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This article explores power relations in gathering Holocaust survivor life stories. Through the case study of Slovakian Jewish survivor, Vera Karoly, it asks whether her testimony was given or taken. Using Hank Greenspan's work as its inspiration, it contemplates the various forms of testimony and cultural production that were produced relating to Vera. The author himself is part of that process and it includes a reflexive approach to how he confronted the Holocaust. The ethical issues raised when a Holocaust survivor is reluctant to give testimony are to the fore, analyzing in this case how it led to a form of counter-memorial to the (im)possibility of speaking about the Shoah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates reactions of Jews to the perceived risk of antisemitic incidents in Germany by using a mixed-methods design. First, findings from qualitative interviews with 21 German Jews are presented: They perceive Jewishness as a stigmatized identity which ‘spoils’ everyday interactions, often simply because it is linked to the ‘weight’ of German history. We derive two analytical types of reaction to perceptions of stigmatization: defensive efforts to hide one’s Jewish identity and intervening engagement to actively combat antisemitism. In the second part of the paper, we report the findings of a quantitative survey of 295 Jews living in Germany to answer the question who choses which type of reaction. Especially the characteristics of the area where Jews live and the specifics of their Jewish identity are important correlates for explaining variance in their reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in the early 1980s, Leningrad-based Jewish intellectuals began to explore the settlements of the former Pale of Settlement in search of their ethnic and religious identity. Starting in 1982, Ilya Dvorkin, a physicist by training, together with a few friends, undertook several such shtetl expeditions to the Belarusian and Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republics. They visited the hometowns of their ancestors and explored important sites of Hasidism. Based on interviews and extensive archival material, this article investigates Jewish encounters with the abandoned material heritage of the shtetl and confrontations with the immaterial narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data literacy for students in nonquantitative fields is important as statistics become the grammar of research and how the world's decisions are made. Statistics courses are typically offered by mathematics or statistics departments or by social and natural sciences such as economics, political science, psychology, and biology. Here we discuss how to construct a statistics course for students in nonquantitative fields, with a goal of integrating statistical material with students' substantive interests, using student-focused teaching methods and technology to increase student involvement. We demonstrate this kind of hybrid course with the example of an introductory applied statistics class, taught at both the University of Toronto's Anne Tanenbaum Center for Jewish Studies and the United States Naval Academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christians and Jews in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Castile relied on income from local taxes levied on commercial transactions to maintain the fabric and the effective administration of their communities. The consumption tax imposed by the crown, the alcabala (also known as the sisa), was a major source of royal revenue so that traders were doubly taxed on the sales of their produce. The mechanism for the collection of these taxes and the way in which the tax-farmers were appointed to these lucrative posts showed some similarities between the two faith communities. A dispute described in a fourteenth-century rabbinic responsum reveals, however, that the process within one Jewish community (aljama) was less structured than that followed in the Christian municipalities (concejos). Furthermore, it portrays the considerable emphasis placed by the protagonists on the legal injunctions of Jewish law (halakha). The conflict between the various elements within the Jewish leadership and their attempts to influence rabbinic authority are an illustration of rivalry and contention and of the bids to dominate judicial process within a late-medieval Jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Munich Agreement and the Vienna Arbitration led to the first displacement of Jewish residents. Representatives of the regime saw the loss of territory as an opportunity to resolve the 'Jewish question.' On November 4th, 1938 an operation was launched to deport the Jews to their home villages and the ceded territories. It is estimated that 700 Jews remained imprisoned in 'No Man's Land' on the border of Slovakia and Hungary. Two camps were established where these Jews were concentrated. This study illustrates the events in the case study of the town of Čadca and the local Jewish population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As instructors of Jewish Studies struggle to find ways for their students to be more engaged in their learning, it is worthwhile for educators to consider whether art-based assignments are effective at reaching this