ABSTRACT
The book’s opening chapter establishes its historical foundations by tracing and analyzing relations between the two communities through dance as they have developed since the late 19th century to the present. The chapter starts with encounters in dance between Jews and Arabs in 19th-century, pre-Zionist Palestine and explores how these encounters evolved with the arrival of secular Jewish groups in the early 20th century, the advent of Israeli statehood in 1948 and the various social, demographic and political changes that followed. It ends in the year 2000, with the closure of the two government-sponsored folk and ethnic dance institutions. The author uses concepts from colonial and postcolonial studies to interpret major trends in the relationship between the two groups, as seen through the Jewish-Israeli perspective. This perspective contains a range of powerful political and emotional meanings, from an initial neighborly relationship, to cultural borrowing and adaptation, continuing with the emergence of an orientalist mimicking gaze, expanding to artistic inspiration and cultural appropriation (especially of the Dabke dance) and ending with governmental patronage and representation of Arab dance.
