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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the Gebo Institute for Jewish Research. My name is Julia Rothkopf and I'm the program associate at yivo. Today we have Sonja Gollins and Josh Lambert joining us to discuss Sonia's book, It Could Lead to Mixed Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity. For those who do not know Yivo, we are a very special place for the celebration, contemplation and exploration of Yiddish Eastern European Jewish culture. We are located in New York City where a library and archive contain over 24 million documents and 400,000 books. These resources are used by researchers from all around the world. Also have lots of classes on Yiddish language and culture, exhibitions and public programs just like this one, where we aim to bridge the worlds of Jewish culture and our vast library and archival collections. We are very excited to have you all joining us for today's Book Talk. Sonia Gollins is lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. She is a scholar of Yiddish studies and German Jewish literature whose work focuses on dance, theater and gender. Her first book, It Could Lead to Make Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity, was published by Stanford University Press in 2021. Previously, she has taught at various universities, including the University of Vienna, the Ohio State University, and as well as the University of Gottingen, Germany. She received her PhD in Germanic languages and Literature from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA in Comparative Literature and Germanic Studies from the University of Chicago. And we also have Josh Lambert joining us today. He is the Sophia Moses Robison Associate professor of Jewish Studies and English and Director of the Jewish Studies Program at Wellesley Wellesley College. He's the author of the Literary Jews Publishing and Post War American Literature and Unclean Lips, Obscenity Jews and American Culture, as well as co editor of How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish. And now I will hand it over to Sonia and Josh.
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Well, thank you so much, Julia, and thanks for setting this up. It's always fun to do this and particularly because I get to ask the questions that I want to ask someone and that it's awkward to ask them if we're just hanging out. So, I mean, Sonia, I've known you for a long time. I've been reading your work for a long time. And I thought because this is the paperback edition, but this is your first book, it might just make sense to start with how you got on the track to being a scholar of Yiddish and German literature, cultural history. How did that start for you? Why did that become the focus of, of the work you do?
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Well, thank you. And it's, it's really great to be having this conversation with you because as. As you mentioned, we've known each other for a while, and actually it's very fitting that we're speaking here at a YIVO Institute event, because we actually met when we were both studying in the YIVO summer program years ago. But so I got started on this path because I wanted to learn Yiddish. I had just started high school, and I had an older relative, the. The. The younger brother of my great grandfather, who had functionally been a great grandfather for me. And he had been born in 1905 in what's now Belarus. And he told me I should learn Yiddish, which was the language that he grew up with. This is my Uncle Peter, and he's one of the two uncles that the book is dedicated to.
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And.
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And so when I heard that him say that I should learn Yiddish because it was a very expressive language, I was already interested in genealogy and family history. And I thought, I'm curious about learning all sorts of languages. Why not add Yiddish to the list? And that kept being something in the back of my head. And so when I was in high school and I decided that I didn't want to continue with French, but I did want to study another language, I wasn't sure how to go about learning Yiddish, but my high school did offer German, so I decided to take German, and I really fell in love with German, and I got really interested in the idea of German modernism. I had considered studying history, but I didn't know really that cultural history and social history existed. I had thought I would do something involving ancient history. And I remember taking a class on, like, the Assyrian Empire, where we were leading, reading lots of royal inscriptions. I was like, I want to learn about the pulse of the people, what they care about, what would make people excited or anxious. And I thought maybe literature is the way to go about doing that. And I spent the summer after my first year in university in Berlin, and I was just really intrigued by the idea of the dynamism of modernism. And at this point, I had already taken one Yiddish literature class in translation with Jan Schwartz, who was then at the University of Chicago and then subsequently was at Lund University in Sweden. And I was just really intrigued by this. So then when I found out about the Yiddish Book Center, I decided to apply for an internship. At that point, I had. I was also continuing with German, and I was interested in German modernism and how it related to Jews. And then I started taking Yiddish formally at the university, well, at the Yivo Book, at the Yiddish Book Center. And then at the University of Chicago, also with Anna Schwartz. And I was just really intrigued by all the possibilities to study things and ask questions that maybe hadn't been approached before. So I really got caught up in this whole romance of finding out about Yiddish culture. And at the Yiddish Book center internship, in addition to taking Yiddish language classes in this summer program, we also took Yiddish culture classes. And from the beginning, I was learning about the idea that the gender was part of it. And like, Yiddish could be this space for. For looking at these sort of, like, rebellious narratives. So I had classes with Naomi Seidman and David Schneer. And so from the beginning, I was just like, learning about ways that I could approach Yiddish literature in this way. And so these pieces sort of came together that I wanted to do something involving Yiddish and German. I ended up deciding that I wanted to pursue a PhD and also thinking about gender questions and how gender and choices that young people made about who they would marry and what kind of families they would make and why. That was a source of great concern for these modernist writers. All these things became part of what I wanted to study. And so then it just became a question basically of how the dance piece would become part of it. I should also mention that when I decided to turn to literature, I turned to comparative literature as a way of looking into German and Yiddish. And so when I was thinking about the modern Jewish experience, the idea of just limiting it to those two languages, even though I was thinking in a Germanic languages context, for a lot of my studies, it seemed that it made sense to bring other literatures, including Anglo American literature, into dialogue with these. These questions that were happening in German and Yiddish.