goal. This article examines what students gain when their study of a biblical chapter is paired with the generation of an art product on that chapter. The study evaluates a pictorial summary assignment to retell the narrative and a dramatic production assignment to analyze the messages of a biblical chapter. The findings suggest that art-based assignments help students read Jewish texts more closely and make more personal connections to them more so than when no pictorial component is included with verbal-based assignments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The work of Rufino Blanco Fombona (1874–1944) and Rómulo Gallegos (1884–1969) is generally understood as reinforcing the then-common Venezuelan representation of race as biological and binary – as separable into either "white" or "non-white", with the latter category including all mixed-race people who made up 60% of Venezuela's total population at the time. These authors' narratives attempt to reinforce these binaries by racially classifying Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century – by understanding where they fit within this racial taxonomy. Instead, as I show, these attempts destabilise the categories themselves, leaning first on biological determinism, and then on cultural and ethnic profiling. To make this argument, I analyze Blanco Fombona's Judas Capitolino (1912) contextualised by his writings on race outside of his fiction, alongside Gallegos's short-story "Los inmigrantes" (1922). These works take biologically deterministic positions on race in their caricatures of Jews and mixed-race individuals, demonstrating the inability of Jewish immigration to whiten what Gallegos denotes as the"raza autóctona", the Venezuelan mixed-race individual that he believes to be barbaric and impure. Without the correct shade of whiteness to lighten Venezuela's mixed-race majority, the "raza autóctona" will take over positions of power, becoming a ruling "barbarocracia", threatening the white order and dooming Venezuela's (white) future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lies at the intersections of Jewish Anthropology, History, Diaspora Studies, and cross-cultural Jewish Studies. It intertwines two analytical trajectories. The first is the thematic core: extensive ethnographic research conducted among Indian Jewish communities living in Israel, some of whom made aliya over four decades ago. The second trajectory entails self-reflections on my subject-position as a non-Jewish, non-Israeli researcher conducting fieldwork among over 125 Indian Jews living across Israel. This paper delves into the process of doing Jewish Anthropology by identifying the spaces where shared cultural and linguistic "Indian-ness" intersected to dissolve boundaries of "difference" between my respondents and myself, facilitating community inroads and culminating not only in the successful accomplishment of extensive fieldwork but in creating enduring bonds of personal engagement. In stepping back to reflect on my own journey, I offer possibilities to understand certain nuances in the process of anthropological engagement, more specifically in doing Jewish Anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative, mixed-methods study explores various definitions of Israel Studies as a discipline through their manifestations in library and archival collections. A survey and a follow-up interview with collection curators provide a glimpse into library operations and demonstrate their dependency on Jewish Studies across the board. Collection strengths, extensiveness, and uniqueness are shaped not by the presence of an on-campus Israel Studies center, but rather by individual curators guided by their own proactive approach to collection building. The article includes an annotated list of over 120 distinctive collections, among which we uncover several hidden collections. Taken together, our article illustrates the need for better communication between Israel Studies' scholarly and information communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contrast between student-centred and knowledge-centred teaching is explored through a qualitative case study exploration of the pedagogies (Bruner's 'folk pedagogies') of six teachers of Jewish studies. These teachers, based in orthodox Jewish schools in the UK and Australia, discussed their roles as teachers in the context of their responsibility for inducting students into the Jewish community. They appear to overcome (or at least mitigate) the tensions between being student-centred and knowledge-centred through understanding both students and knowledge in communal terms. This communally-focused approach, drawing on the philosophers of 'personal' knowledge such as Polanyi, and of personalist approaches to schooling such as those of Macmurray and Noddings, is then proposed as of value in debates on schooling and the curriculum in general, well beyond the religious context of this particular research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads two texts, 'The Argentine Writer and Tradition' by Jorge Luis Borges and Monolingualism of the Other by Jacques Derrida, to examine the tension between singularity and specificity in comparative work, particularly in comparisons between Jewishness and postcoloniality. 