestly sect
358 Rebecca Rossen
Fig. 7. Hadassah in ShuviNafshi,ca. 1947. Photo by Marcus Blechman. Courtesy of the Museum of
the City of New York. Gift of the estate of Marcus Blechman.
and said to be direct descendents of Aaron. The line is determined patrilin
eally, and the Cohanim are always men. Although Hadassah's dance may
have been received as "authentic," it presented a modern movement
vocabulary that combined Hindu and Hasidic principles and translated
them into motion. Furthermore, she adapted ritual gestures performed by

men, and never women, to the dance stage and presented the female
body,
rather than the male body, as a spiritual and kinesthetic force.
Hadassah's costume provides another clue to the dance's feminism.
She was not cross-dressedher long, black robe clearly identified her as a
woman. But to this she added a tallit, a male prayer garment. Although
today a female Reform rabbi can wear a tallit, it would have been very
unusual, shocking even, for a woman to do this in 1947.46 Hasidism is a
masculine practice. Hasidic women do not execute Jewish rituals in public.
Even in Reform Judaism, the first female rabbi was not ordained until
1972, two years before Hadassah last performed Shuvi Nafshi.47 The work was
Rebecca Rossen m
revolutionary, for it presented a Jewish woman executing ritual and rabbi
like acts in a public sphere.

As discussed previously, St. Denis combined Orientalism and spiritual
ity as a means to put the white female body on stage and remove it from
"the strictures associated with the body's materiality and sensuality."48

Hadassah did something similar in Shuvi Nafshi, drawing upon spirituality in
order to modify stereotypes about Jewish female corporeality. Despite her
association with the Orient and the sexual connotations of the Hasid
Hadassah's mystical Shuvi Nafshi succeeded in

approaching religious ecstasy,
her Jewish female it possible to evoke, in the
desexualizing body, making
words of one newspaper reporter, that "elusive quality called 'soul.'" Even
her rabbi father, who felt that theatrical dance was licentious, was moved
to tears by Shuvi Nafshi.''9

Hadassah's priestess differed significantly from Koner's
cross-gesturing
cross-dressing Hasid, but both choreographers intended to convey politi
cal, and not merely aesthetic, meanings. When Koner performed her
dances under the aegis of the Pioneer Women's Organization, the effect of
her works became polemical through the context in which they were
Hadassah premiered Shuvi Nafshi immediately after the end of

staged.
World War II and, as noted above, one year before the establishment of
Israel. In the wake of the Holocaust and in a climate of ardent U.S.
Zionism, she embodied the bond between two nationsthe United States
and Israel. She made this connection quite clear at a 1947 concert, which
she concluded with a plea "for peace in a tortured Palestine."50 Coin
cidentally, the choreographer bore the same name as Hadassah, the
Women's Zionist of America. According to its mission state

Organization
ment, Hadassah's members are "motivated and inspired to strengthen
their partnership with Israel, ensure Jewish continuity, and realize their
potential as a dynamic force in American Society."51 Hadassah, the chore
not have been a member of Hadassah, the organization,

ographer, may
but she could have been the organization's spokeswoman. Her Jewess was
and and authoritative, foreign-born and

spiritual powerful, womanly
of realizing her potential as a dynamic force in U.S. society,
capable
Judaism, and dance.
360 Rebecca Rossen
Koner and Hadassah created works that embodied certain stereotypes

about the East and Eastern European Jews. In order to construct her
version of Jewishness, Koner exoticized and feminized the Jew, thereby
contributing to an Orientalist discourse that had reached a peak in the late
nineteenth century and continued to loom large on U.S. concert stages

and Yiddish screens of the early-twentieth century. However, when she
performed in Jewish drag, Kroner called into question fixed notions of
race, gender, and ethnicity and demonstrated that these identity categories
are not separated but inexorably blended. Hadassah's version of Jewishness
was more complex. Shuvi Nafshi fused East and West and painted an androg
ynous portrait of a spiritual leader that converged rabbi and priestess, issu
ing a vigorous critique of a patriarchal religion that restricted women's
contributions to hearth and home. In conclusion, both choreographers,

