It Could Lead to Dancing

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Dances and balls appear throughout world literature as venues for young people to meet, flirt, and form relationships, as any reader of Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, or Romeo and Juliet can attest. In the context of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish culture, dance offers crucial insights into debates about emancipation and secularization. While traditional Jewish law prohibits men and women from dancing together, Jewish mixed-sex dancing was understood as the very sign of modernity--and the ultimate boundary transgression. This pioneering study examines how dance scenes in modern Jewish literature became a charged and complex arena for understanding the limits of acculturation, the dangers of ethnic mixing, and the implications of shifting gender norms and marriage patterns. Combining cultural history with literary analysis, Sonia Gollance illustrates how mixed-sex dancing functions as a flexible metaphor for the concerns of Jewish communities in the face of cultural transitions.