'Singularity' is understood here as uniqueness, while 'specificity' is the factors that define that uniqueness. Borges' text serves as an example of the potential pitfalls of comparative work that is inconsistent in its recognition of singularity and specificity. Borges affords Jewish writers singularity, but not specificity, and so ends up denying the very elements of Jewish culture his argument appears to valorise, at the expense of his celebration of the postcolonial condition. Borges' comparison therefore undermines its own logic. Derrida, meanwhile, appears to exaggerate one particular colonised Jewish community's exceptionality, but through this apparent focus on the specificity of one group at the expense of others, offers a potential model for how to work comparatively yet still recognise the specificity of multiple groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of the analysis and interpretation contained in this text is El Lissitzky's work Self-Portrait as a Constructor from 1924. The text aims to indicate that El Lissitzky could have been inspired by two works by Marc Chagall: "Homage to Apollinaire" and "Dedicated to Christ" of 1912. The paper also attempts to interpret the Self-Portrait in a broader kabbalistic perspective. As it turns out, apart from his fascination with Kazimir Malevich's profile and Suprematism, Lissitzky was also well acquainted with the sphere of Jewish mysticism. In light of this, the work discussed in the article (apart from another work by the artist: "The Red Wedge of Beating the Whites" from 1919), one can clearly point to many themes of the Jewish Kabbalah, including such concepts as Ein Sof (the Endless/Infinite), Ayin (The Void), Iyun (Annihilation), Tzimtzum (Shrinkage/Disappearance), Shvirat kelim (Breaking of the vessels), piercing of the "Eye of Evil" and the general idea of Tikkun Olam (Repairing of the World). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes bibliographic classification systems for Jewish libraries and Judaica from a cultural perspective, partly detached from their function as document retrieval tools. Theoretically and methodologically, the study refers to the significance of warrants as formulated in Library and Information Science. With specific interest in the relation between Jewish and non-Jewish classification and bibliography, examples are given of systems from Europe and the USA, primarily from the twentieth century. Results indicate that bibliographic classification systems not only represent documents but reproduce cultural and ideological preferences of both designers and historical situations. In their effort to document religion in a bibliographic context, the example systems help to formulate various aspects of Judaism through both hierarchical structuring and subject definition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Josephine the Singer or A People of Mice: Franz Kafka, translated by Karin Doerr with Gary Evans, with an introduction by Karin Doerr. In particular, the passage from the story noting how Josephine's people live at all times in the shadow of the threat of violence is read as a direct reference to the climate of antisemitism in which Kafka lived. As Doerr explains in her introduction, This translation wishes to capture Kafka's language, even though it is the Prague German of his era, one hundred years ago, whose community has since vanished. [Extracted from the article]

We know little currently about how new digital tools have effected changes in Jewish studies learning environments and processes – although technologies play a central role in contemporary discussions of learning. This study aims to understand how learners collaboratively interpret Jewish sacred texts using informal online collaborative learning platforms. This case study focuses on Project Zug, an online havruta (paired couple) platform for the learning of Jewish texts. Based on 13 semi-structured interviews with Project Zug participants and using sociocultural frameworks of learning, I present how Project Zug created a digital havruta community of practice enabling dynamic learning identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the case study of a programme for Jewish and Palestinian educators in Israel and our initial insights into the outcome of the initiative. The programme aims to address racism, segregation, and prejudice and to support educators to teach culture and tradition in a more humanistic, inclusive, and critical way. To achieve this, it draws on inter-religious and intercultural dialogue. We will discuss how this method is rooted in both Judaism and Islam thus paving the way for participants to not only develop a better understanding of their own but also of others' tradition. Importantly, it also highlights the interrelations of these traditions, which can contribute to the development of a shared society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Fate of the Jews in the Early Islamic Near East: Tracing the Demographic Shift from East to West" by Phillip Lieberman is a comprehensive study of Jewish life during the early Islamic rule in the Near East. The book examines the migration of Iraqi Jews to the West and challenges the hypothesis of a massive migration from East to West. It also explores the identity of Jews in the region after the Muslims came to power and analyzes Jewish and Islamic business laws. The book is a valuable resource for those interested in Near Eastern studies, archaeology, and Jewish studies, although it may be challenging for non-academic readers. [Extracted from the article]

