International Jews By Julia Mickenberg, Department of American Studies In American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream, Dr. Mickenberg traces the attraction of the Soviet Union to leftist American women activists, who imagined the Soviet Union to be a place where a new revolutionary era for women could take place. Here Dr. Mickenberg describes how Palestine and the Soviet Union alike were locations where American Jews imagined they could shed the burden of antisemitism and marginalization. Pauline Koner was of the same generation as Edith Segal, Anna Sokolow, and other leading figures in the revolutionary dance movement of the 1930s (nearly all of them Jewish), but she was only tangentially connected to it. Koner grew up in a socialist milieu of immigrant Jews in New York City and trained with Russian émigré Michel Fokine, among others. Koner’s eclectic training, exotic looks (long, dark hair, olive skin, high cheekbones), and tremendous adaptability launched her reputation as an “ethnographic” or “neo-ethnic” dancer, who performed dances based on a variety of traditions, including many with a Far Eastern flavor, such as an Indian priestess in “Nalamani” (1930) or a Javanese temple dancer in “Altar Piece” (1930). As Rebecca Rossen has discussed, she even performed in “Hasidic drag.” Koner performed such dances to demonstrate her own universality, “or her ability to represent a variety of Others.” In 1932 and 1933, Koner spent nine months studying and dancing in Egypt and Palestine; a year later she went to the Soviet Union. Koner’s itinerary thus encompassed two of the most popular sites of pilgrimage for Jews in the 1930s, the former a place to be proudly
Pauline Koner dancing on the beach in Leningrad, ca. 1935. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundation. Photographer unknown.
Jewish, the latter a place to shed the burdens associated with Jewishness since antisemitism was officially outlawed (though still prevalent). While in Tel Aviv, Koner saw “young settlers from the kibbutzim, energetic, sunburned, work-steeled bodies, and minds honed by the difficulties of survival—a look of life in their eyes and a warmth in their heart […] The atmosphere breathed enthusiasm, hope, and progress.” Koner “felt vibrantly free, as if I had shed an invisible layer of skin, and proud of my Jewishness.” For many Jews, Palestine and the Soviet Union were popular sites of “magic pilgrimage,” both homelands of a sort with utopian promise, places where new people were being created along with
new civilizations. While Palestine was called a Jewish homeland, the Soviet Union offered Jews with roots in the Russian empire a chance to reformulate in terms of “class and political solidarity,” their emotional connection to a land once known for its brutal oppression of Jews. The creation of a Jewish autonomous region known as Birobidjian in the Soviet Far East in 1928 attracted support and settlers from the US, who hailed the idea of a “a territorial enclave where a secular Jewish culture rooted in Yiddish and socialist principles could serve as an alternative to Palestine.” For Jews, part of the Soviet Union’s attraction was the possibility of having distinctions like race or ethnicity no longer matter.
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