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Choreographing identity: Modern dance and American Jewish life, 1924--1954.
No full textWhen Congress passed the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, it brought a dramatic halt to the era of mass migration that had begun over forty years before. For the American-born children of Jewish immigrants who came of age in the turbulent decades that followed, this shift in policy hastened their efforts to integrate into American society at the same time that it pointed to the serious challenges that they confronted. But social prejudices represented just one impediment to inclusion. Jews' efforts to figure out and explain to other Americans what it meant to be a Jew in the United States coincided with America's most serious economic crisis and the rise of Nazism in Europe, cataclysmic events that compounded the difficulty, and the necessity, of their efforts.Examining a remarkable group of American Jewish modern dancers living and working in New York City between 1924 and 1954, the tercentenary celebration of Jewish settlement in North America, this dissertation provides a vivid illustration of how immigrants' children established themselves as Americans. To the mostly female dancers featured here, modern dance offered the rare opportunity to communicate with authority about politics, identity, and sexuality unconstrained by existing gender conventions. Charting their participation in this revolutionary new performance medium provides a lens into this crucial generation efforts to bridge Jewish heritage and American aspirations.Determined to achieve inclusion, American Jewish modern dancers felt a powerful attraction to the cosmopolitan universalism that lay at the heart of both modern dance and interwar radicalism. The Popular Front emerged as a hotbed for cultural activism, and many Jewish dancers viewed its populism as an essential tool for transforming ethnic difference from a marginalizing force into a principal feature of American democracy. Although many dancers confronted fascism as a threat to democracy, few addressed it as a Jewish emergency, hesitant to undermine the strength of their appeal for integration. The consequence of a complex negotiation for acceptance, such compromising recurred throughout the interwar years. The decimation of European Jewry, however, propelled the Jewish dancers featured here to reevaluate what integration meant and begin publicly exploring the meaning of their Jewishness.Thesis (Ph.D.)--New York University, 2008.School code: 0146
Waronker 71
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
Waronker 98
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
Waronker 114
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
Jewish citizens of socialist Yugoslavia: Politics of Jewish identity in a socialist state, 1944--1974.
No full textThis study investigates the process of Jewish communal rebuilding in Yugoslavia after the Holocaust. Focusing on the activities of the central Jewish organization in the period, the Federation of Jewish Communities, it explores linkages between Jewish identity, politics, social memory, and ideology in the context of a multiethnic socialist state. It tells the story of the Jewish rebuilding efforts in the post-Holocaust era in Yugoslavia in order to show how commemorative practices and processes of identification emerge, position themselves in, and are shaped by a matrix of conflicting state and non-state political projects.Taking advantage of the political climate in postwar Yugoslavia, the leadership of the central Jewish organization situated its rebuilding efforts within a wider narrative of Yugoslav reconstruction spearheaded by the Communist government. From rebuilding communal infrastructure to dedicating monuments to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the leaders of the Federation of Jewish Communities pushed through a rebuilding agenda that was a part of a wider Yugoslav narrative, and that defined Jewishness as an identity firmly rooted in the new Yugoslav political project. By focusing on several micro-level debates about the boundaries of Jewishness in Yugoslavia, the dissertation shows how patterns of Jewish identification formed within the discursive framework provided by the new Yugoslav socialist ideology.This dissertation aims to contribute to the integration of seemingly separate "Jewish" and "non-Jewish" histories, provide insights into the processes of creation of space for Jewish identification in socialism and the forging of diverse Jewish identities after the Holocaust, as well as into the politics of memory and the competing narratives of victimhood in postwar Europe and their consequences for different politics of nationhood.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan, 2008.School code: 0127
AHC interview with Herbert Korner
No full textJanuary 15, 2008Herbert Korner was born in Vienna, Austria on May 29th, 1921. He lived with his parents Regina and Salomon Korner in the third district, where he also attended elementary and high school. He then continued his education at the "Technisches Gewerbemuseum", a technological school for trades. Herbert Korner left Vienna in July 1938, entering illegally to Switzerland, where he stayed for several months. Then the entered France illegally. At the outbreak of WW II he was arrested and interned in camp 'Les Milles'. During the German invasion of France he managed to escape to Morocco, where he obtained a visa for the USA. He arrived in New York on March 12th, 1942 and enrolled first at the Polytechnic Institute in Brooklyn, NY and then at the University of California in Berkeley, CA. He became a civil engineer and architect. Herbert Korner and his wife Gerda Alina Korner settled in San Francisco, CA.Austrian Heritage CollectionThe interview was made possible through a grant of the National Fund of the Republic of Austri
AHC interview with Leo Berkun.
No full textLeo Berkun (1919 -), an aerospace engineer, was born and raised in Vienna. He lived together with his parents in an apartment in the 10th district. At home Hungarian and German were spoken. His parents were members of the "Kultusgemeinde". Leo witnessed the so-called "Jew Baiting" 15 years prior to the Anschluss. He and his family were being blamed for economic ills for example. But he also remembers that friends behaved supportive towards their family. After the “Anschluss”, Leo Berkun was a victim of forced labor in spring 1938 (at Gudrunstrasse in Vienna), and had to scrub streets. Leo left Vienna for the Swiss border on July 21st, 1938, and arrived in the United States on the 31st of July 1938. In 1942 he joined the U.S. army and was sent to North Africa. He was discharged in 1945. He worked in the USA as an aerospace engineer, and eventually settled in Jupiter, FL.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Hans Taussig
No full textJuly 22, 2008Hans Taussig was born on March 28, 1917 in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was involved with the youth organization Blau-Weiss in Vienna, where he was introduced to Zionism. In 1938 he left Austria and went to Palestine, paying for the immigration permit with the help of relatives in Slovakia. He worked as a bus driver and got married in Palestine. In 1956, he and his wife visited his family in the United States for a couple of months, but in the end, they stayed. Hans Taussig worked with a security services company and as an air courier, before retiring in Queens, NY.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Alice Schachter Barzilay.
No full textOctober 22, 2008Alice Schachter Barzilay was born 1929 in Vienna, Austria. She lived in Vienna’s 2nd district (Obere Donaustrasse) and went to elementary school in Vienna’s center (Boersegasse). For her secondary education she went to the Schwarzwald Schule and to the Chajesgymnasium. Alice Barzilay was forced to leave Vienna in 1939. She emigrated to London, from there to Havana, Cuba and then to the U.S.A, where she arrived in Sept. 1940. Alice Barzilay worked as an administrator in a school for translators.Austrian Heritage Collectio
