Judith Brin Ingber’s anthology Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance is a remarkable compilation of nineteen essays and more than 180 photographs focusing on Jewish and Israeli dance from numerous approaches—the social sciences, arts and humanities, and artists’ autobiographies and memoirs—and thus is expected to appeal to a wide variety of readers. The editor has skillfully gathered and organized some of the most central texts in the field of Jewish and Israeli dance research, either updating already-published articles or including new ones. Bringing together a diversity of sources and research angles—rare archival material (often originally in Hebrew), elaborate theorization, fine-grained ethnographies, historians’ explorations of old sources, and artists’ accounts of a complex and multidimensional situation—this volume is a precious tool for a broad public ranging from scholars to dance amateurs. Thus the book is a much needed contribution to numerous fields, including folklore studies, Jewish studies, dance studies, European studies, North American studies, Middle Eastern studies, and social anthropology.

As the author explains in her acknowledgments, the book’s nineteen chapters are not presented in a chronological order, but rather are “organized to instill the liveliness of dance in a performative way” (2). This editorial choice is the editor’s way to problematize her subject matter throughout the anthology, rather than simply juxtaposing a succession of articles. In this regard, Ingber’s introduction underlines the theoretical issues brought out by this volume and in doing so, she succeeds in weaving together debates more often addressed by various disciplines in their separate ways. Starting with the various ways of defining who and what is a Jew, and what is Jewishness, the editor continues with the challenging question, what is dance, to arrive at the question, what is Jewish dance? As each of these questions is rather complicated, she chooses to address them through the discussion of several intersecting themes: “Gesture” (7), “Judaism and the Body” (8), “Concepts of Time and Place” (11), “Impact of Diaspora” (15), and “Sources of Knowledge about Jewish dance” (17). These themes and issues are directly or indirectly tackled by the contributors in their in-depth case studies. For instance, in Sparti’s article, the author queries historical sources to question the existence of Jewish dance, in spite of the fact that Hebrew dance masters were numerous and important in Renaissance Italy (244). Other authors here engage theoretical questions from a fresh angle, for example, through analysis of debates within the Israeli folk dance scene, occurring from the origin of this scene in the first decades of the twentieth century to the present, on the query, “What is Israeli Dance?” (see chapters by Spiegel, Brin Ingber, Roginsky, and Kaschl, this volume).

Throughout this volume the authors are revealing the value of researching dance material, dancing contexts, and dance protagonists as a key to the study of a larger range of issues, including socio-political developments and historical periods. Questions that lie at the heart of this book revolve around the body, gender, religion, minorities, nation-building processes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and North America, folklore and migration, processes of creation, transformation, and dissemination, and politics of “applied folklore.” The confluence of these nineteen texts also permits us to approach such central issues through the articulation of different scales and different planes, as focus shifts from the individual to the group, from audience to dance critics to dancers in a specific dance company, or to the entire society or nation-state. The authors in this volume succeed in intertwining the constitutive planes of body movements and gestures, dance syntax, music, protagonists, imaginaries involved, and costumes, thereby giving readers exciting pathways for addressing issues central to anthropology and folklore studies. Such issues include going beyond the dichotomy between anonymous creation and known-creators, investigating the voluntary processes of folklore elaboration, and exploring the interplay between power relations and body construction.

While this anthology provides rich material and engaging thinking, readers might nonetheless encounter a few limitations. First, some articles would have been enriched by a fuller historical and political contextualization, in particular with regard to socio-political developments in Israel that led to changes in the status of Jewish social groups over the years and the way dance repertoires have been institutionalized in this context. Indeed, a critical turning point occurred in the 1970s when Israeli society transitioned from the ideal of “absorption” (klita) of all the newcomers within a single and common national culture to the recognition and the valorization of the multi-cultural dimension of Israeli identity. This change was conditioned by, among other factors, social movements of the so-called “Oriental Jews” (Mizrahim) contesting a false commonality that dismissed large parts of the culture they had brought to Palestine/Israel. In these movements they sought recognition of their own cultural elements within a broadened Israeli culture.

Similarly, more cross-references among the various chapters might have permitted readers to explore additional issues, such as the ways that references to “the past as a source of authentification” (341) were active during the creation of Israeli folk dance, though very differently than happens nowadays. Indeed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Zionist model of building an “old-new country” (see T. Herzl’s utopian novel, Altneuland, 1902) drawing on cultural references in the Bible and returning to so-called “Biblical times” in order to “take a leap” over the 2000 years spent in the Diaspora (Ben Gurion’s expression: see Gorny 1995), was central to the (re)creation of a (new) Hebrew dance (see, for instance, Zerubavel, 1995). Moreover, scholars might remain unfulfilled on the epistemology of dance research in the social and human sciences, as research methodologies and theories used by this volume’s authors are not always presented, nor is the current literature addressing such issues. However, this is not always the case as very comprehensive kinetic descriptions of dance practices are sometimes provided (as in Goren-Kadman and Lille, for example), and there is an engaging discussion on the necessity to think together about the complex relation between protagonists, contexts of performance, and choice of the repertoire performed (in Gellerman). Finally, some of the articles that were written a few decades ago seem not to have been fully updated, therefore leaving out some more recent work published on similar research objects and questions. However, these limitations should be seen as the flipside of the empirical richness and erudition provided by this must-have anthology.

Works cited:

Gorny, Yosef. 1995. “The ‘Utopian Leap’ in David Ben-Gurion’s Social Thought, 1920-1958.” In Israel, the First Decade of Independence, ed. I. Troen, 125-142. New York: State University of New York Press.

Herzl, Theodor. 1902. Altneuland. Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger.

Zerubavel, Yael. 1995. Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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[Review length: 1108 words • Review posted on September 24, 2013]