Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y (review)

As the magnet city for performers of all sorts, New York has always had a plethora of venues, large and small, where seasoned veterans and green hopefuls strive to capture the attention and imagination of the sophisticated audience the city provides. Most such venues exist solely as spaces to be filled by those artists and groups with the means to rent the halls. From its inception, the 92nd Street YMHA was much more than just such a space, and in Naomi Jackson's comprehensive study, the reasons for its central role in shaping the development of modern dance become very clear.

Founded by predominantly German Jewish émigrés in 1874 as the Young Men's Hebrew Association, from its outset the organization was dedicated to offering young Jewish men "a mixture of educational and cultural activities" (22). The programming was very much in keeping with the trend in the country toward self-improvement and the betterment of society that saw the popularity of such institutions as the Chautauqua lectures blossom in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but within a Jewish setting. With increasing secularism among succeeding generations of Jews in America, the leaders of the Y sought to maintain its role as an anchor for the community by reflecting the broad interests and liberal values of its members in its programming.

Among the strongest values embraced by the Y's directors in the 1920s was support of adult education as propounded by such theorists as John Dewey, Edward C. Lindeman, and Dr. Mordecai Kaplan, the latter a rabbi and board member interested in extending the idea of Jewish community beyond the bounds of religion. "For Kaplan, education and the arts were central to building the vibrant and fully developed Jewish civilization he envisaged" (37). In 1930, the Educational Department of the Y launched its first series of classes in dance, taught by the Jewish dancer Benjamin Zemach, who had emigrated from Russia in the 1920s. Though Zemach did not stay on following this first season, other teachers took over the program, and by the time William Kolodny was hired as director of the Education Department in 1934, the foundations of a dance program had been laid. It was to be Kolodny, however, who would shape the Y's role in dance over the next thirty years and who ensured its prominence as an arts institution.

Jackson presents a detailed description of Kolodny's odyssey as an educator with great convictions about the value of dance in the curriculum but without any background in the art himself. His genius was to refuse to compromise on quality, and early on he enlisted the support and services of the major names in modern dance: Martha Graham, John Martin, Doris Humphrey, Charles Weidman, and Hanya Holm. Their involvement and advice helped to establish the Y's Dance Center, and despite eventual evolution of the Center into a more broadly based educational and performance site than advocated by these artists, all continued to participate in the life of the Y from time to time.

The uniqueness of the Y's program resulted both from Kolodny's personal philosophy and from the attitudes of American Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. Jackson traces the effects of the Y's openness in encouraging unknown dancers by offering an inexpensive performance space in a city with few venues for dance at all. African American dancers found a welcome there, and such notables as Pearl Primus and Alvin Ailey premiered works on the Y's Kaufmann Theater stage. Not surprisingly, interest in Israeli and other Jewish folk dance flourished in the late 1940s with the establishment of the new state. The dance classes at the Y reflected Kolodny's deep commitment to modern dance; classical ballet never played a major part...