Just as in modern dance performance, a disproportionate number of American Jewish women have also specialized in dance education and writing. Categories overlap and are not clear-cut; some writers are also educators, and many of the performers have become teachers. Given the Jewish emphasis on inquiry and free thought and on the value of both studying and writing, there is a disproportionate interest in dance education and dance writing, with a longstanding interest in analyzing dance and establishing its place within academic artistic disciplines. On the academic level, the new framework known as Jewish Dance Studies has gained much attention.

Alice Bloch (b. 1945) received her Ph.D. from Temple University and is a specialist in Isadora Duncan, teaching and performing nationally. She founded the dance program at Lindenwood University in 1991 and taught there until 2006. 

Miriam Roskin Berger, Ph.D., danced with Jean Erdman Theatre of Dance in the 1960s, directed the Education Program at New York University (1993-2002), and directs the dance therapy program at the 92nd Street Y Harkness Dance Center, plus has been director of the Dance Movement Training in Montreal, as well as creator of dance therapy programs internationally.

Margot Mink Colbert (b. 1935) attended New York's High School of Performing Arts, trained in ballet with Antony Tudor, Alfredo Corvino, and Margaret Craske, and graduated from Juilliard; she taught at University of Wisconsin Dance Department from 1980 to 1991 and from 1991 to 2017 at University of Nevada, as Professor of Ballet and Choreography, where she also choreographed for her own company.

Sharon Friedler was Stephen Lang Professor of Performing Arts and Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College (1985-2016) and was Director of Dance there from 1985 to 2014. Her MFA is from Southern Methodist University. Along with Ze’eva Cohen, Friedler has been in charge of dance standards for the International Baccalaureate exam for national high schools.

Sandra Genter (b. 1936) received her BA in dance from University of Wisconsin and performed with Rudy Perez in New York. She became a major modern technique teacher and dance program director at Barnard College in New York City for over 30 years, retiring in 2004. 

Joan Finkelstein directed the dance center at the 92^nd St Y (renamed the Harkness Dance Center) from 1992 to 2004. Currently she is Executive Director of the Harkness Foundation for Dance. From 2004 to 2014 she directed dance programming for the New York City Department of Education. Finkelstein danced professionally in the Cliff Keuter Dance Company, the Don Redlich Dance Company, the Jean-Leon Destine Afro-Haitian Dance Theatre, and Manhattan Festival Ballet, also appearing on Broadway in Rags. She received an MFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Paula Levine, who danced with Delakova and Berk’s Jewish Dance Co., founded the dance program at Hollins College.

Meriam Levine Rosen (1927-2015) helped found the Dance Department at the University of Maryland, where she taught from 1952 to 2009. She also danced, choreographed, and directed Improvisations Unlimited. She was actively involved in the arts community of the Washington, DC, area.

Doris Rudko (1918-2008) was an internationally recognized teacher of dance composition. Studying with Louis Horst, she became his assistant at the Neighborhood Playhouse, the Graham School, and the American Dance Festival, where she continued until 1967. She taught composition at the High School of Performing Arts (1949-1963), at Juilliard (1969-1992), and at New York University (1972-1991).

Dr. Andrea Mantell Seidel (b. 1947) teaches Isadora Duncan and Eleanor King repertoire and other classes at Florida International University, where she is associate professor of dance.

Deirdre Sklar (1944), was Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University and a prolific dance research writer in ethnographic fields especially about dance in Mexico. Her book

Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico helped establish dance ethnography.

Alice Teirstein taught at Fieldston School for over three decades and founded Young Dancemakers Co., giving New York high school students the opportunity to choreograph. She teaches for the Alvin Ailey School and received a Bessie in 2012 for distinguished service for the field.

Rose Anne Thom (1945-2018) was Labanotator for professional dance companies including the Joffrey Ballet and dance writer and critic especially for Dance Magazine (from 1968-2015). She taught in the dance program at Sarah Lawrence College from 1975 to 2016.

Pauline Tish (1912–2002) was a member of the Federal Theater Dance Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration, and performed in several Helen Tamiris productions. She also helped to reconstruct Tamiris’s works. In 1956 she founded the dance department at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, retiring in 1977, while also teaching occasionally at Brooklyn and Hunter Colleges. She was president of the American Dance Guild.

