Selma Jeanne Cohen's "Encyclopedia of Dance"

July 26, 1998

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International Encyclopedia of Dance, Oxford Press.
Edited by Selma Jeanne Cohen.

"The fact of its existence is the most important thing about it," the New York Times reviewer wrote of The International Encyclopedia of Dance in a review published on July 26, 1998. He commended editor Selma Jeanne Cohen for having "held on to her project with remarkable tenacity" for the 24 years since its inception. Unfortunately, the reviewer had few other positive things to say about the Encyclopedia, faulting it for a "failure of editorial focus," and "multicultural and multinational inclusivity at the expense of common sense" that "undermines the Encyclopedia's credibility." Despite a long catalogue of criticisms, the reviewer conceded that the Encyclopedia was a large (literally, at six volumes and almost 4,000 pages) accomplishment, that would "serve as a basis for all future endeavors." And he paid tribute to Cohen, for whom, he wrote, "people in the dance world have been rooting … for almost 25 years," noting that the Encyclopedia's existence was "because of her."

During those 25 years, Selma Jeanne Cohen had worked to make dance scholarship a respected academic discipline. Born in 1920 and raised in Chicago, Cohen was educated at the University of Chicago and began her academic career as an English professor at UCLA. In 1953, she moved to New York, where she taught dance history at Hunter College and the High School of the Performing Arts. Among her students were many future dance company directors such as Arthur Mitchell, Bruce Marks, and Eliot Feld. She wrote a number of scholarly articles about dance, and struggled to make dance more present in different fields of scholarly research. From 1955 to 1958, she worked as an assistant to the dance critic for the New York Times, becoming one of the paper's first female art critics. In 1959 she founded the quarterly journal, Dance Perspectives.

In 1962 she began to teach dance history at the American Dance Festival, which led to the creation of a program to train professional dance critics. She also wrote several books of dance scholarship, including The Modern Dance: Seven Statements of Belief (1966), Doris Humprey: An Artist First (1972), Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present (1974), and Next Week Swan Lake: Reflections on Dance and Dances (1982). Cohen was also a founder of the Society of Dance History Scholars. In 1981 she was the recipient of the first Dance Magazine Award to a dance historian. Cohen died in December, 2005. She is remembered as the founder of dance history, and—despite the Encyclopedia's initial poor reviews—as editor of the definitive reference work on dance.

To learn more about Selma Jeanne Cohen, visit We Remember and in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: This Week in History for September 18, 1920, "Birth of dance scholar Selma Jeanne Cohen"; Dance Performance in the United States.

Sources: Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 252-254; New York Times, July 26, 1998.

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Henrietta Szold helps to create American Jewish culture

July 28, 1893

On July 28, 1893, the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent announced that Henrietta Szold would be moving to Philadelphia from her home in Baltimore to serve as the secretary and first paid employee of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS). Szold had been elected as the only female member of the JPS publication committee when the organization was founded in 1888 in order to provide a steady series of substantive works of Jewish culture to an American audience. Despite the initial apathy and opposition that the JPS encountered, Szold committed herself to the society, at one point "personally addressing eleven hundred circulars and membership blanks" although in the end they only yielded 75 responses. She had already served the organization as an author, translator, and editor, but now she would be a paid employee.

While Henrietta Szold's most significant impact on Jewish life would come after she founded Hadassah, the Zionist women's organization, in 1912, her work at JPS constituted a major contribution to the creation of an American Jewish culture. The Jewish Exponent article about her move to JPS suggests that, even before the formal commencement of this work, Szold was recognized as a woman who had and would continue to play an important role in the American Jewish community. Szold had already established herself as an educator and, through newspaper columns, as an astute observer of Jewish life. According to the Exponent article, "no one better equipped could be found than Miss Szold."

Upon being offered the job of secretary in 1893, Szold withdrew from her positions in Baltimore, including her role as superintendent of the Russian night-school of the Hebrew Literary Society. As the school's founder, superintendent, fundraiser and one of its teachers, she had, according to the article, surrounded herself with teachers "whom she has made thoroughly conversant with her masterful manner of teaching English to Russo-Jewish immigrants, and in the sympathetic manner of engaging their undivided attention so as to develop in them an appreciation of American ideals."

Szold's work for JPS was monumental. Although she worked under the title and salary of secretary, she served as translator, indexer, fact checker, proofreader, statistician, administrator, and editor, overseeing the publication of 87 books during her tenure. Szold's clear mind, exhaustive dedication, and meticulous attention to detail enabled the Society to offer a remarkable literary and scholarly array. Many of the translations and original works published by JPS during this time still inform contemporary American Jewish culture and scholarship. A new Bible translation and the series of American Jewish Year Books that commenced publication in 1900 began to define the contours of a distinctive American Jewish intellectual world. After twenty-two years, Szold withdrew from JPS work in 1916 when a group of Zionists offered to provide her with an annuity in order to support her growing work for Hadassah.

