Judith Brin Ingber is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and dance historian who cultivated the contemporary research field of Jewish dance studies. By establishing space for conversations regarding how dance is a Jewish cultural phenomenon, Ingber became a foremost expert on Jewish dance and dancers around the world. She has fostered multiple generations of Jewish dance researchers as well as countless students, dancers, and writers.

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When they returned to the United States, Ingber and her family settled in Minnesota. She founded the dance program at the University of Minnesota in 1986 when it combined to become the Department of Theater Arts and Dance, and taught there for many years. Ingber continued to write often for Dance Today: The Dance Magazine of Israel, and she still writes about dance on her regular trips to Israel, often during the annual International Exposure dance festival.

In the 1980s, Ingber became invested in making Sephardic performance practices more present in Jewish arts discourse. She formed the chamber group Voices of Sepharad with singer David Harris in 1980; they toured throughout the US and Canada. Ingber choreographed and performed dances based on Harris’s singing of Ladino songs. Together they researched Sephardic forms, also investigating biblical stories with Sephardic Nusach (chant), accompanied by their drummer and ‘ud player. This work resulted in essays focused on Sephardic dance, including Ingber’s 2005 piece “Is Sephardic Dance Too Sexy?” which described historic Sephardic dance practices and their marginalization by Ashkenazi culture brokers; and her introduction to her 2011 anthology Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance, “Coming into Focus,” which highlights North African, Greek, and Turkish Jewish dance sources as part of defining Jewish dance aesthetics.

Ingber’s contributions to Jewish dance as a mode of cultural inquiry include her work in monographs, journals, periodicals, edited volumes, academic papers, and public lectures teaching diverse audiences how dance is an expression of Judaism and Jewish culture. Ingber’s scholarly publishing credits include: Victory Dances; “Shorashim: The Roots of Israeli Folk Dance,” a Dance Perspectives monograph from 1974; a Fall 1985/Spring 1986 special issue of Dance Research Journal titled “Dancing into Marriage: Jewish Wedding Dances” based on collected papers from a conference she directed that focused on dance traditions in Ashkenazi, Yemenite, and Persian Jewish communities; and Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance (2011), an anthology containing essays highlighting theatrical and folk Jewish dance traditions from many parts of the Jewish diaspora.

One of Ingber’s most poignant essays is “Vilified or Glorified? Nazi versus Zionist Views of the Jewish Body,” first published in the volume of Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review (2000) that she edited, then expanded in Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance. In it, Ingber explains how, when folk dancers from the Yishuv toured to displaced persons camps to perform for Holocaust survivors in the aftermath of World War II, these two groups did not recognize each other as Jews across their corporeal divides, between the healthy bodies of the dancers from the Yishuv and the depleted bodies of the Holocaust survivors. As with her first editorial that asked why Minneapolis dancers would not get along, Ingber’s sustained focus on how we understand the Other through dance prompts us to reexamine our own assumptions on the stage and on the page.

Judith Brin Ingber’s papers are located in the archives of the University of Minnesota and the Dance Library of Israel. A full list of Ingber’s publications is available at: http://www.jbriningber.com/bibliography.html

“Shorashim: The Roots of Israeli Folk Dance.” Dance Perspectives 59 (Autumn 1974): 1–60.

Victory Dances: The Story of Fred Berk, A Modern Dance Jewish Dancing Master. Tel Aviv: Israel Dance Library, 1985.

“Dancing into Marriage: Jewish Wedding Dances” Special Issue, Dance Research Journal 17/18 (Fall 1985/Spring 1986).

“Jewish Dance,” Special Issue, Jewish Folklore and Ethnology Review 20, nos. 1–2 (2000).

“Is Sephardic Dance Too Sexy?” In Sephardic Identity: Essays on a Vanishing Jewish Culture, edited by George K. Zucker, 167–177. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., Publishers, 2005.

Seeing Israeli and Jewish Dance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011.