Muriel Topaz (1932-2003) danced in the 1956 Henry Street programs. As an advocate of written choreography, Topaz championed the Labanotation system and notated the works of more than 25 choreographers, including those by Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins, and Martha Graham She directed the Dance Notation Bureau and taught for the Dance Division of Juilliard. In 2002 she wrote the biography of Antony Tudor, Undimmed Luster. She was also an editor for Dance Magazine. She was married to the composer Jacob Druckman.

Shirley Leitman Ubell (1928-2007), received her masters from Hunter College, worked as a dance therapist, and ran her own studio in New Jersey, the Center for Modern Dance Education, from 1962 until 2015; for many years she was also a member of Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center in New York City.

Kayla Kazahn Zalk (1931–2001), a student of Edith Segal, graduated from the University of Michigan, studied with Doris Humphrey and José Limón and was a Labanotator. Zalk became a certified Laban movement analyst, was president of the American Dance Guild from 1977 to 1980, and taught at the Boston Conservatory.

Sally Banes (b. 1950-2020) was taken by her mother, who identified herself as a dancer, to see dance, inspiring an interest that took Banes to Russia, Germany, England, France, Canada, Denmark, and Israel as a dancer, dance writer, and historian. In 2003 Banes received the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) Award for Outstanding Contribution to Dance Research, and in 2004, following a severe stroke, she was recognized by the Society of Dance History Scholars (SDHS). Her influential books include Terpischore in Sneakers (1980); Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theater 1962–1964 (1993); Writing Dance in the Age of Postmodernism (1994), and Dancing Women (1998). She also edited several dance books and the CORD Dance Research Journal. She wrote for The Village Voice, Soho Weekly News, and Dance Magazine. From 1982 to 1988 she was president of SDHS. Until 2003 she was professor of Theater and Drama plus chair of the Dance Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Ann Barzel (1905-2007) studied ballet in Chicago with Adolph Bolm and in New York with Vechesla Svoboda and Mikhail Fokine plus modern dance with Doris Humphrey. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and taught ballet in Milwaukee from 1945 to 1961. She was most noted as a dance reviewer for the Chicago Times, the Chicago American, Ballet Review, British Ballet Annual, and Dance Magazine; she became senior editor of Dance Magazine in 1936 and was associated with the magazine until shortly before her death at 102. Her writings have also appeared in encyclopedias, including the International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998). She is also known for the extraordinary ballet performance films she made from 1937 until the 1960s. These archival films and her private dance collection were donated to Chicago’s Newberry Library as the Ann Barzel Dance Archives. Some of her rare films are also in the dance collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. She was an important supporter of dance in Israel and donated materials to the Dance Library of Israel.

Lynn Mattluck Brooks taught at Franklin and Marshall from 1984 to 2018, creating the university’s dance department; co-edited Dance Chronicle from 2007 to 2017; edited Dance Research Journal from 1993 to 1999; was a founding member of World Dance Alliance; and edits Philadelphia’s thINKingDANCE.net.

Judith Chazin-Bennahum (b. 1937), a protégée of Selma Jeanne Cohen, has written six books, including Dance in the Shadow of the Guillotine (1988); The Ballets of Antony Tudor (1994), which won the prestigious De la Torre Bueno Prize for best publication of 1994; and with Jewish themes in mind, she wrote her book René Blum and the Ballets Russes: In Search of a Lost Life(2011), as well as many articles and academic presentations and reviews; for her recent article on the Russian Jewish dancer Ida Rubenstein, see Dance Today 36 (https://www.israeldance-diaries.co.il/en/). She was president of the Society of Dance History Scholars from 1986 to 1989. Her academic career has been at the University of New Mexico beginning in 1975; she is now Distinguished Professor Emerita of Dance. (For information on her performance career see Judith Chazin in the article “Jewish Women and Ballet in the United States.”) [link to new entry on Jewish Women and Ballet]

Selma Jeanne Cohen studied ballet with Edna McRae in Chicago and received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago before beginning her work as the outstanding pioneer of dance history. She first taught dance history for Lillian Moore at the High School of Performing Arts in New York, setting standards and expectations for the field while also teaching at Connecticut College, New York University, the University of Chicago, and other institutions. The key founder of the Society of Dance History Scholars, she wrote four books: The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief (1966); Doris Humphrey: An Artist First (1972); Dance As a Theater Art (1974), and Next Week, Swan Lake (1982). She also founded and edited the magazine Dance Perspectives, as well as countless articles for all the major dance publications. She devoted more than two decades of work to creating and editing the first multi-volume dance encyclopedia in English, the International Encyclopedia of Dance (1998).

