Queering Jewish Dance: Baruch Agadati

Abstract The work of the homosexual Israeli dance pioneer and choreographer Baruch Agadati (1895–1976) queered Jewish dance. His project of Hebrew Dance was a queer take on traditional Jewish dance material mixed with a seemingly queer shift of the antisemitic distortions of this material. Throughout his approach to Jewish dance traditions from a perspective as a nonobservant, secular Jew, Agadati transcended boundaries of religion, secularity, and nation to a complex questioning of how Jewishness could be expressed through modern dance.