To learn more about Henrietta Szold, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and History Makers.

See also: This Week in History for December 21, 1935; February 13, 1945; and February 24, 1912; Jewish Women On the Road; Go & Learn: Primary Documents and Lesson Plans Henrietta Szold on Saying Kaddish; Jewesses with Attitude, "Henrietta Szold: travel and transformation"; Henrietta Szold poster.

Sources: Jewish Exponent, July 28, 1893; JWA Henrietta Szold exhibit, jwa.org/exhibits/wov/szold/; Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988 (Philadelphia, 1989).

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Broadcast of Deborah Kaufman's "Blacks and Jews"

July 29, 1997

The documentary film Blacks and Jews, written and directed by Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow, was aired on PBS on July 29, 1997. The film, which was co-produced by Kaufman, Snitow, and Bari Scott, examines three headline-making conflicts between the two groups, from the perspectives of activists on both sides. The 90-minute film begins with the Crown Heights riots of 1991. It then moves to Chicago to discuss the 1960s phenomenon of "blockbusting," in which real estate agents bought homes in Jewish neighborhoods at bargain prices and then resold them to African-Americans for large profits. Finally, the film examines a 1994 incident in which Black and Latino students at Castlemont High School in Oakland, CA, were asked to leave a movie theatre after they laughed during a screening of Schindler's List.

Intended to get behind the headlines and to spark dialogue, Blacks and Jews examines these conflicts through interviews with the participants, news footage, and comments from activists like scholar Cornel West, writer Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Tikkun magazine editor Michael Lerner, and historian Clayborne Carson. In addition to intergroup conflict, the film explores conflicts within each of these communities. The filmmakers have said they hope that Blacks and Jews will "provoke debate and discussion about intergroup relations in the United States" and that "the film lets us laugh about ourselves and lets us approach one another without fear."

Blacks and Jews was the first of three films that Kaufman, who holds a law degree from the University of California Hastings School of Law, has directed and produced with Snitow. Their non-profit production company, based in Berkeley, CA, was founded in 1993 "to produce film, video and educational media for the general public on social issues from race relations to globalization." In addition to Blacks and Jews, Snitow-Kaufman Productions has released Secrets of Silicon Valley (2001), which explores the darker side of the Internet revolution, and Thirst (2004), which explores the role of water rights in globalization and community resistance to globalization.

To learn more about Deborah Kaufman, visit her author bio in Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

See also: Independent Filmmakers in North America.

Sources:New York Times, July 29, 1997; www.snitow-kaufman.org/; newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0014; www.newsreel.org/guides/blacksan.htm.

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Birth of publisher Blanche Wolf Knopf

July 30, 1894

Although her name and work have been overshadowed by those of her husband, Blanche Wolf Knopf carved out her own place in the publishing industry as vice-president and president of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Born on July 30, 1894 (some sources say 1893), Blanche Knopf was raised in New York, where she met Alfred Knopf in 1911. They were married in 1916, the year after Alfred Knopf launched his eponymous publishing firm. Blanche Knopf was involved in the firm from the start, and in 1921, she became a director and vice-president.

In addition to running the office, Blanche Knopf's duties included frequent travel to meet with and recruit new authors for the press. By all accounts, she excelled in establishing relationships with writers on three continents. Under her leadership, Knopf published translations of French writers Albert Camus, André Gide, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre; South American writers Jorge Amado, Gilberto Freyre, and Eduardo Mallea; and the first American edition of Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism. Knopf published American classics, but under Blanche Knopf's urging the firm also published such new American writers as H.L. Mencken, Willa Cather, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. For her work in support of French literature in America, she was named a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1949 and made an officer in 1960. Similarly, she was honored by the Brazilian government in 1950 with the Order of the Southern Cross.

In 1957, Alfred Knopf became chairman of the board, and Blanche Knopf took over as president. However, in 1960, the firm was sold to Random House, which maintains the Knopf imprint as an independent entity. Blanche Knopf remained involved at the helm of the Knopf imprint until her death in 1966. Her New York Times obituary said that her "alertness and perspicacity in recruiting writers ... and her driving energy as an executive contributed immensely to the success of the house of Knopf." In a field dominated entirely by men, in which she was virtually the only woman in her time to take a leading role, Blanche Knopf had a lasting impact on Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., on the world of publishing, and on American letters.

To learn more about Blanche Wolf Knopf, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.

Sources:Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, pp. 743-745; New York Times, June 5, 1966; www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/books/holdings/knopf/.

