Jews Of The Universe

Introducing Danielle Aris

“To me, dance is a form of prayer. It’s an exchange of breath with others; it’s the highest form of gratitude. Coming from a family of survivors drove me to go after what truly made my heart sing, offered me a sense of purpose, and gave me a voice. My refugee / nation-building lineage has taught me things I never could have learned in school.

Dance is how I pieced myself together from the brokenness of my family. I come from people who survived against almost impossible odds, and yet they embodied so much trauma. Dance is how I found my way to myself within the diaspora, where so many of us felt so separated and set apart.

I’ve been blessed with a linguistic and cultural connection to every corner of the world. Dance gave me the agency to choose my own experiences, come to my own decisions, and to truly be myself. And I never renounced my faith for dance — instead, I expressed it in its wholeness and truth.”

*

“My grandparents on both sides were survivors of the Holocaust.

My paternal grandfather, Yoseph, was one of seven children and the only surviving brother of his family. I have a photo of his parents and four of his siblings in the Dubrowa ghetto; some of them are wearing their yellow stars.”

“My paternal grandmother arrived in British-occupied Palestine on the Kindertransport from Berlin, after being separated from her parents. A lot of people think the Kindertransport only brought rescued children to Britain itself. But she made it to Palestine, as we used to refer to our homeland.

As a young adult, she met my grandfather at Degania Alef, Israel’s first Kibbutz by the Kinneret [The Sea of Galilee]. They were both members of the Haganah [the main Zionist paramilitary defense force in the region].

Their wedding was literally underground and they made their own wedding cake. Family lore has it that because they were both orphaned, and neither had parents who taught them to cook or bake, this cake was as hard as a rock. (My grandmother would later go on to become a magnificent cook.)

Their wedding was in Palestine, and that’s why it’s so important to acknowledge that Jews were Palestinian. Their passports said Palestine. So when I hear the distorted construct of the term today, it makes me crazy. That term does not refer to a specific religious group. It refers to people who lived there before 1948. The Jews of that region were as Palestinian as the Arabs of Transjordan.

When the war broke out in 1948, my grandfather was the first tank commander in the history of modern Israel.

Eventually my grandparents acquired their own land in Hadera, a city in the Haifa District, which is where my father and his brother were born. They stayed in Israel until 1958, when the family decided to move to America. Having spent both their adult lives in the Army, my grandparents did not want their sons to be consigned to the same fate. My grandfather had a sister in New York, so the family moved to the Bronx.

*

My mother’s family is from Baghdad. They were there at a time when Jewish children went to public school with Muslim and Christian children. Jews lived in separate neighborhoods but they went to public birthday parties that were co-ed, where girls were allowed to talk to boys, and the rigid restrictions we associate with fundamentalist Islamist countries weren’t yet in place.”

Danielle’s grandmother Violet with her first child, Samira

“But then what happened is Iraq became a pro-Nazi regime that wanted to finish what Hitler couldn’t. There was so much collaboration with Hitler that didn’t even really end when he killed himself.

My mother’s family lived in a house on the Tigris River. And instead of going to the orchestra or the opera or museums, as people were doing in Europe, what they did to experience art and culture was to gather in backyard garden parties and recite poetry and sing, which represented a kind of tribal oral tradition, a way of imparting their culture to the next generation and keeping their community intact. When they threw a party, a belly-dancer was always in the mix. In this dance form, the body made music with the coins clinging to its sashes.

With the rise of anti-Semitic persecution, many of the Jews who had money fled to Iran, which was the Paris of the Middle East at the time. Those with the means to do so could continue their education in Tehran, where there were international schools, and they would learn English and French from the colonizers, and even women were able to earn degrees.

My mother’s family stayed in Iraq where they could maintain their heritage and enjoy their beautiful house while keeping the family together. But Jewish children were now being pelted with rocks at school, so my grandmother put her daughter into a Jewish school for her safety. Then one day my grandfather was fired from his job after being accused of embezzlement and theft. And before long, all Jews were accused of the same crimes, and none were allowed to remain in their professions.