Like all scholars, Samuel Stern was profoundly influenced by his teachers and mentors. This article focuses on four scholars with whom Stern forged especially close relationships: S.D. Goitein (1900–1985), D.H. Baneth (1893–1973), Paul Kraus (1904–1944), and Richard Walzer (1900–1975). Through an analysis of their ideas about Islam, Judaism, and Islamic Studies, this paper aims to situate Stern's work in its proper context and to offer an analysis of the twentieth-century German-Jewish orientalist tradition of which he was, in the words of Albert Hourani, an embodiment. It proposes that Stern's mentors constructed a broadly positive and sympathetic view of Islam as a sister religion of Judaism and heir to Hellenic civilization, that their orientalist scholarship was influenced by trends in modern Jewish philosophy, and that their work in Islamic Studies constitutes a humanistic contribution to modern Jewish thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction gives an overview of Stern's career, summarizes his prolific and field-shaping work on Jewish and Islamic subjects, and looks ahead to the articles in this special issue. Surveying Stern's scholarly network, and noting his resemblance to his great compatriot and coreligionist Ignaz Goldziher, it also proposes that academic orientalism has been an important element of modern Jewish activity in Europe, the USA, and Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a survey and assessment of the state of New Testament scholarship and disability studies. It provides some critical reflections on the current trends and trajectories of the field and potential futures for it to progress further. While some work has been done on the Catholic Epistles, Revelation, and Paul, the majority of focus has been on the canonical Gospels. Studies often encompass meta-critical, historical, literary, or theological focuses. A number of problems have been raised, such as the question of lived disabled experience in antiquity, anachronism, and ableism within the field itself. Still, there are a number of potential futures for the field, especially in dialogue with adjacent fields to biblical studies like second temple Jewish studies and classics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of COVID, the Mandel Teacher Educator Institute (MTEI) faced essential pedagogical challenges in creating learner-centered, relational, and inquiry-based Jewish text study in an online synchronous space. In fall 2020, we offered an online adaptation of a line-by-line method for text study to understand the way this pedagogy invites enactments of teaching, social, and cognitive presences. This study uses qualitative methodologies to understand the learners' experiences. Implications from this study can help us understand how activating presence in online spaces can bring rich, connected Jewish learning experiences into spaces often perceived to be flat and disconnected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iranian-Jewish newspaper Ha-Hayyim represented a high point of Jewish engagement with the wider public sphere in the late Qajar period. Its modernizing agenda saw it and its editor Shemuel Hayyim become subjects of controversy as Jews debated their political future in Iran. This article examines four poems featured in Ha-Hayyim as a means of illuminating a period of Jewish literary creativity mostly neglected by scholarship. The paper explores the poems as literary and historical texts and outlines the writers' employment of modern literary techniques, comparing them with contemporary Iranian writing in Persian and Hebrew. Jewish literary engagement with Persian literature represents an important linguistic and political self-assertion in a dynamic cultural environment. The article pursues the poems' overlapping treatment of Zionism and constitutionalism, examining how the two ideologies informed each other, and argues for a literary optic to the well-documented antagonism between Hayyim and his political rivals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is surprising that Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet whose self-proclaimed mission was to give city streets a language, turned to publicizing farming collectives. No less noteworthy is the fact that this poet of internationalism worked on the ethnocentric project of promoting Jewish agrarian communities in Crimea. This article addresses Mayakovsky's collaboration on the film Evrei na zemle (Jews on the Land, 1927), and his poems "Evrei (Tovarishcham iz OZETa)" (Jew [To Comrades from OZET], 1926) and "'Zhid'" ("Yid," 1928). I argue that in these works the poet reshuffles the svoi–chuzhoi (us-versus-them) dichotomy. Using the Moses story of exile and liberation, the poet both domesticates Jews through features of the dominant culture and marginalizes antisemites by ascribing to them the pejorative markers of the Jewish stereotype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on recent publications in modern Jewish studies including forgiveness and resentment in the aftermath of mass atrocity, exile and identity among Jews, and Jewish queer lesbian feminisms for the twenty-first century.

