White Rooms, Red Scare

Anna Sokolow’s early Cold War choreography cloaked social(ist) challenges to the status quo under the façade of American modernism. Lyric Suite (1953) laid bare sexual discontent in the guise of universal abstraction; Rooms (1954) portrayed gay people’s and Jews’ experiences among those of society’s untouchables in tenement houses; and the Opus series (1958–1965) cemented the political significance of the Old Left meeting the New Left through ironic uses of musical and movement elements drawn from jazz, as Africanist elements like these signaled a generalized Americanness. Sokolow’s assimilation into concert dance whiteness through these works’ critical reception and Israeli Bonds festivals reflected the American Jewish community’s postwar assimilation from racially marked to Caucasian. Sokolow’s work evidences roles played by leftist Jews in crafting definitive images of midcentury Americana as they publicly rewrote their 1930s leftist actions into normative postwar American activities in the wake of the Second Red Scare.