Running Down a Dance
Irina Jacobson Image by Courtesy Janice Ross
Crossposted from Haaretz
Leonid Jacobson bears the distinct honor of being both the only Jewish choreographer active in the Soviet Union during the Communist era and a man who won praise from Mikhail Baryshnikov and Natalia Makarova after they defected to the West. The search for Jacobson has brought dance historian and researcher Janice Ross to Israel.
“When I was a dance critic, I kept hearing about a Jewish choreographer whose works were amazing, but no one had ever seen them outside of Russia,” says Ross. “There was an attempt to erase him. His work was either prohibited or censored or repressed for years during his lifetime.”
In the 1980s Ross learned that in San Francisco, not far from where she lived, there was a ballet teacher called Irina Jacobson who taught technique in an unusual way. Ross found out she was the widow of the choreographer, who died in 1975.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
