From Victimized to Victorious: Re-Imagining Identities through Dance

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Jewish Cultures

Abstract

Following the brisk, yet brutal Holocaust in Hungary, then 19-year-old Auschwitz survivor Yehudit Arnon, the future founding artistic director of Israel’s Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, made her way to Budapest. There she quickly became the Marxist - Socialist - Labour Zionist HASHOMER HATZAIR Zionist Youth Movement’s dance captain; working with hundreds of Hungarian child Holocaust survivors on choreographies of protest and empowerment. This paper, which is a culmination of three years of fieldwork in the framework of my doctoral degree, in three countries, on three continents, and consisting of oral history interviews with 50 senior HASHOMER HATZAIR Youth Movement affiliates from the period, extensive archival work throughout Israel, as well as a community-based dance reconstruction project, under the auspices of Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, traces Arnon’s little-known politically-themed repertoire during the immediate years following liberation, and prior to her immigration to Israel in 1948, within the framework of HASHOMER HATZAIR Zionist Youth Movement in Hungary. Arnon’s choreographies challenged practices of violence and war and presented Hungarian Jewish youth with then-progressive, alternative worldviews such as Marxism (bordering on Communism) and of course, socialist labour Zionism. The significance of her various pageants and pieces, I argue, lie in their transformative as well as healing capabilities. Arnon's dances provided a platform for scouts to perform their transformation from traumatized to triumphant; from Holocaust survivors to New Jews. My sources reflect the interdisciplinary nature of my research; from literature in the field of contemporary Jewish and Holocaust history, to Dance Studies scholarship, to work in the field of Memory Studies and art therapy. In addition to contributing to the ever-growing Jewish/Israel Dance Studies field, I hope my novel research will draw attention to the power of embodiment on identity formation, and will therefore encourage further diversification within Jewish Studies in the future.

Author

• Gdalit Neuman, York University