“I don’t like things which you would call in Hebrew balagan”: Dance, Desire, Diplomacy, and Diasporic Dreams in the Baroness de Rothschild’s Politics of Patronage

• In Event: Embodied Acts: Dance and its Impact on Jewish Memories, Peoplehood, and Institutions

Abstract

This paper explores how the Baroness Bethsabée (Batsheva) de Rothschild activated a foundational shift in the organization and perception of concert dance in Israel in the 1960s and beyond, through her philanthropic and political actions. As a Jewish refugee from France at the beginning of WWII, “Madame de Rothschild” moved to the U.S., where she studied American dance as a practitioner and theoretician. In this environment of artists and political activists, de Rothschild crafted a lifestyle that could comply with both her family’s philanthropic and political enterprises and her more intimate desires.
I will focus on the key shifts in de Rothschild’s arc between the 1940s and 1970s, which encompasses her renowned support for the Martha Graham Dance Company, the establishment of her own philanthropic foundation, her increasingly frequent trips to Israel until she made aliyah, the establishment of the dance companies Batsheva and Bat-Dor, and other actions of dance patronage and cultural governance. I will do this by mobilizing public and private archival sources (interviews, letters, contracts, etc.) and remapping the transnational networks and hierarchies of influence that de Rothschild interwove as a private citizen and political figure.
What emerges, I contend, is that, in Israel, de Rothschild attempted to establish an artistic vision as well as a model of private funding that could compete but also align with a governmental agenda and model of public funding. I will demonstrate how de Rothschild simultaneously inhabited the private and public artistic and financial sectors interweaving relations with Zionist international agencies while also claiming her direct family’s disengagement from Zionism. Ultimately, I argue that, on the one hand, de Rothschild envisioned a practice of cultural and political management aimed at manifesting a sense of low-key artistic and governmental virtuosity that could initially comply with a Labor Socialist ethos. On the other hand, her aesthetic and political aversion to balagan, as a semi-official feature of mamlalkhti’ut (Israeli statism and consciousness), made her political efforts progressively incompatible with the larger Israeli agenda, reducing the scope of her actions and influence.

Author

• Melissa Melpignano, The University of Texas at El Paso