My mother’s family realized that without any income, they would soon starve to death, so they filed for permission to leave the country. Most Jewish families weren’t allowed to take so much as a kiddush cup with them, so almost all the Jewish artifacts of that era and place have been destroyed or hidden. Because of this, our presence in that region has been all but erased, as if we were never there.”

Danielle’s grandparents (center) with extended Iraqi family

“My mother’s family settled in a very poor neighborhood in the Bronx. This was in 1952.

As kids, my parents both attended P.S. 7, a public grade school in the borough. They knew of but never spoke to each other. My mother was painfully shy as a child and my father was this competitive and driven kid who skipped a grade, so they were a year apart.

They met again as adults, fixed up on a blind date by their Greek friends, where they realized they’d both been at P.S. 7 and grown up within a few blocks of each other. The date went well and it wasn’t long before they were married. They went on to have two girls and two boys, in that order. I was the second girl.

I remember vividly that as a child, surrounded by my 6-person family in a two-bedroom apartment, I would take the initiative to put on the Shalom Tsum Tsum videos, which were in Hebrew, because I felt at home in the language of my family. My parents would play Tzena Tzena on their turntable record player, along with other songs in Israel’s pioneering spirit. When we went to the Iraqi synagogue, we would dance these Iraqi dances. Getting up to dance was almost obligatory and there was nothing else like it — nothing like the soul in those dances.

My mother had been a professional bellydancer, so that’s what I learned as a child! But when I danced like that anywhere else, like in a freeze dance game at school, I learned so fast that it was not at all socially acceptable, and I got in trouble for being ‘inappropriate’.

I was so humiliated by this that I didn’t want to dance anymore. Dancing felt very unsafe after that. It wasn’t until my mother enrolled me in a ballet school that it felt somewhat safe again. In ballet, there was a very specific structure to follow. There was a safety in having a clear set of rules and knowing exactly what I was expected to do.

But by around the age of eight, the ballet I was learning started to feel like a less-than-perfect fit. My attention started to drift in class. That Mizrahi music was in my bones, and especially when there was any strong percussive beat, my body wanted to move in a different way.

My mother would tell me to dance the way I wanted to dance, but I overwhelmingly received other messages as a girl in an Arabic family. Truly, even as a young girl — before you’re developed, long before you’re a woman — you’re already being objectified. People stare at you when you move your body to music, and by drawing any attention to yourself, you’re made to feel as if you’re inviting something perverse. Dancing was something I longed to do, but again, it felt dangerous, and I experienced that push-pull for years. I want to! I can’t. But I want to! But I can’t.

When I told my mother I wanted to pursue a career as a professional dancer, she laughed. I think it was hard for her to see her daughter experiencing a freedom that she herself never had.

But I was also powerfully drawn to visual art and my mother let me take a painting class. The teacher was Harriett Belag — she was this wonderful Polish Jewess who taught me how to paint. She really nurtured my love of color and creative expression, and eventually she helped me get into LaGuardia Arts High School.

No one was allowed to study both fine arts and dance there — you had to do one or the other. I applied to the visual arts program at the high school and I was still dancing at home, but no longer studying formally. But just as part of my own fashion style, I wore ballet flats to school, and between those shoes and the way I carried myself, people were always asking if was a dancer.

I wanted so badly to say yes. But I felt that I couldn’t, because I was at LaGuardia for the visual art program and I wasn’t studying dance anymore. I thought my answer had to reflect my major. Yes, I still danced by myself at home, but I thought that didn’t really count.

*

When I was 16, I went to Israel for a summer program called Chetz Vakeshet, which means bow and arrow in Hebrew. This was for kids who were dual citizens. We were in the Gadna, which was a youth movement in Israel meant to train teens for service in the army.

In Israel, too, people would ask me all the time: “Do you dance?”

There’s something about being in a totally foreign environment that’s freeing. In the middle of the desert, it was like I could be a different version of myself. So in Israel, when people asked, Do you dance? I found myself saying… Oh, yes. Yes, I do.

On many of the days we were hiking in the mountains or going on an excursion, I would wear this t-shirt that said American Ballet Theater. But I never in my life thought I’d be performing with them. Never.”