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I mean, what makes sense to me about the story you told and the sort of work you do is that I think for some people, literature is this sphere that's separate from social life that sort of has its own, that is just sort of maybe distinct or separated. But my feeling is that what you're doing often is using literature as a window into social history and vice versa. Right? Like thinking about how social history can open up a literary text for us. And I think that, you know, that's. It's not so unusual among Jewish literary scholars. That's something that I think a lot of us find ourselves doing. But I think particularly this book is such a strong example of that, because one could imagine someone writing just a history of mixed dancing in Jewish culture. And your book is kind of gets that job done, but also is so attuned to how literature itself is like part of that story, tells that story to us, you know, unpacks it. The question. The other question I wanted to ask you, though, and I think is, you know, related in the sense that a lot of literary scholars. I think there is a prejudice that we can say exists among literary scholars against kind of embodiment and thinking about embodiment in the kind of way we think about cultural history that, you know, not accidentally. A lot of literary scholars are very textual and very wrapped up in abstraction. And I. I'm just curious, like, what was. What background of dance did you bring in? Did you bring with you that, like, got you started on this project on mixed dancing? Like, I actually don't know. The. Having read this book and knowing you, I don't really remember or know what your history of dance was.
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So a lot of the methodologies that I use come from this emerging field called literary dance studies, where you look at literary descriptions of dance in literature. And that's something that's particularly prevalent in. I mean, to the extent that it's prevalent anywhere in the study of 19th century British literature, especially Jane Austen. And so one of the things that I wanted to contribute was showing how Jewish literature can add to this story. But I bring up this field of literary dance scenes to illustrate what you just said. Because early on in my process of working on this project, I went to a conference that was specifically about dance and literature in Graz, Austria, and we had this conference and everybody was presenting on this intersection of dance and literature. And then during the coffee breaks, we would quietly ask each other, so do you dance? What sort of dance do you do? Because, yes, there's this. I think there is this idea that's present in a lot of ways, including in the ways that think. People think of the caretaker responsibilities and academic labor that scholars should just be a mind, not a body. And the question of thinking about how to. To take the dance seriously is something that's still ongoing, especially now that unlike in the period that was my primary area of examination between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust, it's not necessarily the expectation that everybody is a dancer, that everybody knows how to social dance as a way of socializing with people. So for me, I've been dancing since before I could remember. From when I was two, I started doing ballet, not to a great serious professional level. But by the time I started learning Yiddish literature or Yiddish language and about Yiddish literature, it made sense also for me to learn the folk dances. And since I was studying in Chicago, there was a really respected Yiddish dance teacher, Steve Weintraub. Who was also based in Chicago. And since I received a grant from the Yiddish Book center to put on Yiddish cultural programming on campus, I thought, well, I should work with Steve on that. And I just loved it. I loved going to these dance workshops. And so I went to Yiddish Summer Weimar and to Kles camp. And as I was starting my PhD. And I think a lot of times when you're doing a PhD, sometimes it's also thinking strategically, not just what do I want to study, but also what sorts of opportunities do I want to have, what countries might I want to visit? I think I heard about somebody once who came up with some sort of dissertation topic that meant that they could just eat lots of cheese and drink lots of wine in southern France. And for me, I realized that I really wanted to keep going to these dance workshops. And if I was writing about dance and I'd already done a term paper and a conference paper that did relate to dance, if I was focusing on dance, then I could also apply for. For funding from Penn to go to dance workshops. And I thought, okay, I'll do that. And then I realized, wait, actually, I'm already interested in these questions about how Jewish women encounter modernity and how it all relates to courtship. And actually, dance is a really great lens for looking at it and something that hasn't really been done before in this Jewish literary context. So this actually works out really well. And in the end, I didn't actually apply for funding that often to go to dance workshops, but what ended up happening was I started getting invited to these workshops or to these festivals to talk about my research. So I was able to make it work on a student budget that way.
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And just to follow up on that, can you think of ways in which your experience dancing played out in the scholarship? Are there. You know, there must be moments where, when you're reading a literary text describing a dance, or let's say, let's put it this way, there are moments when I'm reading a literary text describing a dance. And because I'm not someone who has a lot of experience with dance, I just sort of take for granted that other people are dancing, they're doing something, and I don't really have to think much more about it. But I imagine that there must be moments where even, like in your earlier reading of literary text, you'd, like, come across something and. And it would just jump out to you because you'd pay attention to something that, you know, I wouldn't pay attention to. Can you, like, does. Is. Is there an example that comes to mind, like earlier in the process, that sort of made you understand that you could do this as a book.