In 2011 we started following a cohort of 1,000 Jewish 11-year-olds as they entered Jewish and non-Jewish secondary schools in Britain. We were interested in finding out about their Jewish behaviors, attitudes and identity, milestones, and significant events. What follows in this article is an analysis of six family stories, which show how we have been charting change over time in three ways—through themes that develop within a single family over time, themes that develop across the sample of six families over time, and themes that resonate with all six families at one moment in time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a list of recently published books on various topics related to Jewish studies, including subjects such as queer Judaism, Holocaust experiences, Jewish theology, and more.

In the last century, the theme of an objectified mesorah (tradition) has been operative in, and at times central to, discussions relating to modernity within rabbinic discourse. This article traces the history of the usage of this term, principally within the Lithunanian-rabbinic tradition, from its technical halakhic antecedents to its extended invocations in modern discussions which often take place in areas of social and political significance. The emergence of the term mesorah in these contexts is traced to the kulturkampf with heterorthodox movements in nineteenth-century Europe and is shown to have been centralized within American Orthodox discourse through the teachings of one of the most important ideologues of American Modern-Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik. Although linguistically the term's extended usage is a child of modernity, this article demonstrates that the thrust of arguments from mesorah are well precedented in traditional rabbinic literature where they have been deployed for very many centuries. Special focus and analysis is given to the linguistic significance of the term and on explaining how this invocation has been used within the recent debates in American Orthodoxy regarding the potential for inclusivity in clerical roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses data from site visits to four Hasidic elementary schools in Brooklyn to examine how specific learning, review, and testing activities used in these schools might be applied in other Jewish education classrooms to build knowledge depth and automaticity. The literature on learning and cognition in secular subjects has identified many classroom techniques that promote deep learning and long-term retention rather than superficial recall, but these techniques have not been applied systematically to Jewish studies classrooms. Hasidic schools, whose overall approach to religious education differs significantly from that of other Jewish day schools, employ distinctive learning activities that incorporate many of these techniques. Some elements of Hasidic learning practices may thus represent a valuable model for other Jewish studies contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Michael Checinski's anonymously-published piece "USSR and the Politics of Polish Antisemitism, 1956-1968" from the first issue of Soviet Jewish Affairs in 1971 can be read as both an analysis of antisemitism in Communist Poland and as a scholarly artifact that illustrates the manner in which the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Jewish communities in the region were studied and understood at the height of the Cold War, it also tells us much about the study of East European Jewry and other, related fields over the past fifty years. Indeed, key parts of Checinski's analysis including its focus on the Soviet Union's anti-Jewish policies, its emphasis on the corrosive if not inherently evil nature of the Soviet Union, and its examination of antisemitism in Poland remain central topics in the study of Soviet and East European Jewry. Moreover, while the Soviet Union has long passed into the annals of history, many of the same historical themes, narrative tropes and scholarly frameworks that once helped researchers frame the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are now critical parts of scholarly efforts to construct and explicate another important sub-field in the realm of Jewish studies, the study of antisemitism, including debates regarding the "New Antisemitism." In this and other ways, Checinski's essay exemplifies not only the manner in which Cold War tensions, ideologies and anxieties shaped the study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for generations but also how they continue to influence the study of Soviet and East European Jewry and other, related fields to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jewish rhetorics recently garnered critical attention in rhetoric studies, resulting in extensive scholarship attempting to carve out the field's jurisdiction. Jewish feminist rhetoricians, for example, often use Jewish rhetorics to reclaim women's religious experiences. But recovering the secular voices of Jewish women is also essential to understanding Jewish rhetorics, evinced by an anonymous group of nineteenth century women. These women use secular Jewish topoi—exile, tzedek (justice), and zikaron (memory)—to articulate their identity as American Jewish women, demonstrating both Jewish rhetorics' potential as a cultural rhetoric and topoi's ability to empower marginalized communities through exclusionary practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This