Barbara Cohen-Stratyner (b. 1945) received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. She worked in the dance division of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and directed its exhibition space for many years. She is the author of the The Biographical Dictionary of Dance (1982).

Susan Reiter is a New Yorker who studied at the University of California in Santa Cruz, returned to New York, and has been writing dance criticism since the 1970s. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Playbill, Dance Magazine, Ballet Review, and other publications. She also is the US correspondent for Dance Australia.

Judith Lynne Hanna (b. 1936), who holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University on dance as non-verbal communication, studied all forms of dance from ballet to street jam, including dance in Africa. She is a specialist in dance ethnography and anthropology, writing for Dance Magazine, Dancer, Dance Teacher, Dance International, and scholarly dance journals. She is especially known for her books To Dance Is Human (1979) and Dance, Sex and Gender (1988), as well as for defending dancers at trial especially if working in what society might deem as tawdry venues.

Joanna Gewertz Harris has a multifaced career as dance therapist, dance critic and dance historian with a Ph.D. working in the San Francisco Bay area of California. 

Lydia Joel, née Turnower (1914–1989), danced in Hanya Holm’s company, became interested in dance photography and writing, and completely revolutionized Dance Magazine, which she edited from 1954 to 1968. She brought a new breadth to the coverage of dance, increasing the magazine’s thematic scope to include all styles of dance, dance history, and dance education, and its geographic scope to cover the entire United States. She later directed the High School of Performing Arts dance program and then presented programs on Catherine de Medici and the queen’s influence on dance.

Dawn Lille (b. 1936) trained in ballet at New York’s Ballet Arts and in modern dance with May O'Donnell. She received a B.A. from Barnard, an M.A. from Columbia, and Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. A Labanotator, she organized an international dance notation conference in Israel in 1985. She headed the graduate program in dance at City College/CUNY and taught dance history at Juilliard for fourteen years. Her international teaching includes Israel, where she also researched dance and movement in the Ethiopian community. Her writings include books on Michel (Mikhail) Fokine and Alfredo Corvino, chapters in seven others, and articles in encyclopedias, Dance Magazine, Dance Chronicle, Ballet Review, Art Times, and others. She served on the board of the Dance Library of Israel and is a member of the international board of the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

Susan A. Manning (b. 1956) is professor of English and Theatre & Performance Studies and Herman and Beulah Pearce Miller Research Professor at Northwestern University. She has written in her eulogy for her German Jewish engineer father that his experiences escaping the Nazis for the United States influenced her life-long interest in the complexities of history and memory, identity and trauma in twentieth-century culture, especially the histories of dancing bodies in Germany. Her books include Ecstasy and the Demon about Mary Wigman (2006), Modern Dance, Negro Dance: Race in Motion (2004); New German Dance Studies (2012), about dance scholarship after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and Futures of Dance Studies.

Edna Ocko (Meyers) (1908-2005) was born to Russian immigrant parents: Bessie, a dancer, and her cigar maker, union activist, and socialist father, were musical (her brother became a professional violinist). Ocko also played piano and worked as a dance accompanist. Besides studying with Matilda Naaman, she studied dance with Hanya Holm at the Mary Wigman school in New York. There she met other dancers with whom she started the New Dance Group. She began writing dance reviews when the Workers Dance League sponsored solo and group recitals and the New Dance League was active. She covered the benefit held in 1935 for the Daily Worker (for which she also wrote), which sold out Radio City’s Center Theater for the first time in history. The concert included works by Sophie Maslow, Anna Sokolow, and others such as José Limón—choreographers who shaped the modern dance world. Her writing recorded the ideals of the revolutionary dance movement as well as the proletarian issues of the early 1930s. When the New Theater publication folded in 1937, Ocko became editor-in-chief of TAC, the publication of the Theater Arts Committee. During the McCarthy hearings of the 1950s, she was “named” as a communist by Jerome Robbins. She changed careers, earning a doctorate in psychology and becoming chief psychologist of Harlem’s first psychiatric clinic and a tenured professor at the City University of New York.