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Miriam Miller joins the WAVES

July 30, 1942

On July 30, 1942, the U.S. government established the Navy WAVES, or Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, program. Though Navy women would not be allowed to serve outside the continental U.S., or even to go to sea, the military hoped that the recruitment of 10,000 women, who would work in onshore bases, would free sufficient numbers of men to fight overseas. Although women had served as nurses in the navy as early as the Spanish-American War, and officially in the Navy Nurse Corps since 1908, the WAVES program was by far the largest-scale effort to recruit women to active duty in the Navy. In the WAVES program, thousands of women performed nearly every possible job at over 500 naval stations through the Second World War. As military leaders had hoped, they enabled male officers and enlisted men to staff the ships that were responsible for the Allied victory in the Pacific theatre.

Among the earliest group of women to enlist in the WAVES was Miriam Miller. Although her parents felt that military nursing "wasn't the life for a nice Jewish girl," Miller enlisted soon after her graduation from the Wilkes-Barre General Hospital School of Nursing, in Pennsylvania. She was assigned first to the Great Lakes Naval Station and then to the San Diego Naval Hospital. Later, when the Navy relaxed its prohibition on women serving outside the continental U.S., she went to Guam, where she cared for soldiers injured in the battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Active in veterans' affairs after the war, Miller was elected President of the Jewish War Veterans National Ladies Auxiliary in 1961.

To learn more about Miriam Miller, visit Jewish Women in the Military: Miriam Miller.

See also: Jewish Women in the Military: WAVES; Jewesses with Attitude "Remembering Jewish Women in the Service; Jewish American Women and WWII online collecting project; "Jewish American Women and World War II" exhibit on Flickr Commons.

Sources:jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/navy/;jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/navy/miller.html; jwa.org/discover/inthepast/infocus/military/navy/waves.html;National Museum of American Jewish Military History, www.nmajmh.org.

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Bobbie Rosenfeld goes for the gold

July 31, 1928

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Fanny Rosenfeld is recognized as Canada's premiere woman athlete of the first half of the twentieth century. She was an all-round, company-sponsored athlete, a world class track and field champion, an Olympic gold and silver medalist at the 1928 Amsterdam Games and a sports journalist in Toronto for over twenty years. This photograph is from the mid-1920s.

Institution: Danny Rosenfeld

Even before she won gold and silver medals in the 1928 Olympics, Bobbie Rosenfeld was well known as a star of Canadian track and field. Born Fanny Rosenfeld in Dnepropetrovsk, Russia in 1904, she moved to Canada as an infant; she was later nicknamed "Bobbie" because of her bobbed hair. Growing up in Barrie, Ontario, and then in Toronto, Rosenfeld was an enthusiastic athlete from a young age, playing basketball, softball, hockey and tennis, as well as running. Despite widespread belief that strenuous exercise was damaging to women's bodies, Rosenfeld's family supported her athletic pursuits.

In 1923, Rosenfeld burst onto the national scene when she entered the 100-yard dash at a picnic on a dare from a softball teammate. At the time, Rosenfeld was working in a Toronto chocolate factory. Rosenfeld not only won the race but also beat the Canadian national champion, Rosa Grosse. Two years later, Rosenfeld and Grosse would share the world record for the 100-yard dash, at eleven seconds. Later in 1923, she entered her first major race at the Canadian National Exhibition. In the 100-yard dash, she again beat Grosse and also beat American and world-record holder Helen Filkey. The same evening, after the race, Rosenfeld joined her softball team and helped lead them to the city championship.

Over the next decade, Rosenfeld came to symbolize Canadian women's sport. She went from success to success, leading ice hockey, basketball, and softball teams to championships and winning the Toronto Ladies Grass Courts tennis tournament in 1924. She claimed victory in so many sports that one author later wrote that "the most efficient way to summarize Bobbie Rosenfeld's career ... is to say that she was not good at swimming." A consummate athlete, she was also applauded for her sportsmanship. Both these qualities would soon be evident on the world stage.

In 1928, Rosenfeld was chosen as one of the "matchless six" on the Canadian women's Olympic track and field team. The Olympics of 1928 were the first in which women were allowed to compete in track and field, although only on a trial basis. On July 31, 1928, Rosenfeld won the silver medal in the 100-meter race, though many spectators thought she had actually finished first. A few days later, Rosenfeld competed in the 800-meters, a race in which she had been entered only to encourage teammate Jean Thompson, and for which she had not trained. Coming from the rear, Rosenfeld ran alongside Thompson through most of the race, allowing her teammate to finish fourth while she placed fifth; this was considered a great act of compassion and sportsmanship, as Rosenfeld could easily have pulled ahead and earned a medal in the race. Finally, on the last day of track and field events, Rosenfeld got her gold medal when she led her team to victory in the 400-meter relay. On the team's return to Toronto, 200,000 people lined the streets to cheer a celebratory parade.

