Mixed-Sex Dancing in Yiddish Culture and the YIVO Archives

Max Weinreich Fellowship Lecture The Vladimir and Pearl Heifetz Memorial Fellowship and the Vivian Lefsky Hort Memorial Fellowship in East European Jewish Literature Admission: Free

Contemporary popular culture often portrays mixed-sex Jewish dancing as either absolutely forbidden or as the punch line of a joke, yet Yiddish and German writers used Jewish social dance as a powerful metaphor for modernization and acculturation. In literary texts depicting settings such as weddings and Purim balls, young people challenge the social order through their partner choice on the dance floor, and frequently suffer tragic consequences. Dance conveys the temptations and gendered paths of acculturation, and it manifests itself in a way that both serves a dramatic function and has entertainment value. Drawing upon a variety of materials from the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and other Center for Jewish History partners, this talk discusses the social and literary significance of the mixed-dance trope in Jewish literature and the documentary evidence for this controversial cultural practice.

About the Speaker

Sonia Gollance is a PhD candidate in Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and a fellow in East European Jewish Literature at the Max Weinreich Center. Her dissertation research concerns the motif of Jewish mixed-sex dancing in German and Yiddish literature. She has received fellowships and grants from the Hadassah Brandeis Institute, the Österreichischer Austauschdienst (Austria), the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History (Israel), and the Fulbright Commission. In addition to her scholarly pursuits, she is a Yiddish dance leader and was a fellow and lecturer in the Jewish Dance Leaders Program at KlezKanada in 2015.