Whose Jewishness? Inbal Dance Theater and Cold War American Spectatorship

Jewish dance critic Ann Barzel recorded companies in Chicago with her wind-up camera from a downstage theater wing or the stage's edge.² Her film of the Tel Aviv-based Inbal Yemenite Dance Group (Inbal Dance Theater) in March 1958 shows this powerhouse company under the artistic direction of Sara Levi-Tanai.³ The dancers lead swooping kicks into hovering jumps that land in deep, spongy pliés, initiate rhythmic foot patterns with petite sweeping ankle kicks, and embellish them with polycentric hip isolations and measured claps. Geometric floor designs melt away as dancers reassemble in new formations, sometimes dipping under bridges formed by each other's arms. Inbal's tall headdresses of wound fabric, head shawls and long skirts, striped tunics, and wide swaths of cloth gathered into pants react to the dancers' spiraling torsos, swaying hips, and billowing leaps. Their works, Shepherd's Dance, Song of Deborah, The Wisdom of Solomon, and Yemenite Wedding, offered character-driven epic narratives that suggested a vibrant Jewish nation rooted in a Near Eastern locale to American Jewish audiences yearning for a tangible connection to Israel in the first decade of statehood. American media reported sensationalistically about Inbal at a time when the America-Israel Cultural Foundation (AICF) was increasing efforts to connect American Jews to Israel.

This article tells a story of postwar American Jewish assimilation through audience interactions with Inbal's tours. Inbal's Arab ethnicity represented a different kind of Jewishness from the Ashkenazi (Central and Eastern European) and Sephardi (Spanish/Balkan/Mediterranean) Jewishnesses prominent in the American imaginary. American Ashkenazi Jews experienced feelings of both kinship and distancing that furthered their own assimilation when they watched Inbal. Inbal's practices included vocal ululations, hand mudras, and upward sagittal torso undulations from Arabian, South Asian, and East African cultural sources, mixed with German expressive dance and American modern dance elements. Scholars including anthropologist Karen Brodkin, historian Matthew Frye Jacobson, and theater historian Alisa Solomon show how American Ashkenazi Jews experienced rapid acculturation into the American mainstream in the postwar era, most acutely in the 1950s.⁴ They moved from urban Jewish enclaves to predominantly Christian suburbs, and experienced privileges of whiteness associated with upward economic mobility. Inbal's 1958–1959 tours offered American Jewish audience members ambivalent about their rapid acculturation a sense of a global Jewish community.⁵

Israeli propaganda touting Yemenite Jews' authentic connections to Israel framed American reception of Inbal. A myth widely circulated by the AICF that Yemenite Jews' traditions went unchanged since their ancient settlement in Yemen suggested Yemenites' unbroken chain to Jews in antiquity. An AICF press release claimed that the company's members were authentically Israeli because their origins in Yemen proved their indigenous connections to the Middle East. This press release contained a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Moshe Sharett celebrating the Yemenite Jewish community's cultural preservation during millennia-long isolation on the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, their performances provided a glimpse into the biblical past.⁶ This ideology suppressed contemporary Yemenite Jewry under a dominant Ashkenazi heritage.

The rhetoric of Inbal's isolation drove how US audiences experienced their relationship to Israel through Inbal's performances. Many Inbal members hailed from the British protectorate of Aden, Yemen, a metropolitan crossroads of Arabic, South Asian, East African, and Spanish cultural influences.⁷ According to historian Esther Meir-Glitzenstein, the Israeli government appropriated Yemenite Jews' ethnicity to define indigeneity for a Jewish nation-state ancestrally rooted in the Middle East, and it suppressed Mizrahi Jewish (Arabic, African, and Asian-originated) rights and livelihoods.⁸ Moreover, cultural theorist Ella Shohat notes "the [Zionist] modernizing narrative in which anthropology renders Mizrahim as living 'allochronically' in another 'time.'"⁹ This conception of Yemenite Jews materialized in claims that Inbal's performances preserved ancient tradition. Critics' instructions to hold Inbal at this distance emphasized differences that intertwined race and temporality as markers of imagined traditions.

American receptions of Inbal reveal hierarchies among Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish cultural practices within the US's minority Jewish but Ashkenazi-dominant ethno-religious environment during significant moments of...