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So I think a lot of. I mean, the. The dance descriptions that I look at are very varied. Sometimes they'll tell you the name and they'll give you a sense of the choreography. Sometimes they'll say that the characters dance. And they might give an indication of how many characters are dancing together, if it's a couple's dance or somebody's dancing solo. But they won't necessarily say what the name of the dance is. So one of the things that I was really thinking about, and I think that does come from my experience dancing, is just thinking about the emotional environment for the people that are dancing. And some of the ways that things like eye contact and who you're facing might heighten the atmosphere of the dance floor. One of the things I think about a lot is how the dance floor is this really special space where characters are in the celebratory mood. Often this is at weddings and characters are dressed up. They might be drinking some alcohol. They're like, having nice food. There's music. It feels really different from their normal, everyday type of life. And then they might also encounter people and have the opportunity for flirtation and dancing with people that maybe their parents wouldn't have introduced them to and maybe their matchmaker wouldn't have chosen for them. And so then it becomes a situation where people are having these interactions that might not happen in other places. They're being watched by other people who have. Who know how to read dancing because it's something that they were trained in themselves. And then there's this big question of what happens when the music stops. Are they able to continue having this sort of environment where the rules don't really apply, or are the social hierarchies and the sorts of divisions going to be enforced? And so I think not just about men and women dancing and this taboo, which is a big part of my book, but also how this taboo gets really enforced in situations where people who wouldn't be considered appropriate marriage partners are dancing together. So it's much more controversial if Jews and Christians are dancing and flirting together, or if people from different classes are dancing together, or if somebody who's married is dancing with somebody who's not married. So these are, I guess, so those are things that I really thought about based on my own experience dancing. Also, since I had done a number of these dances, I could think about the choreography, even though there wasn't so much easy to locate, if you weren't looking for it, scholarship on some of the specific dances. There are some really great resources on Yiddish dance, both in studies of klezmer music and like ethnomusicology. And also a lot of the people that are doing really great work in Yiddish dance studies don't have conventional academic appointments. There's this website, Helen's Yiddish Dance Page, that's just great resource of just like all different types of things related to Yiddish dance. But this, I mean, my book is the first study, like academic study of European Jewish dance, Although I do have a chapter on American dance. And so a lot of things weren't necessarily in places that would be really accessible to people. So one thing that you do get is when you have Yiddish texts in particular that have been translated, more of the German texts that have these sorts of dance scenes weren't necessarily translated because they're often more designed for a popular audience. So when you have these translations of the Yiddish texts, a lot of. On some occasions when you have the dance mentioned, the translator might want to avoid a footnote and doesn't necessarily say the name of the dance that you get in the Yiddish original. And that's the sort of thing that I pay a lot of attention to and that I think about a lot when I'm trying to interpret these scenes myself. But translators sometimes are thinking about it in different ways because often you want to avoid footnotes. And it might have been less than straightforward for readers to find out what the dances were originally.
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Okay, so we'll talk a little bit more in a minute about sort of some examples of like, these readings that you do. But first, you know, you brought up the taboo on mixed dancing in Jewish culture. And I think it might be helpful for some people for you to just go over sort of the ways in which dance, mixed dancing was figured differently for Jews in. In Europe than it did. Than it did for other populations in Europe. My sense is that, you know, that's a. That's a fairly like. It's something that people have a sense of. People, you know, are aware. Right. That dancing, especially mixed gender dancing, was something that, like, was talked about a lot, was discussed was. Was tense in its way. But yeah, I'm not sure that people know to the same degree like, how conventional it was or wasn't to mixed, you know, to do mixed dancing in non Jewish, you know, European culture. So why don't you say a little bit about just that social history as the background for the literary studies you do. So.
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Thank you. One of the things that I found really interesting was that dancing is seen as potentially dangerous for both Jews and non Jews. And so you get, you get Christian theologians that were concerned about mixed dancing between men and women. I open up the introduction with a joke, but it could lead to mixed dancing, which also inspires the title of the book. And one of the things that I found out was that this is a joke that Jews use, but it's also used by Baptists and other and other religious groups. So there were, there were anxieties about dancing, but they were. The way that, it's. The way that these concerns about dancing were discussed were different for Jews. Certainly various groups were concerned about sexual impropriety. And until the, around the late 18th century, when Jews were writing about mixed dancing or warning people against mixed dancing, it tended to be focused on concerns about sexual impropriety as well. But at the same time that Jews had the opportunity of becoming acculturated, of becoming part of non Jewish society, that you also get a different type of discussion about the dancing. And there are concerns there that Jews are going to be dancing in ways that basic, that mirror magnify all the concerns that Jewish leaders had about entry into non Jewish society. So for instance, one, one phenomenon that I found were examples of rabbis complaining to the secular authorities that the Jewish young people were engaging in dance, mixed dancing with Christians. And they were saying, and they were asking the local authorities to crack down on members of the Jewish community. And they were saying that the reason that the non Jewish authorities should get involved was because the sorts of people that would not follow the rules of their religion would also be the sorts of people that were not going to be good citizens in general. So you get this different way about talking about the dancing. And one thing that I argue is that mixed dancing becomes a metaphor for the way that Jews were talking about modernity more generally. And so things like secularization, urbanization, immigration, the changes in how marriages were, were set up. So going from arranged marriages to love matches. And so you have. And so like I discuss this in the more social history or cultural history components of my book, but also in literature, you have writers who are engaging with these concerns because for a lot of literature, they show the sorts of things that people want to read and reflect the things that they find both pleasurable and scary. And so here what writers will do is they will use dance scenes to give their take on these changes that are happening, but in a way that's entertaining for their readers. They'll put some sort of scandalous dancing in there. And that will show what they think about all of these changes that are taking place.