each in her own way and in the context of her own time, manipulated
essentialist imagery in order to combat the discourses that attempted to
confine and contain them as Jewish women and artists.
Notes
1. Pauline Koner, program, 27 Feb. 1932, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York
Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter cited as NYPL DD). "Chassidic" is a
variant spelling of the more common "Hasidic."
2. See Giora Manor, The Life and Dance of GertrudKraus (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad
Publishing, 1978). Also see Judith Brin Ingber with Felix Fibich, "The Unwitting
Gastrol: Touring the Soviet Union, France, the United States, Canada, Israel, South
"
America, Europe and Back to Poland, in her edited volume Seeing Israeli and Jewish
Dance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 43-57.
3. Michele Aaron, "Cinema's Queer Jews: Jewishness and Masculinity in Yiddish
Cinema," in The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, ed. Phil
Powrie, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 90-99;
Eve Sicular, '"A yingl mit a yingl hot epes a tam': The Celluloid Closet of Yiddish
Film," Jewish Folkloreand EthnologyReview 16, no. 1 (1994): 40-45; and "Gender Rebellion in
Yiddish Film," Lilith 20 (Winter 1995): 12-17. Sicular noted that Yankele premiered in
Boston in 1918 before moving on to theatrical runs in Eastern Europe and New York
City.
4. For a more complete discussion of these issues, see Rebecca Rossen, Dancing Jewish:
Jewish Identityin American Modern and PostmodernDance (forthcoming).
5. The subtitle of this dance is inconsistent, both in Hadassah's programs, writings, and
promotional materials, as well as in the press. It is alternatively titled Shuvi Nafshi,
Rebecca Kossen 361
Return, Oh My Soul, or Shuvi Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul). Hadassah was born Hadassah
Spira, and later married Milton Epstein. Professionally she used only her first name; I
follow her practice throughout this article.
6. Ann Cooper Albright, ChoreographingDifference: The Body and Identityin ContemporaryDance
(Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), xxiii; Sally Banes, Dancing Women:
Female Bodies on Stage (New York: Routledge, 1998); and Susan Manning, "The Female
Dancer and the Male Gaze: Feminist Critiques of Early Modern Dance," in Meaning in
Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance, ed. Jane C. Desmond (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1997), 153-66.

7. Naomi Jackson, ConvergingMovements:Modern Dance andJewishCultureat theNinety-SecondStreet
Y (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 9; Ellen Graff, SteppingLeft: Dance and
Politics in New YorkCity, 1928-1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 21.
8. Jane Desmond, "Dancing Out the Difference: Cultural Imperialism and Ruth St.
Denis's 'Radha'
of 1906," Signs 17 (Autumn 1991): 28-49.
9. Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexualityand the Inventionof theJewish Man
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); and Sander L. Gilman, The Jew's Body
(New York:Routledge, 1991). For more on gender and representation, see Ann
Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis,Staging Race (New York: Routledge,

1997); and Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become Americans: Jews, Gender, and the Anxiety of
Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). Pelligrini and Prell have critiqued the field of
Jewish studies for its elision of Jewish women in discussions of stereotypes. Most
notably, Pelligrini charged that the iconicity of the effeminate Jew in Jewish cultural
studies omits Jewish women altogether: "In the homology Jew-as-woman, the Jewish
female body goes missing. All Jews are womanly; but no women are Jews" (18). In
fact, in most Jewish studies scholarship, she writes, "the Jewish female enters the
frame of analysis only to exit as a man in drag" (19). This statement is particularly
interesting when considering Jewish drag performance in modern dance.

10. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity:Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 401; and Harley Erdman, Staging theJew: The
Performanceof an American Ethnicity,1860-1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University

Press, 1997), 40-60.
11. Jean Cocteau, quoted in Lyn Garafola, "Ida Rubinstein," Jewish Women: A Comprehensive
Historical Encyclopedia,Jewish Women's Archive, http://jwa.org/ encyclopedia/article/rubin
stein-ida.
12. Erdman, Staging theJew, 25-26.
13. Rossen, Dancing Jewish.
14. Pauline Koner, SolitarySong (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 24, 2.
15. Ibid., 71.
16. See the reviews of John Martin: "Dances by Pauline Koner: Recital at Guild Theater
Confirms Her Earlier Promise," New York Times, 8 Dec. 1930, 24; "Varied Program by
Pauline Koner" New York Times, 30 Apr. 1934, 13; "The Dance: On New Talent," New
York Times, 14 Dec. 1930, x 4; and "Varied Program by Pauline Koner," New York Times,
30 Apr. 1934, 13.
362 Rebecca Rossen
17. See Koner, Program, Shubert Theatre, 5 Nov. 1933, NYPL, DD. When dealing with a
kinesthetic time-art that disappears once it is performed, one must become adept at
putting together narratives and reconstructing dances and contexts from fragments
of evidence. There are no filmic records for many early-twentieth-century dances,
which requires the dance historian to coalesce evidence from reviews, programs,
photographs, press releases, publicity materials, interviews, oral accounts, and
published histories in order to imagine what those dances might have looked liked
and how they were received. For more on this process, see Susan Manning, Ecstasy and
the Demon: Feminismand Nationalism in the Dances of Mary Wigman (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 294n66.
18. Naum Rosen, "The Jewish Dance in America," Dance Observer1 (June-July 1934): 51, 55.
19. For more on how Hasidism could be relevant to modern Jewish experience, see
Martin Buber, Hasidism and Modern Man, ed. and trans. Maurice Feldman (New York:
Harper and Row, 1958).

20. Rosen, "Jewish Dance in America," 55; Koner, SolitarySong, 69.
21. The photographer, Aram Alban was an Armenian with studios in Paris and Alexan
dria. He photographed Koner during her trip to Palestine and Egypt.
22. Jennifer Robertson, Takarazuka: Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998), 97.

23. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminismand the Subversionof Identity(New York: Routledge,
1999), 176.
24. In Solitary Song (48), Koner described how she orchestrated efficient costume changes
for these shows.
25. Aaron, "Cinema's Queer Jews"; Sicular, "'A yingl mit,"' and "Gender Rebellion."
26. Sicular, "Gender Rebellion," 13.
27. Ost und West was renamed Mazel Tov for its U.S. distribution in 1924. For an intricate
analysis of this film, see JeffreyShandler, "Ost und West, Old World and New: Nostal
gia and Antinostalgia on the Silver Screen," in WhenJosephMet Molly: A Reader on Yiddish
Film, ed. Sylvia Paskin (Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves Publications, 1999), 72. My analy
sis is based on the recent restoration: East and West, VHS, directed by Sidney M. Goldin
and Ivan Abramson (1923; Waltham, MA.: National Center for Jewish Film, 1991).
28. See Rebecca Bryant, "Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in America,"
American Music 20 (Summer 168-87. Bryant also noted that Jewish vaudeville
2002):
starsSophie Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantorperformed
Tucker, songs about the
shimmy. For example, Brice's "Becky from Babylon," about a New York Jewess who
learned to shake it like an "Oriental," parodied both the exotic Jewesses and ghetto
girls that Brice frequently portrayed (177).