“But saying that I was a dancer throughout my time in Israel affected me, and when I returned to New York, I no longer believed I had to sacrifice one art form in order to practice the other. So I tried to take classes at a couple of local studios, but none of them would let me in. My body was changing, and I needed to regain a command of the fundamentals. But at that time, there were no beginner ballet classes for teens or adults.

So I finished my high school fine arts program. But I held onto the conviction that had seeped into my bone marrow in Israel, where people would ask if I was a dancer and I would always say yes.

When I graduated high school, I returned to Israel before going to college. I joined the IDF within a program called Maarva. And like Chetz Vakeshet, it was for people with dual citizenship, to help them acclimate into the environment. I did my basic training in Sde Boker.”

“I shared a tent with nine other girls. It was blazing hot by day and freezing cold by night. We were on a base with a barbed wire enclosure and lookout tower, and that was hard for me, given my association with those visuals. Each soldier had to do an hour on guard duty, protecting the base, and my shift was between 4 and 5 am. You wear an M-16 all the time, and that M-16 was about my height, so it was very difficult. You even have to take it into the shower with you, and if you didn’t, you could be arrested, because that would mean someone could steal it, and whoever stole it would then know what weaponry we were using.

At that time, service in the IDF was your gateway into society, much more so than any college degree. Nobody cared where you went to school or what you went to study. What was your job in the army? That was all anyone cared about.

Basic training was very hard, but then I was given a job as a translator and I got to work at the Children’s Museum of Holon. And it was in Israel that I finally got to take some dance classes, at Studio B in Tel Aviv. The teacher let me in and told me I just needed to brush up on the basics and I’d be good to go. I was so grateful to be able to take dance classes again.”

“After my year in Israel, I began college in Boston, at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. I kept seeing ads for The Nutcracker and I wanted so badly to see it, so finally I went online and bought a seat in the cheapest price bracket. But when I got there, the usher brought me to the very front row. I have no idea how that happened — maybe it was the last available seat in the house and I was assigned to it randomly. But there was magic in the air that night and my heart was hammering so hard just watching the dancers spin and leap right in front of me.

I decided to reach out to several different dance companies to tell them I was an artist and ask if they had any interest in displaying any of my dance-related art. I never heard back from any New York companies, but Boston Ballet responded the very next day. They were very interested in seeing my work and they invited me in to show it to them. They ended up wanting several of my pieces, including a series featuring my handmade paper ballet slipper molds, and asked me to bring them back the next day.”

“Soles And Souls”

“When I returned, I also applied for a volunteer position in their library just so I could be surrounded by all the dancers, from the littlest kids to the most accomplished stars from all around the world who would come to the Boston Ballet for a summer intensive. And I would also attend the “pre-curtain” talks and listen to each of the dancers talk about their process.

Holding onto the dream of dancing professionally when I’d be coming back into the discipline so late — it seemed delusional. But when I started college, I asked myself: if I just got a teaching degree and had a stable income and didn’t dance, would I be okay with that? And I didn’t even have to think about it. I knew the answer was: no, I would hate myself for the rest of my life.

So the Boston Ballet was the first company I found that began to offer ballet classes for adults. I started taking beginner classes there, and I would always look at their website for opportunities, and one day, there was a notice for a casting audition. They were looking for people who could fill a walk-on role, but they wanted these people to at least have some background in dance. So I decided to go to that audition.

I’ve never considered myself a person of high confidence, but I really wanted to try out for a part, and I protected it by telling no one about it, not even my mother. That kept it safe.

The audition was absolutely packed. I wouldn’t be surprised if a thousand people were there. And looking around at all the others who looked so much more professional and confident than me, I felt very intimidated.

But some of the staff recognized me and one of them called me up to audition first, along with the pros, which came as a shock to me. They were videotaping us in groups and planning to review the footage later, and I was among the first to learn that I’d been given a walk-on part in Sleeping Beauty.”

