Document Type

Article

Publication Date

Fall 2019

Publication Title

AJS Perspectives: The Magazine of the Association for Jewish Studies

Publisher

Association for Jewish Studies

Issue

The Body Issue

First page number:

26

Last page number:

27

Abstract

Performed most recently in Jerusalem’s Beit Shmuel Auditorium on July 4–5, 2014, Margot Mink Colbert’s ballet, TRANSIT(ION): Emigration Transformation, was scheduled for a third night. Margot cancelled. On July 6, 2014, explosions from Gaza tunnels triggered Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, beginning days of Gaza rocket launches interrupted by Israel’s Iron Dome Missile Defense System. In Tel Aviv, Margot heard the pop of successful interceptions. The experience could not have been more emblematic of Jewish survival. Margot dubs her decision to cancel the performance beforehand a miracle.

The ballet dances the epic story of twentieth-century Eastern European Jews from the Pale of Settlement who, as immigrants and artists, faced the trials and gifts of everyday assimilation and artistic creativity—the exodus that refused slavery, desired liberation, struggled with freedom. Her work embraces the drive to survive in the New Country and a critical view of capitalism and materialist culture. She has choreographed what Hans Blumenberg calls the impulse to resist utopic vision for realistic solution. We hear the human story of the laughter through the tears. As one father mused, “America’s a free country. You’re perfectly free to keep your opinions to yourself. You can’t even tell your own daughter what to do.”

Controlled Subject

Jews--Migrations;Dance--Performances

Disciplines

English Language and Literature

File Format

pdf

Language

English

Comments

The Margot Mink Colbert Papers (MS-00901) are available at the Special Collections & Archives Department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries.

For more information about Jewish history in Southern Nevada, please see the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project.

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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