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I mean, it occurs to me, and I'm sure you know this better than I do, that, like, there were just, you know, in the. Let's say, in the 19th century, there were just relatively few places for people to mix across gender. Like, there just weren't a whole bunch of places you could go. And that might be hard for at least young people now to, like, imagine that life was much more gender segregated. And so a dance was like this kind of magical, strange, unusual thing where not only are you mixing in a way that, like, normally you're not, but all these other possibilities are opened in a way that does seem like a slippery slope towards illicit sexuality and sort of, you know, the connections between people that otherwise wouldn't be possible and all those, you know, sorts of things. And really, it is sort of fascinating to imagine. Why don't you give us an example or two? I mean, there's really a lot. What I remember from reading your book is one of the things it convinced me of very thoroughly is this is not a small part of modern Jewish literature, right? Like, we have these dance scenes. Even if we, you know, even if someone like me wouldn't think of this as like, a central facet of Eastern European Jewish life in, you know, so many dozens of the writers that I read, you could point to the moments in their books when characters get together around social dance. And I wonder if you can just give a few examples, an example or two of a text where paying attention, close attention to the dancing helps us to see it in a different way or brings out something that we might not otherwise have understood about it. And really, I mean, you have so many interesting texts to talk about that it's probably hard to choose, but I'm sure you can give us an example or two.
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Well, you tipped me off in advance. So I have two examples. One that's set in Europe and involves a male Jewish dancer, and then one that's set in the United States, and it's about the experience of a woman. So the first text is a novella that I discuss in my chapter on taverns, on Jewish tavern keeping. Because in my book, I focus on most of my chapters on different spaces where dancing occurred. And so this is a novella by Leon Coburn called Yanko Boiler. And it's about a young man who. A young Jewish man who has grown up the son of a tavern keeper in rural Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire. And one of the Things that I argue in my chapter on taverns is that the dance scenes involving the children of tavern keepers reveal concerns about how Jewish families in rural areas are able to educate their children about Jewish life. And so Yanko Boile, he can barely say his prayers. He speaks Yiddish as if he were with the accent of his peasant neighbors.
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And.
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And. But he's much. He's much better able to fit in with the non Jewish peasants who he grew up with. And one of the things is that he is the best dancer. And he's. And also all of the. All of the non Jewish peasant women in the village think that he is the most attractive man because he is such a tremendous dancer. And so the dancing, the fact that he's able to dance that way, and also that he uses dancing as a way of demonstrating his physicality and how he belongs with these neighbors and friends of his and his lover, they show how he fits in better with them. But then, on the other hand, he's consumed by guilt and tortured even when he. When he's on the dance floor with the idea that he is potentially letting down his. His father by engaging in this society. And he. He really resists the. The assumption that a lot of the other characters have that he's going to convert to Christianity because he doesn't really fit in with the Jewish characters. So dancing heightens a lot of that and really shows how well he can quite literally perform among the peasant neighbors. Another example that's set in the United States is Kady Molodovsky's novel Von Lublinbes, New York, which has been translated by Anita Norwich as A Jewish Refugee in New York. And this is a novel that's set during World War II about a young refugee from Lublin. And during the course of the novel, she's becoming more accustomed, reluctantly, to American society, even though she thinks that a lot of the other young people aren't taking the war seriously and basically that they're doing swing dancing instead of paying attention to the war reports. And she is very aware that her family in Europe is suffering, and she doesn't know how they're suffering, but they're definitely not dancing. This is something that she makes clear. And since she is in the year of mourning for her mother, who was killed in the German invasion of Lublin, she doesn't dance. And this is one of the last things that happens in her transition to becoming American, is that finally, at the end of the novel, she is willing to dance when up till then, she's been resisting it. And that's seen as a stubborn reminder of her Europeanness and how she doesn't quite fit in with the other young people who she views as not taking the suffering of European Jewry seriously.