Barbara Palfy (1936-2014) graduated from Washington University, studied dance at the New Dance group, danced in the company of Fred Berk at the 92nd St. Y, and worked with Hadassah Badoch before becoming librarian of the Dance Collection of the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center and serving as associate editor for Dance Chronicle, chief copy editor for the International Encyclopedia of Dance, and editor of countless dance articles in numerous books.

Wendy Perron (b. 1943) is the daughter of dancer Dorothy Wayne née Dora Weinberg. Perron graduated in dance from Bennington College, received an M.A. from SUNY, performed for Sara Rudner, and joined the Trisha Brown Dance Company (1975-1978).  She wrote for the Soho Weekly News, was associate director at Jacob’s Pillow in the 1990s, and was editor in chief at Dance Magazine (2004–2013) and continues writing on-line articles for the publication. She has written several books, including The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of the Downtown Dance 1970-1976, published in 2020. She also co-wrote (with Ninotchka Bennahum and Bruce Robertson) Radical Bodies: Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972 and helped organize the accompanying exhibition seen in Santa Barbara and New York. (All three of the featured artists are Jewish women dancers).

Lillie F. Rosen was an active dance critic always emphasizing Jewish dancers in the United States and dance in Israel when possible. She wrote from the 1950 to the 1980s for dance newsletters, Dance News, Manhattan East, and Dance Scope for which she was also contributing editor. Her two books published by Dance Horizons were Ivan Nagy (1975) and Anthony Dowell (1976).

Janice Ross (b. 1950) studied with Graham dancers Marne and David Wood at University of California, Berkeley, and with Margaret Jenkins in San Francisco. A professor at Stanford University, she is the author of four books, including Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance (2007); Like a Bomb Going Off, Leonid Yakobson and Resistance in Soviet Ballet; and dozens of articles and reviews. A former dance critic and journalist, she has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and Dance Magazine, among other publications. She is the recipient of numerous awards including Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship. 

Laura Shapiro (b. 1946) wrote criticism for alternative Boston papers and served as dance critic of The Boston Globe. She has been the dance critic at Newsweek (1984–2000) and written for New York Magazine since 2002.

Marcia B. Siegel (b. 1932) received a B.A. from Connecticut College and was certified in Laban movement analysis (1971). Founding editor of Dance Scope, she also wrote for Hudson Review and The Boston Phoenix. Among her books are Days on Earth, The Dance of Doris Humphrey (1987) and The Shapes of Change: Images of American Dance (1989). She taught at New York University from 1983 to 2003.

Nina S. Spiegel received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in modern Jewish History and dance history, focusing on dance in Israel. She is the author of Embodying Hebrew Culture: Aesthetics, Athletics and Dance in the Jewish Community of Mandate Palestine (2013).  Spiegel is the Rabbi J. Stampfer Associate Professor of Israeli Studies at Portland State University.  

Pam Squires (b. 1947) studied with Eugene Loring, as well as ethnic dance. Her M.A. in dance ethnology from UCLA, was background for her work on dance and music of the Iraqi Kurdish Jews in Israel. She wrote for The Jerusalem Post (1982 -1990) and back in the US she also wrote sporadically for The Washington Post from 1991.

Tobi Tobias (b. 1938-2020) studied dance at the Henry Street Playhouse with Nikolais-Louis, and at the New Dance Group with Beatrice Seckler and Nona Sherman. She graduated from Barnard and earned an MA from New York University. (Her daughter Anne Tobias performed professionally with Pearl Lang). Tobias wrote for New York Magazine, the New York Times, The Village Voice, Arts Journal.com and Dance Magazine, where she also was dance review editor. She also wrote several children’s books, including Arthur Mitchell about the Dance Theatre of Harlem founder.

Lisa Traiger (b. 1962) has written for Dance Magazine, Washington Jewish Week, the Forward, Dance Magazine, and the Washington Post (1996-2006), also reporting on Jewish dance conferences and personalities including the National Foundation of Jewish Culture’s international conference and festival on Jewish Dance at the 92nd St Y in 1986, the Dance Umbrella conference and festival on Israeli and American dance in 1989, The Ohio State University, and Arizona State University’s Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World in 2018. Traiger’s 2004 MFA thesis was "Making Dance That Matters: Dancer, Choreographer, Community Organizer, Public Intellectual Liz Lerman." 