qualitative study, examining seven communities in the globalized Asia Pacific area, aimed to investigate Jewish community attitudes toward Hebrew, their heritage language (HL), as influenced by the social environment. The main finding was that the "complex ecology" of context influences attitudes to Hebrew. The article delineates three major categories: expatriates in Asia, whose particularistic identity, including Hebrew, was strengthened; citizens, the majority native-born, in Australia and immigrants in New Zealand, whose Jewish identity was weakened. Findings demonstrate the importance of community contact, adding to understanding HL learning and linguistic distance between micro and macro elements in the sociolinguistic context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean to be a Jewish girl today and how do Jewish adolescent girls navigate their identity? The study that I undertook is exploratory and designed to understand how three girls, who are recent day school graduates, experience the process of identity development as they begin high school. While the sample is small, the study reveals new directions for looking at Jewish girls and questions that need to be asked when researching their lives. It concludes with a few suggestions for thinking about how to conduct future research with Jewish girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This curriculum studies article uncovers how ideological commitments often, without acknowledgment, determine instruction. Through a comparison of two popular Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) curricula, both focused on the same subject, one emerging out of a fundamentalist religious worldview and the other a progressive, modernist religious worldview, curricular nuances are explored and theorized. Ultimately, this article argues that small differences in instruction serve to shape radically different conceptions of religious activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars often analyze houses' "Jewishness" vis-à-vis Jewish law and rituals. For Dutch Sephardic Jews during the long eighteenth century, however, identity is better understood using a model of rhizome in which "Jewishness" consists of the deliberate interbraiding of multiple traditions. Jewish identity was inextricable from the cultures in which Jews lived. Jewish homes along the Vecht River near Amsterdam exemplify the rhizome model. They embody the same braided pastoral ideal found in eighteenth-century Dutch Sephardic literature and material culture. As Sephardic Jews relocated to Netherlands Antilles, the rhizome present in country houses shifted, taking into account Jews' new role as slave owners. Thus while buitenplaatsen along the Vecht embraced the Jewish pastoral ideal of a retreat from mercantile life, landhuizen in Curaçao evoked a georgic ideal that channelled the residents' gaze not on rivers, gardens, and grottos, but on guard stations, slave huts, and enslaved workers. Leisure became redefined as an ability to watch rather than retreat from labour. Taken together, Dutch Jewish country houses along the Vecht and in Curaçao challenge the notion that Jewish material culture has a "single root system." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways that Jewish studies teachers think about their teaching. It analyzes data from a three month teacher study group in which teachers read educational research articles as a framework for reflecting on their own teaching. The data suggest that Jewish studies teachers take one of two approaches in talking about their teaching: Half the teachers focused on the process of teaching, the specific modalities and teaching moves they employed, while the other half focused on the goals of teaching, the specific outcomes they wanted to see in their students. We also found that those teachers who were more focused on outcomes (rather than process) saw personal identity as an essential ingredient in effective Jewish education. This article raises questions about the efficacy of transferring professional development models from general education to Jewish education, without special attention to the specific cultural context of Jewish studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of that question, which focuses on the effects that political and diplomatic changes and antisemitism has on the Jewish community, were the dominant features of research on Jews in Poland until the 1990s. In Poland, shifting relations between Germany and Poland further decreased the party leadership's commitment to anti-fascist rhetoric. "Reflections on the Polish Experience" was written in the aftermath of the mass exodus of Poland's remaining Jewish population. [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes American Jewish writer Abraham Cahan's depictions of dance in the context of turn-of-the-century, immigrant dance culture. The protagonists of his 1896 novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto and his 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky are fascinated with dancing and, moreover, identify dance halls with American-style physicality. The two male characters experience very different problems with the women in their lives, difficulties that Cahan suggests result from their inability to conform to American dance etiquette. These romantic failures give the plots a circular structure, reminiscent of the dances themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]