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And that detail, which I had forgotten, though I've read that novel about the ways in which mourning practices interact with social dance. Like that sense that you can't celebrate when you're in mourning is just another thing that feels to me, and I'm sure there is some parallel to it in non Jewish culture, but it just seems very specific to Jewish culture, a way in which someone who can't be at a celebration or can't participate in that way is sort of marked out by their grief or their morning practice. That's totally fascinating.
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All right.
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We don't have that much time. I realize that time is going quickly, so I want to ask a couple of more questions before we open it up for Q and A. And as someone being an Americanist myself, one of the things that interests me in your project is that it seems to me that for a while, probably for at least a couple of generations in the US and other places, social dancing has become sort of so integral to how Jewish life happens that if you go to a bar mitzvah celebration, if you go to a wedding, if you go to a Jewish summer camp, there might be some prohibitions on mixed dancing at Orthodox versions of all those things. But at, you know, most Reform, conservative, Reconstructionist, other Jewish events, there's going to be mixed dancing as a kind of centerpiece to the event. And so I think that there's a degree to which, like, that's. It's a very central part of Jewish life now, but I'm not sure it's one that we have like, a real. I think if you asked a lot of American Jews about, like, what that dancing is doing for them or what its purpose is or what its meaning is, they might not be incredibly articulate about it. They would just sort of say it's just what you do at a wedding or it's just what you do at a mitzvah. But I wondered if the sort of work you've done and the thinking you did for the book can help us to understand a little more anything about the way that social dance has become so central in Jewish life. I know that I think in the conclusion of the book, you talk about Dirty dancing and the Catskills and that sort of aspect of. Of Jewish cultural history in the US But I. But I just wonder, like, to what degree you feel like this work that you've done on cultural history, you know, opens up that. That question of social dancing in a. In a different way in the present. And I guess also I want to ask you, and maybe it's separate, if you have anything to say about TikTok dances, because I don't really know anything about that. But it does seem to me that for kids, for little kids, people my children's age, there is this whole new sort of socialization of dance around these kind of performances. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about that.
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So thank you for this question. It's really interesting to think about. And I'm not sure that I've necessarily approached things in thinking about it in quite the same way that you have, because I think that a lot of these dances that are ubiquitous at Jewish communal events, they are. I mean, in some ways they're different, and certainly some of the emphasis is different than what I've been studying. But I have one thing that I think if I were to think about it more further, one thing that I would want to do is think about certain pop culture moments where having these. These dances and these Jewish celebrations are really significant for. For these pop culture texts. One thing that I'm thinking about is there's this song from the. The show Crazy Ex Girlfriend that's. It's called Remember that We Suffered. And it's basically. It's showing a. Like the. Some festive dancing, like a horuset at a Jewish communal event. And the characters are singing about basically that part of this Jewish tradition that they're keeping on is like remembering the ways in which Jews have suffered in the past. And then you have. The dancing, which is in Jewish tradition is a symbol of joy. And that's sort of the backdrop for this song. So that's something that I might think about also about the. I think you might have been the person that told me to look at some of the dancing scene, like the wedding scene in the show Transparent. So I think those are some texts that I might think about to think about how dancing might punctuate some of the ways that the Jews are both thinking about dancing or Jews are celebrating their. Their festive occasions and life cycle events and also the ways that they appear in pop culture. I don't know so much, I have to admit, about TikTok dancing, but I do want to give a shout out to Cameron Bernstein, who is a Yiddish TikTok influencer and a great friend of my book. And so she's. I think we first got in touch with each other because she was interested in some of the Yiddish vocabulary for dancing in order to interact with a TikTok trend. So I think that's sort of how I've thought most about it. But there's certainly a lot, a lot more to explore there. And I definitely encourage other people that are, that are interested in Jewish dance research to, to explore more of these things and hopefully they might like to be in conversation with my book in some way.
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C
Yeah, no, I think we'd probably agree that there's been an interesting wave of Jewish dance studies over the last 10 years or so and there's still plenty more to do. And it's sort of a topic that's open. I don't know, I wonder if it's useful to say or if you'd agree that in sort of conventional social dancing in Jewish communities you really don't have some of the tensions and conflicts that you have in the literature you've studied. In other words, I don't know that in the way that class is sort of cross class mixing or Jews and non Jews mixing are very tense or fraught issues in, in the text that you've written about. Like, I don't know that that's a site that dancing is a site of that conflict for, you know, in the last 20, 30, 40 years in general, like you in Dirty Dancing. It certainly is, right In Dirty Dance. The whole point in Dirty Dancing is that it's a. That in that environment you could cross class lines in on the dance floor. But I just think that that probably isn't a huge facet of social dancing for American Jewish communities.