“Though I loved the ballet, it never made me cry like people in the movies are always crying at the opera. But then one day, we had a different cast, and a ballerina from Cuba named Adiarys Almeida came onstage, and everyone was crying. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. She had such fire. She was dancing with her whole being. And I saw something of myself in her. The Eastern dance is what set me on fire. And she had that same attitude, the attitude of, like, I’m attacking the pirouette. I’m going for it and I’m not afraid and I will stop at nothing. If you look her up on YouTube, you’ll see something you’ve never seen in your life. And she showed me I could channel my Iraqi-Arabic fire into ballet and make it my own, because I saw her do it.

I worked as hard as I could for the next five years. I got to dance with The Boston Ballet again in the World Premiere of Swan Lake. Then I applied to join a dance company in Spain and I got in. It was in Seville, on the southernmost tip of the country. Africa was just across the water, and I could see Morocco from my window. It was one of the most beautiful places I’ve been to in my life.

Seville is very influenced by Arabic architecture because of the Arabic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula. And I’m looking at all of it, and it’s gorgeous and inspiring because of my Mizrahi background. I’d felt really broken when I left Boston, for a few different reasons, and this was reviving me.

Here is a line from my diary at that time: I’m in a beautiful city that sounds like accordions, smells like chocolate, and takes me dancing every day.

You could get a week’s worth of groceries — and this was fresh food! — for around $10. And there I also had the pleasure — after a lifetime of feeling I didn’t fit in, either in my family or in my high school — of meeting a lot of like-minded people. And I knew I would find them! I knew I would find them, but I never expected it to be in Spain. Though they were not all from Spain — some of them were, and some were from other places, like Australia. I was the only American there. But I was meeting all these great friends and it was a dream come true to finally feel like I was seen. That was so special for me. I kept thinking: I’m so happy I’m here — I’m just so happy I’m here.

In Spain, I also had a very flamboyant teacher, a wonderful guy named Tony. We would be doing dégagés and he would say, ‘Kick higher.’

I’d say: ‘I’m trying, I’m trying.”

So next he’d tell me: ‘Kick my hand.’

I’d say, ‘Gladly!’

But what an instinct this guy had for the cues he would give you. Unlike in New York, which strived for this cookie-cutter uniformity where ballerinas couldn’t be too tall, he would tell the tall girls to use their height, and to me, in the last part of the exercise, when one arm is up and the other arm is out and you feel like you’re sweating and you just can’t hold on a second longer, he would say to me, You’re at home. You’re at home.

I just loved that. I’ll always remember that.”

“Other professional pursuits and some health issues brought me back to the States and the latter took me out of dancing for a while. But another great highlight of my dancing life came just this past spring when I auditioned with the American Ballet Theater and got a part in Cinderella. I was a palace ballroom dancer and I got to perform with Isabella Boylston, Aran Bell and Misty Copeland.

It was such a magical experience. Our costumes were from the Stravinksy Ballet in Russia and they were gorgeous. And they had real horses onstage to pull Cinderella’s carriage!

And now I’m also going to be back in the Nutcracker this December.

When I think about how I wore my American Ballet Theater t-shirt throughout Israel, it’s just extraordinary for me to realize that what was an impossible dream to me then has actually come true. In every sense of the phrase, it’s my Cinderella story!”

“Since I was always looking for work, I booked a photo shoot with the photographer that all the prinicipal dancers of the Boston Ballet worked with for their own photos. She was famous for understanding how to photograph dancers — how to light the shots, how to work with the lines of the body for the best composition. And what this woman does is to find out exactly what you want and create that for you.

I told her that I needed to authentically show all of myself. I was born in America, I come from a dual lineage of Holocaust survivors, I’m both European and Arabic, I served in the Israeli Army, I’m both a visual artist and a dancer, I love working with children, I love absorbing other cultures, I love to travel, I love languages, and I love to be full of life.

And when I saw the photos, especially the one that’s now my favorite, it was clear she’d understood the assignment. In that image, I'm leaping into the heavens and touching what I thought could not be touched. Because you can know who you are, but if you never see any outside validation of that, if your essence remains hidden and locked down, then you can just feel yourself fading into the ether.