Rosenfeld had helped to show that women's competition could be a worthy part of the Olympics; after the Games closed, the delegates of the International Amateur Athletic Federation voted 16-6 to continue women's track and field events at future Olympics. The Canadian delegate voted against women's participation. Back at home, though Rosenfeld had received a hero's welcome, she went back to work at the chocolate factory to pay her bills. In 1928, no endorsement contracts or professional sports opportunities were available to women. Rosenfeld continued to play sports, even starring on championship ice hockey and softball teams, but recurrent attacks of severe arthritis ended her athletic career in 1933. She moved to coaching track and softball, and then, in 1937, to writing about sports. For nearly twenty years, she wrote the "Sports Reel" column for the Toronto Globe and Mail. She retired from the Globe and Mail in 1966 and died on November 14, 1969.

Rosenfeld's legacy is one of breaking down barriers. First as an athlete, and then as the only woman on the sports staff of the Globe and Mail, she carved new paths for women in sports, making it clear to skeptics that, as she put it in a column, "girls are in sports for good." These contributions were recognized both during Rosenfeld's lifetime and after her death. In 1950, a press poll of sportswriters named her Canada's Female Athlete of the Half Century; in 1955, she was among the earliest inductees to Canada's Sports Hall of Fame. Her portrait recently appeared on a Canadian postage stamp, and every year the Bobbie Rosenfeld trophy is awarded to Canada's Female Athlete of the Year.

To learn more about Bobbie Rosenfeld, visit Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia and History Makers.

See also: Teach: Primary Sources “Feminine Sports Reel,” Toronto Globe and Mail, January 10, 1941; Bobbie Rosenfeld in the Virtual Archive; Jewish Women On the Map Old Globe and Mail Building; Sports in the United States; Bobbie Rosenfeld poster.

Sources:JWA Bobbie Rosenfeld exhibit, jwa.org/exhibits/wov/rosenfeld/; New York Times, August 1, 1928; www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/women/002026-236-e.html; www.cshof.ca/accessible/hm_profile.php?i=474.

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Congregation appoints first woman to serve as senior rabbi

August 1, 1979

Reconstructionist rabbi Linda Joy Holtzman was appointed the spiritual leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Coatesville, PA, on August 1, 1979. The appointment made her the first woman to lead a Jewish congregation in the U.S. Although Sally Priesand had been ordained as a rabbi seven years earlier, and Sandy Eisenberg Sasso was the first woman to be ordained as a Reconstructionalist rabbi in 1974, no woman rabbi prior to Holtzman had won appointment as the leader of a synagogue. Women ordained as rabbis in the 1970s generally either served as associate or assistant rabbis, or found jobs outside the synagogue. In hiring Holtzman, Beth Israel broke with tradition in a second way; the congregation was affiliated officially with the Conservative movement, which had not yet authorized the ordination of women.

Holtzman's appointment was greeted with excitement by supporters of women's ordination, who understood that she had opened a door that more women rabbis would then be able to walk through. Holtzman told the New York Times that she believed her appointment was "very significant for women and for the Jewish community." Similarly, Rabbi Wolfe Kelman of the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly called it "an historical breakthrough and simply fantastic," noting that Holtzman's hiring would make it easier for other congregations to move forward with hiring women without having to feel that they were breaking entirely new ground.

Holtzman remained at Beth Israel for six years. Following her tenure there, she moved to Beth Ahava in Philadelphia, a gay and lesbian synagogue. While at Beth Ahava, she founded the Reconstructionist Hevrah Kadishah of Philadelphia, or traditional Jewish burial society. Later, Holtzman helped to found Kavod v'Nichum [Honor and Comfort], an organization which works to educate Jewish communities about the traditional practices of honoring the dead and comforting the bereaved, and to help communities and families adapt the rituals to their own needs. After leaving Beth Ahava, Holtzman served as interim rabbi for Philadelphia's Congregation Mishkan Shalom, and then for five years as that synagogue's Education Director.

Holtzman is currently an associate professor of practical rabbinics and director of the Department of Practical Rabbinics at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She has published extensively, including chapters in Twice Blessed (1989) and in Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation (2000).

See also: Rabbis in the United States; Reconstructionalist Judaism in the United States.

Sources:www.rrc.edu; New York Times, August 16, 1979; www.jewish-funerals.org/morekavod.htm; www.jew-feminist-resources.com/a_0730_0805.html; www.jewish-funerals.org/conference/conferencespeakers.htm.

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