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And anymore from my own experience, because I'm a dance leader and then also I have friends and family who get married sometimes, sometimes I end up getting called in to lead dancing there. And I've noticed that a lot of times it's non Jewish in laws that are particularly excited about the dancing that's going on. And I think in terms of my book's epilogue, which you mentioned, where I do bring in some post war sources and in addition to Dirty Dancing, there's like unorthodox and several more recent novels, some of which are set in the historical past. But a lot of the danger of the dancing has been removed from these texts. Not necessarily all of it, but there's less threat and there's more of a. An idea that couples that are not from the same group can have a happy ending and that this will somehow get resolved. So a lot of the concerns that might be seen as incredibly problematic in some of the pre War texts are not seen as being so dangerous in these more recent texts.
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C
And there's a way. I mean, I always think about those kinds of social dangers in the past. There's a way in which there's a loss there. Right. You can imagine how electric it was to be in a room where you could cross a boundary. That would be truly scandalous. And the fact that it's harder to imagine that happening now is maybe a loss for the power of social dancing in some way.
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A
I have found it kind of funny. I've attended certain Dati Lomi, or modern Orthodox weddings in Israel, where at a certain point, the mechitza, the divider between men and women, will come down. Sometimes that's also when the cigarettes come out. And so it's sort of interesting to think about which of those divides might still exist and how they might disappear, and then, as you say, how that might mean that some of the. The heightened feeling that people might have when there was this real sense of a taboo might not exist in certain spaces. Although, of course, there are certain communities where the taboo of mixed dancing is still very prevalent and in some ways may be more strictly observed or more consistently observed than was sometimes the case in the past.
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C
Yeah, that's certainly a fascinating thing to think that the taboo in some places has gotten stronger. Okay, I think I have just time for one last question, and then we'll open it up for Q and A. And I just want to give you a chance to talk about what projects you're working on next, because obviously the book is out in paperback. You've been talking about it for a long time, and I know you're working
- [40:34]
A
on new stuff, so thank you. And this is also a great opportunity for me to plug a future EVO event. So my main project right now is Women who Wrote Plays in Yiddish. When it comes to feminist scholarship in Yiddish, it's often been related to particular genres. So starting in the 1980s and the 1990s, there was scholarship started on poetry, and then you get more translations of short stories and more recently, interest in novels and newspaper writing. But there hasn't been as much on plays. It's only been in the past year, and that we've had published translations into English of Yiddish plays by women, which is very exciting. If there are earlier translations into English that I don't know about, I would love to hear about it. But as far as I know, it's only been in the past year that we've had two translations published online. And next month, in November, we're also going to get a book with three translations, which is great. To my knowledge, there's only two academic articles about plays by women, one by Deborah Kaplan, one by myself. And so I realized through my work with the Digital Yiddish Theatre Project that there just wasn't so much awareness, although there certainly is some. And there are people who have been doing readings. It was a series by the Volksbiene Theater with readings of Yiddish plays by women. But this is a subject that's really on the cusp. So this is what I've been working on. And as part of that I'm doing a translation of a play who is a modernist, a Polish modernist Yiddish writer. He was in the circle of Eyel Peretz in the early 20th century, and she also was a founder of an avant garde theater company, the Azazel Theater Troupe in Warsaw. And then she began writing this play in the 1920s that was in response to the pogroms that were in Eastern Europe, primarily in Ukraine, following World War I. And it was particularly about the experiences of children. And she worked on this play for several decades. It didn't get published until the 1950s, and at that point it was really celebrated by her colleagues. It won a literary prize, but as far as I know, it was never performed. So the play is called Miriaml and it's understood either to be about pogroms or about the Holocaust by the time it was performed. And it has this really fantastic protagonist. Miriamal is a 13 or 14 year old girl who's an orphan and she's described as having a mental illness, but she's kind of a prophetess figure. And actually she tells prophecy. She also speaks a lot in rhyme. I'm trying to keep the rhyme. And she says morbid things that scare the other children. But she also can be very tender. And she has a crush on the rabbi's handsome son. And at the end of the play she leads the children to Jerusalem for Warsaw, or at least that's what she claims she's doing. So I have a translation of this
- [43:51]
B
play
- [43:54]
A
that I'm going to have two staged readings of this spring in March in London and in April at Yivo in New York. So that's the main thing that I'm working on right now. I'm also planning on writing an academic monograph that has to do with Yiddish plays by women, probably focusing on the Schomer family. So this family that was really involved in Yiddish melodramas and the writer Shomer, notorious writer of these Yiddish melodramas, had four Children who survived to adulthood, all of whom were very involved in American Jewish institutional life and all of whom were wrote plays. And I'm particularly interested in two of the daughters who wrote plays together, Miriam Zinser and Rose Schomer Botulis. And I'm slowly developing a project that has to do with dance and German antisemitism.
