This morning I saw the New York Times Obituary for Harry Belafonte. During my childhood and adolescence (late 1950s-1960s), my family socialized with Harry and Julie Belafonte regularly when they visited LA. My father's closest friend, as well as business partner, was Harry Belafonte's brother-in-law [the friend's wife was Julie Robinson's sister]. I remember fondly seeing him perform at the Greek Theater from the front row, followed by meetings backstage afterwards. I also remember the great many Civil Rights and Ban-the-Bomb marches and protests that my father and I attended with the friend's family during those years. I am now an old lefty who has my parents' original vinyl Harry Belafonte's records, and I cherish his part in the social activism I’ve participated in and supported all my adult life.
A significant number of The Choice’s readers questioned how I could have my hero Nathan, an Orthodox rabbi, participate in mixed dancing at a mid-1950’s New York City dance hall. The answer comes from scholar Sonia Gollance’s 2021 National Jewish Book Awards finalist, “It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity” (Stanford University Press). She is an excellent speaker and I urge my readers to sign up for her May 9 lecture.
Contemporary popular culture often portrays Jewish mixed-sex dancing as either absolutely forbidden or as the punch line of a dirty joke. Fictional representations of women who leave the Hasidic world sometimes use transgressive dancing to underscore the seductive freedoms of secular society – and gentile men. Yet long before the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, Jewish writers used partner dance as a powerful metaphor for social changes that transformed Jewish communities between the Enlightenment and the Holocaust. Literary texts such as Marcus Lehmann’s novella Elvire (1868), serialized in the German Orthodox journal Der Israelit, depict dance scenes as part of a larger conversation about acculturation and courtship norms. In these works, young people challenge the social order through their partner choices on the dance floor, and frequently suffer tragic consequences for their rebellious behavior. Indeed, at a time when social dancing was a nearly universal leisure pursuit across class lines, readers were trained to interpret dances as texts and even to expect momentous dance scenes, which were crucial for plot and character development. Scandalous dance scenes in German, Yiddish, and other literatures allowed writers to convey their concerns with Jewish modernity while simultaneously entertaining their readers.
About the Speaker: Sonia Gollance is Lecturer in Yiddish at University College London. She is a scholar of Yiddish Studies and German-Jewish literature whose work focuses on dance, theatre, and gender. She is currently translating Tea Arciszewska’s modernist play Miryeml (1958) and developing a project on women who wrote plays in Yiddish.
To sign up for the May 9 lecture, please click on the link
Today I heard an inspiring report on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Robert Smalls (1839-1915) was a true American hero. Born into slavery in Beaufort, South Carolina, he freed himself, his crew, and their families during the Civil War by commandeering a Confederate transport ship in Charleston harbor, on May 13, 1862, and sailing it from the Confederate-controlled waters of the harbor to the Union-controlled enclave in Beaufort, where it became a Union warship. His example and persuasion helped convince President Abraham Lincoln to accept African-American soldiers into the Union Army. Today, the USS Chancellorsville was renamed the USS Robert Smalls. Click on the link to hear to the whole segment, including interviews with his great-great grandchildren; his inspiring story is remarkable. It's only five minutes.
All Things Considered