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Article: Angels "Rewolt!": Jewish Women in Modern Dance in the 1930s.
- Article from:
- American Jewish History
- Article date:
- June 1, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 American Jewish Historical Society. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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In the late 1920s the modern dancer and choreographer Doris Humphrey noted that the "piles of Jewish girls" in her company "moved like angels."(1) Dancing in such works as Martha Graham's "Heretic" (1929) and Humphrey's "Life of the Bee" (1929), which dramatized Maurice Maeterlinck's 1901 study on the hierarchical authority of the queen bee and the pitiless duties of worker bees, Jewish women quickly put themselves in the middle of a dance revolution. Although the leaders of modern dance in the 1930s--Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm--were not Jewish, Jewish women filled modern dance classes, companies, organizations, picket lines, and ...