- [44:48]
C
The most amazing thing about translating a play is that you can do a staged reading. Like, in what other literary field could you have so much fun presenting the work as the staged reading is absolutely going to be, even if it's intense material, just to have people performing it is going to be amazing. That's very exciting. One of the things we can feel, I think, really enthusiastic about in the field of Yiddish studies is how much the field is changing because of the work that people are doing to translate women's work and make sure that it gets know, like reintroduced into the canon. And I think that it's exciting to think of how very different the field of Yiddish studies is going to look, is going to feel, already does, but will feel in the next 5, 10, 15 years as students enter it and can have the benefit of all these sources. Okay, so I'm going to take stuff out of the Q and A. And the very first one, which absolutely is, is the highest priority question. And please, if you have other questions for us, please don't hesitate to type them in. And I'll try to get to as many as possible. But the first and most important question is you didn't actually tell the joke, so you have to tell the joke. I'm sorry, you might not want to, but it's like your responsibility.
- [46:13]
A
I mean, I've gotten to the point where I have very little shame about telling I. Telling this joke. So a young man who's about to get married goes to his rabbi to learn about the mitzvah, the commandment of sexual intercourse with his wife. And the. The rabbi explains the. The mitzvah to him. And the young man is terribly embarrassed. He's. He's completely flushed red fist, he can barely speak. And the rabbi says to him, my son, do you have any questions? And the young, the young man stammering bright red, he says, rabbi, is it permissible to perform the mitzvah with the man on top? And the rabbi says, yes, yes, my son. This is a very classic way of performing the mitzvah. You should have many children and they should, you know, become rabbis. And so the young man feels a bit better. He's. He's starting to. To Be a little bit less flushed. And he stammers a bit less. And he says, rabbi, is it permissible to perform the mitzvah with the woman on top? And again, the rabbi is very supportive. And he says, yes, my son. This is, you know, this is completely kosher. Some people even prefer it. And the rabbi and the young man continues with asking questions. And I don't go into so many more details because I am aware this is still an academic presentation or an academic book. But the young man is feeling much more comfortable. He's almost back to his normal complexion. He's not stammering as much. And the rabbi has just been completely supportive of all of his various creative ideas. So then finally, the young man, who is feeling much more relaxed, asks, rabbi, is it permissible to perform the mitzvah standing up? Absolutely not. The rabbi says, it could lead to mixed dancing. And that's how I begin my book.
- [48:16]
C
It's a really good joke. It's just a good joke. There's a couple other interesting questions that I thought I'd give you. And honestly, in some cases these are probably these sort of break off from the work you did in the book. But I just think these are interesting things to think about. One is from a participant who asked, who says, one hallmark of dancing at Jewish rituals in my lifetime is parents dancing with children. This, I presume, is very modern and maybe very American. And I wondered in. In the sources, is there parents dancing with children? Is that a thing that you found or not at all?
- [48:56]
A
So I'm. So I think maybe this might be referring to the. The first dance where you might have the. The opposite sex parent dancing with the bride or the groom. And so that I haven't found references to. But you definitely have intergenerational dancing where you'll have people dancing to show their connection with people. So you have examples. For instance, Dernister has a short story or text called Polish. And Polish is a name for the mitzvah tants, the dance that celebrates or that performs the mitzvah of dancing opposite the bride to give her joy. And so it's a description of a bride dancing with her grandfather, and it's about the emotional bond between them. So this is a text that, to my awareness, has not been translated. And so it's sort of in the back of my mind as something I might want to translate myself. Also in Yehoshua Aparla's novel Yiden von Egansjor, or Everyday Jews, which has been translated, there is this beautiful scene where a stepmother and her stepdaughter dance together. I mean, so this would. I mean, they're dancing with the separating handkerchief, similar to the mitzvah tants, but this would probably be referred to as a kosher tans, which is a very. Which also has a role in the Jewish wedding. And so their dancing together shows this emotional bond. I have an article that I wrote in the journal Jewish Social Studies where I go more into analysis of that scene. Also in the film east and west with Molly Pecan, this is the film that got the comedian Molly Picon her start. There's a wedding scene where the character Molly, like both the actress and the character's name, Molly, where Molly's father breaks into a circle of women so that he could dance with his mother.
- [51:01]
C
You know, I do think that's probably what the question is about the person.
- [51:05]
B
Great
- [51:08]
C
home movies show me dancing with my dad and my brothers at bar mitzvahs. And it's. You know, and I. And I do think that in community spaces, like, parents dancing with their children is just this, like, sort of sweet thing. That's. That it's not about any kind of, like, exciting or illicit social mixing. It's just about the pleasure of being together and, like, sort of moving together, something like that.
- [51:31]
A
I mean, so much about dancing is about reinforcing bonds of community. Yeah. And absolutely, people do that with their families.
