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Modernist Continuities: Queer Jewish Dances, the Holocaust, and the AIDS Crisis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 October 2022

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Abstract

During the height of the 1980s AIDS epidemic in the United States, LGBTQ+ Jewish choreographers agitated for gay rights by using Holocaust allusions to address the AIDS crisis. Modernist practices in their work generate a long modernist midcentury that reframes established historical binaries between modernist and postmodernist concert dance modalities. This article argues that choreographers who drew upon Holocaust memory to address the AIDS crisis engendered a queer Jewish imaginary by engaging Jewishness from ethnic Ashkenazi (European) Jewish American lineages of modernist dance as social justice, Jewish cyclical temporal logics, and histories of being scapegoated for societal ills. It demonstrates how Meredith Monk's Book of Days (1988), David Dorfman's Sleep Story (1987), and Arnie Zane's The Gift/No God Logic (1987) fostered Jewish queerness in modernist artistic practices during a time that LGBTQ+ American Jews developed a queer Jewish consciousness. These choreographers’ works connect queer Jewish modernisms to varied temporalities of global modernity.

Keywords

AIDSdanceHolocaustJewishmemorializationmemorymodernism1980squeerpostmodernism
Type
Article
Information
Dance Research Journal , Volume 54 , Special Issue 2: Speculations on the Queerness of Dance Modernism , August 2022 , pp. 70 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Dance Studies Association

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