Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah

Abstract

Hasidic Drag: Jewishness and Transvestism in the Modern Dances of Pauline Koner and Hadassah Rebecca Rossen On February 27, 1932, Pauline Koner, an emerging talent in U.S. concert dance, presented a series of solos at New York City's Town Hall. For this occasion, Koner, who was Jewish, premiered Chassidic Song and Dance, in which the choreographer portrayed a young Hasidic Jew.1 To a certain extent, the folksy and mystical Chassidic Song and Dance was not so different from the other dances that constituted Koner's repertory in the early 1930s. Indeed, aided by an array of vibrant costumes, the U.S.-born soloist would effortlessly transform herself over the course of an evening into a bouquet of foreign types—Hindu goddess, Moorish gypsy, Javanese temple dancer, Andalusian maid, Spanish flamenco dancer, and Russian peasant girl. However, Chassidic Song and Dance offered one critical distinc tion. In all of her other ethnic solos, Koner portrayed female characters; in Chassidic Song and Dance, she presented herself as a boy—in Jewish drag. Koner was not the only female dancer performing in Jewish drag on New York stages in the 1920s and 1930s. In Bar Mitzvah(1929), Belle Didjah depicted an Orthodox boy on the verge of manhood; YeshivaBachur(1932) was one of several dances in which Dvora Lapson portrayed a Talmudic student; Benjamin Zemach, a male choreographer, adorned an ensemble of Jewish women and men in Hasidic outfits for a 1931 concert; and Lillian Shapero offered a more abstract rendition in her Hasidic Sketches (1936). Jewish drag was also prevalent on U.S. and European Jewish stages and Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011), © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 334 Rebecca Rosseti 535 screens in the early-twentieth century. The Viennese choreographer Gertrud Kraus cross-dressed in The Jewish Boy and Song of the Ghetto in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and Judith Berg danced in drag throughout Poland in Menachem Mendel and Pilpul Tants in the years leading up to World War II.2 The most famous female-to-male drag performer was Molly Picon, an influential figure in Yiddish theater and film who frequently cross-dressed in such Second Avenue stage hits as Yankele (1922-1925) and the films Ost undWest(East and West; 1923) and Yidl mitn Fidl(Yidl with His Fiddle; 1937), presaging Barbra Streisand's Yeshiva "boy" in Yentl (1983). Feminist schol ars working in Jewish cultural studies have discussed Picon's Jewish trans vestism, but there are no studies that consider this substantial trend in U.S. concert dance more broadly.3 Although Koner did not perform on Yiddish stages in Manhattan, many of her peers did, demonstrating that performers, choreography, and representational modes flowed sinuously across town and genre. In these drag performances, stagings of Jewishness became entangled with choreographies of gender and nation, resulting in ethnically ambiguous and androgynous figures who simultaneously bolstered and evaded the frameworks that defined them. The role of gender in the staging of Jewishness in U.S. modern dance cannot be underestimated. Indeed, Jewish American choreographers have not only struggled with the ethnic and racial histories that have been in scribed on their bodies but also with their gendered histories.1 When choreographers such as Koner staged Jewishness, they inevitably staged gender as well. This article considers the provocative intermingling of gender, Jewishness, and embodiment in U.S. modern dance during the interwar and immediate postwar years in the dance works of Koner and the Pales tinian-born Hadassah, who, like Koner, perpetuated, and even capitalized on, an exotic persona. However, in Hadassah's 1947 signature work, Shuvi Nafshi (Return Oh My Soul),5 she replaced cross-dressing with cross gesturing. Instead of presenting Jewish drag, this choreographer's dances effectively appropriated and recontextualized ritual gestures restricted to Jewish men. Both Koner and Hadassah undeniably reproduced certain stereotypes about the East and Eastern European Jews. Nonetheless, their ethnic (and gestural) transvestism challenged essentialist notions of 336 Rebecca Rossen gender and ethnicity and, in Hadassah's case, dramatically undermined the androcentrism of traditional Judaism. To a certain degree, this article aims to coalesce feminist studies, Jewish cultural studies, and dance studies in order to more fully...