- [51:40]
C
That actually is maybe a good connection to this other question, which is a little bit more complicated. But someone wrote in to ask about the relationship between mixed sex dancing and Zionism, which is really not the, you know, the centerpiece of your book necessarily. But I want, you know, they wrote in the question, is it similar to the role of Hungarian literature and poetry as a trigger of nationalism, Magyarization in the 19th century? So there's these ways in which these social practices are very often connected to, like, rituals of, like, national belonging or other kinds of, you know, other. Other kinds of, like, social reinforcing of roles or symbols or something like that. And I guess, you know, you can. Maybe there are maybe other scholars who've worked more on the Zionist question than you have, but maybe you can say something about the relationship between this kind of social dancing and sort of nationalist practice.
- [52:38]
A
Yeah, thank you. I'm glad you asked that question, because I can see it, too. And I think it was asked by one of my students. So I'm. Yeah, so that's. So I definitely wanted to address that. I do address the question of nationalism, both Zionism and sort of European nationalism a bit in the book. And I do think dancing is very much part of the ways that different groups tried to have a sense of national identity. And a lot of the research in Jewish dance does have to do with dancing in Israel. And a lot of the ways that people think about Jewish dance do have to do with the popularization of Israeli folk dances in connection with the Zionist movement. The prevalence of. Of hora sets at American Jewish weddings, for instance. So one thing that I do address in the book is about Zionist balls where you would have. I mean, so yes, a lot of the. So dancing is a big part of the. Of the Zionist movement and the ways that. Or the social practices and cultural practices. You definitely do have dancing as part of it. But also when European Jews were supporting Zionism, they would hold balls that might include pageantry. And one thing that I found ironic in my research was that sometimes these balls would have bourgeois European social dances that maybe a lot of Zionists would actually object to. And characters in this one novella that I discuss in more detail actually don't really seem to explicitly see a problem with that. I also look at. I don't look at Hungarian nationalism specifically, but Czech nationalism or bohemian identity comes up in another text that I look at in my tavern chapter, which is Leopold Compert's novella Dikinder des Granders. So the children of the rend or the Arendatur, So a leaseholder in a local tavern. And so there's a scene where a Jewish man participates in bohemian folk dancing with a friend of his to show that he can be a real Hussite, which means basically that he is a real bohemian man, even though he's Jewish.
- [55:13]
C
Okay. I think there are a few other interesting questions, and if you saw one that you really want to answer, just ignore me when I ask this question. But I thought the one that might just be a relatively quick one for you to answer is the first question someone asked. Have you searched in the archives of the Jewish press for discussions of Jewish dance? And I know the answer is yes, but maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you found in press archives, particularly as opposed to literary sources.
- [55:41]
A
So, yes, I mean, the literary versus press sources is actually very blurred because a lot of the texts that I was. That I found in the press were actually serialized novels and novellas and stories, because there were literary pages or foyetons in a lot of these. In a lot of these papers, and a lot of them involve dance. But one thing that I found really fascinating when I was doing the. Doing this project and this has more to do with the methodology or the way that the research landscape has changed over the past decade or so than it does with the actual topic. But one thing that happens is it became a lot easier to use OCR to search for specific words in these digitized press resources. So two of the ones that I used in particular were Compact Memory, which is this amazing resource that has digitized German Jewish periodicals. And then there's also the Jewish Historical Press, which is a database of Jewish newspapers internationally in various languages. But that's where I would find a lot of the Yiddish sources. And over the time that I was working on it, it became a lot easier to look for the word dance in various languages and to find things. And then it became a lot harder to look at all the things that would come up because there were just so many. And these. These tools became a lot more sensitive. So it's been really interesting thinking about how some of the. The ways that I approached this research, both in terms of. Of newspapers, but also in terms of books with the. The Spielberg Digital Library of the Yiddish Book center, how it just. It became different in ways that made certain things easier, especially during the pandemic, and certain things harder because of the volume of potential directions to look.
- [57:37]
C
Right. I can only imagine how many hits you get searching for the word tants in the Yiddish Book Center's OCR collection. I'm sure it's gotta be thousands.
- [57:48]
A
Yes, but then sometimes things wouldn't show up. Like, for instance, there was one archive I went to, and I was just looking for taunts. I mean, in that case, it was German. It was a German archive, and I would just look a German Jewish archive. And I looked for tanz, which is also the German word. And I got lots of hits, and they were all for books that were published in the city of Konstanz, which has the word in it. So one of the things I'm really hoping for in this research is that people will just be more aware of dance as this important aspect of Jewish life. I found a lot of social histories didn't necessarily have dance or balls mentioned in the indices, So I would have to look for things like weddings or music in order to find references to dance practice. And I'm hoping that that might change a bit as a result of my research.
- [58:39]
C
Yeah, I mean, certainly that's the hope. Right. Just that people will recognize how big a part of modern Jewish culture this has been and find ways to understand it as part of the social history and cultural history. Thank you so much. It's been great to chat with you about the book. I wanted to tell everyone who's still listening, who's still with us. It's a wonderful book, deeply learned, fascinating in every way, and I hope if you've enjoyed hearing us talk about it, you'll get a copy and read through it.
- [59:13]
A
Thank you so much. Sa.