29. See Michael Rogin, Black Face, White Noise: Jewish Immigrantsin the Hollywood Melting Pot
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). For more on how Jewish American
dancers used "metaphorical minstrelsy" in modern dance, see Susan Manning,
"Black Voices, White Bodies: The Performance of Race and Gender in How Long
Brethren,"American Quarterly50 (March 1998): 25-48, and Modern Dance, Negro Dance. Race in
Motion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
Rebecca Rossen 363
30. For more on the "Jewish-American Princess," see Prell, Fightingto Become Americans, 177
208.
31. Rick Altman has argued that the film musical naturalizes heterosexuality. One of the
ways it achieves this is by offering in the plot a secondary conflict within a commu
nity that relies on the union of the central couple for a resolution. See Rick Altman,
The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 28-58.
32. Banes, Dancing Women,5, 92, 66.
33. Mark Raider, The Emergenceof American Zionism (New York: New York University Press,
1998), 56.
34. My forthcoming book will dedicate a full chapter to the ways in which Jewish chore
ographers have engaged with Zionist ideals and created works that reflected the
complicated and conflicted role of Zionism in Jewish American life.

35. Hadassah, programs, NYPL DD; Hadassah, "Dance Themes of Hassidism and
Hinduism," Dance Observer30 (March 1963): 37; "Dance Congress of 1953; Hadassah to
Teach Tagore Poem to Shan Kar," unknown author and periodical, from Hadassah
clippings file, NYPL DD; "In between Screens," Ma'ariv (Israel), 11 June 1956 (trans.
Ronnie Geva).
36. B.S., "Hadassah, Premice,and Primus," Dance Observer 12 (February 1945): 21; L.G.,
"Hadassah and Dance Company," Dance Observer 21 (April 1954): 59-60; Margaret
Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), 192, 194, 193.
37. "Performances of Jewish Dances Enchanting Effect," The Times of India, 12 Feb. 1959,
Hadassah clippings file, NYPL DD.
38. Ezra Zussman, "The Dances of Hadassah," Davar, 31 July 1959; and Sheike Ben Porath,
"On Two Performances,"Yedioth Achronot, 30 July 1959 (both articles trans. Ronnie
Geva); "Hadassah to Lead 8 Dance Classes," unknown Essex County, NJ, Jewish news
paper, Hadassah clippings file, NYPL DD. For more on how these binaries affected the
hierarchy of dance genres in Israel, see Nina Spiegel, "Cultural Formation in Eretz
Israel: The National Dance Competition of 1937," fewish Folkloreand EthnologyReview 20,
nos. 1-2 (2000): 59-77.
39. Walter Terry, "Jacob's Pillow Festival," New York Herald Tribune,30 June 1951; and "The
Dance," New YorkHerald Tribune,24 May 1948.
40. Doris Hering, "Jewish Dance Festival," Dance Screen Stage 22 (February 1948), 10.
41. A Gala Eveningof Dance, VHS, 92nd St. YM-YWHA, New York, 21 Apr. 1974 , NYPL DD.;
and American Dance Guild Presentsthe New Dance Group Gala Concert, VHS, American Dance
Guild, 1993.
42. Marilyn Danitz, "Hadassah's Use of Traditional Movement Gesture Exemplified by
'Shuvi Nafshi,'" Proceedingsof the Society of Dance HistoryScholars (1997), Twentieth Annual
Conference, Barnard College, New York City, 285-97.

43. Hadassah, "Dance Themes," 37-39.
44. See Joan Erdman, "Dance Discourses: Rethinking the History of the 'Oriental
Dance,'" in Moving Words: RewritingDance, ed. Gay Morris (New York: Routledge, 1996),
288-305.
364 Rebecca Rossen
45. Paula Hyman, Gender and Assimilation, in Modern Jewish Hisotry: The Roles and Representationoj
Women (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 42. Hyman's chapter, "Paradox
of Assimilation," also included important revelations about women's roles in organ
ized Judaism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
46. I thank Rabbi Andrea London of Beth Emet, the Free Synagogue, Evanston, Illinois,
for her insights on this point.
47. For more on gender, sexuality, and Jewish ritual, see David Biale, Eros and theJews: From
Biblical Israel to ContemporaryAmerica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The
first female Reform rabbi was Sally Priesand. See Paula Hyman, "Jewish Feminism,"
AmericanJewish Desk Reference(New York: Random House, 1999), 60-63.
48. Desmond, "Dancing out the Difference," 37.
49. Uncredited article in Charm Magazine (October 1950), Hadassah clippings file, NYPL
DD. See Adam Lahm, "Hadassah: A Career Kissed by the Gods," Arabesque 9
(September/October 1983): 7.
50. Mary Phelps, "Hadassah and Claude Marchant," Dance Observer 14 (November 1947):
104.
51. Hadassah: The Women's Zionist Organization of America, www.hadassah.org/frame.
asp?section=about.

