Dancing through Yiddish Literary New York: A Guided Tour

Walking Tour Admission: $30 YIVO members & students: $25 Registration is required. Get tickets

Explore New York’s Lower East Side through its urban dance spaces. Between 1881 and 1924, 2.5 million East European Jews immigrated to the United States. Like other ethnic groups in New York around 1900, many of these Yiddish speakers spent their leisure hours dancing: in commercial dance halls, neighborhood associations, dancing academies—and in the pages of newspapers, literary fiction, etiquette guides, and the warnings of social reformers. Jewish writers such as Abraham Cahan identified dancing with changes in courtship and gender roles as part of Americanization and American capitalism. Dancing could be a way of showing off physical fitness and disposable income. It was also a sign of shocking new forms of intimacy between men and women. On this guided tour with Yiddish literature and dance scholar Dr. Sonia Gollance, we will visit some key New York dance sites in the footsteps of Yiddish writers and journalists. No knowledge of Yiddish is necessary for this walking tour.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

About the Guide

Sonia Gollance is Associate Professor of Yiddish Studies at University College London. Her work focuses on Yiddish and German literature, dance, theatre, and gender. She is the author of It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity (Stanford University Press, 2021), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards. She has taught at the University of Vienna, The Ohio State University, and the University of Göttingen, as well as at klezmer festivals in Europe and North America.