What kept me in dance was the desire to express my family history: of the Haganah, and my own contribution to Israel, and my own Jewish soul. Even though — as a woman — I’m not allowed to go up to the bimah, you can hear my soul when I speak Hebrew. When I sing Shema Yisrael, you can hear it. Everyone tells me that it’s poetry in my mouth.

There’s a Hasidic conviction that every person is born with a spark of God within, and the deepest essence of who you are is that divine spark. But I feel that, inside me, that spark is more of a flame, a torch, a bonfire. I did not want to sacrifice my Jewish identity for dance; I wanted to enhance it through dance.

When I was leaping into the air in the photo, one thing that made me initially not want to do it is that I’m very well-endowed and there was nothing supporting my chest. I told the photographer that I couldn’t just let my breasts be unbound as she intended, and she cut me off.

Stop it! she barked. This is what you’re going to wear.

But there’s no support, I told her. There’s no bra.

I could tell she had to stop herself from telling me to shut up. All through the shoot, I kept resisting her vision. My formative experiences in a culture that was so repressive to girls was holding me back. I kept saying: but… but… but…

Finally she said to me in exasperation: Look, you told me what you wanted and I’m trying to give it to you. I’m trying to show you, but you have to let me show you. You keep hiding yourself.

So I surrendered to her process and something extraordinary happened. I started to open up and take up space. Having unbound breasts in this context wasn’t something to be ashamed of anymore; instead, it was therapeutic. I started to feel thankful to G-d for the body He gave me. And I started to honor that by thinking of all the family members who were murdered in the Holocaust: what would they give to be able to dance, at any size or shape?

And this was also part of it: owning that I’m a grown woman. I did not die in the Holocaust. I did not die in the Army either, even though I had difficulties there. I made it to this stage of development: of being a grown woman. And no one is going to tell me I can’t dance because I’m no longer prepubescent.

No one can tell me that. I get to celebrate my life. I get to jump for joy. I get to be happy.

I wrote to that photographer afterward and told her that I had never loved my body once I’d gone through puberty, but she made me love it. And now I wear clothes that don’t try to hide my form because I’m not ashamed of it anymore.”

“I’m still dancing, but right now, I also work at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City, and one thing that upsets me is that in the list of Jewish languages provided by the museum, there’s Hebrew and Aramaic and Yiddish and Ladino, but not Judeo-Arabic.

Yet Judeo-Arabic is the most historically significant Judaic language of our heritage. Abraham came from Mesopotamia, which is modern-day Iraq. Abraham walked by the Tigris River, where my grandmother had a home. It’s our foundational language, so why is it marginalized within Judaism?

It’s hurtful to me because I grew up speaking Judeo-Arabic. When I went to my grandparents’ home, they never spoke English with me. And I made fast friends with Muslims as well as Jews in my public elementary school because I was recognized as Arabic as well as Jewish, and I didn’t know we were supposed to be enemies, and I wouldn’t have cared anyway, and they wouldn’t have either.

Judeo-Arabic isn’t exactly the same as Arabic but it’s adjacent and I was able to pick up Arabic very easily and communicate in that language with my Arabic friends. But there was a flip side to having a foot in each world. I also felt otherized by my Jewish community in certain ways for being Arabic. In Ashkenazic settings, many Jews looked down on their Mizrahi cousins and considered them second-class citizens within the Jewish world. But then when I went to the Iraqi synagogue, people said I had my nose in the air because I was also Ashkenazic. I had the best and the worst of both worlds.

But that’s another reason I consider dance a form of prayer. I bring every single aspect of myself to dance, and that’s my way of saying, I’m 100% Mizrahi and Ashkenazic — I’m both, and I’m here, so deal with it.

And dance demands that you own all of yourself in just that way. People are paying money to see you do something, not to see you hide. In the realm of dance, you have to be a territorial lioness. You have to mind your space; you have to take up that space, and you have to bring your whole self to that space. If you’re not doing that, you’re doing it wrong.”

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If you'd like to contact Danielle, you may email her at DanielleArisArts@gmail.com.