23069906

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

23069906

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah

Author(s): Rebecca Rossen

On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S.

concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York Town Hall.

different from the other dances that constituted Koner's in the

early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born

soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening

temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian

tion. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner female characters; in

depicted an Orthodox boy on the verge of manhood; YeshivaBachur(1932)

student; Benjamin Zemach, a male choreographer, adorned an ensemble

Shapero offered a more abstract rendition in her Hasidic Sketches (1936).

FeministStudies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc.

screens in the early-twentieth century. The Viennese choreographer

presaging Barbra Streisand's Yeshiva "boy" in Yentl (1983). Feminist schol

U.S. concert dance more broadly.3 Koner did not perform on

performers, choreography, and representational modes flowed sinuously

ethnically ambiguous and androgynous figures who simultaneously

The role of gender in the of Jewishness in U.S. modern dance

choreographers such as Koner staged Jewishness, they inevitably staged

This article considers the provocative intermingling of gender,

Jewishness, and embodiment in U.S. modern dance the interwar

tinian-born Hadassah, who, like Koner, perpetuated, and even capitalized

Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul),5 she replaced with cross

gesturing. Instead of presenting Jewish this dances

effectively appropriated and recontextualized ritual gestures restricted to

Jewish men. Both Koner and Hadassah undeniably reproduced certain

ethnic (and gestural) transvestism essentialist notions of

gender and ethnicity and, in Hadassah's case, dramatically undermined

the androcentrism of traditional Judaism.

the abundant in which discourses of gender, ethnicity, and

Jewishness in dance. Similarly, contemporary dance scholarship is rich in

studies that how the body choreographs identity, but few

foreground Jewishness. Still, the convergence of dance studies and femi

play in the production of cultural meanings and specifically how dance

Susan have dances make meaning on more than one

frameworks that dances enliven but also to reflect on the potential of

dance's kinesthetic properties for innovation. In Albright's words, dances

may offer a "double moment of representation," projecting contradictory

lenge to static and repressive notions.

Thus, in order to fully understand the complex, and contradictory,

analysis have overlooked.

Exotic Dance and the Jewish Other

the when Koner made her debut, modern dance had

female choreographers were making great strides in re-envisioning roles

revolutionary site for the generation of radical new possibilities. Female

created dances that portrayed women as autonomous and

subjecta representative of modernity and humanity. However,

elements of modern dance, as defined by John Martin (the influential

Anglo-Saxon choreographers." Despite the fact that Jewish performers

Jewish. Resurrecting the works of artists left out of the

aesthetic and resulted in historical records that only show

In fact, at the same moment that modern dance was materializing as a

concrete the U.S concert was inundated with dance perform

Venues, critics, and sometimes the dancers themselves helped create a

between modern and ethnic dance. In recent years, dance

the female body in performance including the invocation of spirituality,

Denis's works on Indian and Asian themes invoked mysticism in

order to situate the (white female) dancer as an incarnation of spiritual

ecstasy and rejuvenation and drew upon Orientalism to clearly distinguish

encapsulate the essence of an ethnic or racial group and universalize this

merely presented an unadulterated, authentic enactment of their

This dichotomy especially impeded the progress of African American

they teetered between outsider/insider, off-white/white, foreigner/native