It Could Lead to Dancing

Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity

Sonia Gollance

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781503638129, 9781503613492
• eBook ISBN: 9781503627802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: Literature

Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. The popularity of social dance transcends class, gender, ethnic, and national boundaries. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and acculturation. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity––and the ultimate boundary transgression.

Writers of modern Jewish literature deployed dance scenes as a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns, while simultaneously entertaining their readers. In this pioneering study, Sonia Gollance examines the specific literary qualities of dance scenes, while also paying close attention to the broader social implications of Jewish engagement with dance. Combining cultural history with literary analysis and drawing connections to contemporary representations of Jewish social dance, Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Space of the Dance Floor
• 1. The Choreography of Acculturation
• 2. How Jews Learned to Dance
• 3. The Tavern: Jewish Participation in Rural Leisure Culture
• 4. The Ballroom: Questions of Admission and Exclusion
• 5. The Wedding: Celebratory Ritual and Social Enforcement
• 6. The Dance Hall: Commercial Leisure Culture and American Sexual Mores
• Epilogue: “What Comes from Men and Women Dancing”
• Appendix: List of Social and Folk Dances
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List