The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance

Responding to recent evolutions in the fields of dance and religious and secular studies, The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance documents and celebrates the significant impact of Jewish identity on a variety of communities and the dance world writ large. Focusing on North America, Europe, and Israel in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this Handbook highlights the sometimes surprising, often hidden and overlooked Jewish resonances within a range of styles from modern and postmodern dance to folk dance and flamenco. Privileging the historically marginalized voices of scholars, performers, and instructors the Handbook considers the powerful role of dance in addressing difference, such as between American and Israeli Jewish communities. In the process, contributors advocate values of social justice, like Tikkun Olam (repair of the world), debate, and humor, exploring the fascinating and potentially uncomfortable contradictions and ambiguities that characterize this robust area of research.

Naomi M. Jackson is Associate Professor in the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. She is author or co-editor of Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion, Right to Dance: Dancing for Rights, and Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y. Rebecca Pappas is Assistant Professor of Dance at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, and Guest Faculty in the Masters in Social Practice Art at University of Indianapolis. She choreographs dances that address the body as an archive for personal and social memory. Her work has toured nationally and internationally, and she has received residencies from Yaddo and Djerassi, and funding from the New England Foundation for the Arts, the Indiana Arts Commission, the Mellon Foundation, the Zellerbach Family Foundation, The Clorox Foundation, and Choreographers in Mentorship Exchange (CHIME). Toni Shapiro-Phim is Associate Professor of Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation and Assistant Director of the Program in Peacebuilding and the Arts at Brandeis University. She is a cultural anthropologist and dance ethnologist whose research, writing, community work, and teaching focus on the history and cultural contexts of the arts in discrete regions of the world, particularly in relation to violence, genocide, migration and refugees, conflict transformation, and gender concerns. Her first documentary film, Because of the War, premiered in 2018.