Elizabeth Zimmer (b. 1945) studied tap dance because her mother, Beatrice Yannet, was a tap dancer. She then studied dance and writing at Bennington College. She earned an M.A. from SUNY Stony Brook, was the dance editor and a critic at New York’s Village Voice (1992-2006), and has written for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Metro. She also edited Body Against Body: The Dance and Other Collaborations of Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane (1989) and Envisioning Dance on Film and Video (2002). She is a noted teacher of dance criticism.

Those interested in Jewish dance as well as Israeli subjects are heartened by the relatively new academic discipline known as Jewish Dance Studies, expanding the work especially of Ann Barzel, Judith Brin Ingber, Jill Gellerman, and Naima Prevots.

Ninotchka Devorah Bennahum follows her mother Judith Chazin-Bennahum as a historian, dance writer, and teacher. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University’s Department of Performance Studies. She teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to co-editing Radical Bodies, Anna Halprin, Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer in California and New York, 1955-1972, she also wrote Carmen: A Gypsy Geography, and co-edited, with Judith Chazin-Bennahum, The Living Dance: A Global Anthology of Essays on Movement & Culture (2012) among other books. Her next co-curated exhibition with Bruce Robertson, Border-Crossings: Histories of the Body in Exile, opens at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Lincoln Center in 2023.

Jill Gellerman, a teacher and expert of Hasidic women’s dance, is also known for her articles in major dance publications and books, including in the forthcoming Handbook of Jewish Dancing. In addition, her ground-breaking filming and labanotation of weddings at several Hasidic courts in the New York area are archived at the YIVO institute of New York City. She has taught regularly at Yiddish Summer Weimer, Germany, and Yiddish New York, as well as conferences and special programs.

Naomi Jackson (b.1964) directed the international conference “Jews and Jewishness in the Dance World,” held in October of 2018 at Arizona State University (ASU), where she is Associate Professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre. Her forthcoming book Handbook of Jewish Dancing will feature authors who presented at the ASU conference. Her other books include Dance, Human Rights, and Social Justice: Dignity in Motion (co-edited with Toni Shapiro-Phim) and Converging Movements: Modern Dance and Jewish Culture at the 92nd Street Y, as well as articles in such publications as Dance Research Journal and Dance Chronicle. In 2019 she presented the keynote address at the Conney Conference on Jewish Arts at the 92nd St Y. Her Ph.D. in Performance Studies, focusing on dance at the 92nd St Y, is from New York University.

Hannah Kosstrin is associate professor of dance at the Ohio State University and affiliate faculty with the Melton Center for Jewish studies there. She directed the “Modern Jewish Experience through the Lens of Dance” conference at the Ohio State in 201l and The Jewish Dance Symposium, a day devoted to Jewish dance studies subjects at the Dance Studies Association Conference, hosted by the Melton Center in 2017. She is widely respected for her research and international conference papers, especially for her inclusion of Mizrahi and Sephardi dance in the burgeoning cannon of Jewish Dance Studies. Her noted biography of Anna Sokolow is Honest Bodies: Revolutionary Modernism in the Dances of Anna Sokolow (2017).

Rebecca Rossen (b. 1967), noted writer and teacher, published the ground-breaking book Dancing Jewish (2014). She is a noted presenter at academic conferences and is associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin. She also performed her own pieces and appeared in Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. Breathe Normally with Jewish themes.  She coined the concept of “dancing Jewish,” now in common parlance in Jewish dance studies. Her forthcoming book will be about dances on Holocaust themes created by second- and third-generation children of Holocaust survivors.

Hannah Schwadron (b. 1982) received her Ph.D. from University of California, Riverside, teaches at Florida State University and has written The Case of the Sexy Jewess (2018). She is also a choreographer/performer, dealing in Holocaust themes based on her grandmother’s escape from Germany to Shanghai and the United States. Her Ph.D. from University of California, Riverside, explored this academically and performatively. She contrasted this with contemporary immigrant stories in Germany, creating her award-winning dance film Klasse (2015) which she created in Germany with Malia Bruker, and she has written Between I and Thou (2017) based on teaching refugees there.

Rebecca Pappas (b. 1979) began performing in Los Angeles with Barak Marshall who encouraged her to explore her Judaism; she choreographed Monster about the Holocaust and teaches at Trinity College.  Her MFA is from UCLA. She also is co-editor of Oxford University Press’s forthcoming Handbook on Dancing Jewish.