During the Cold War, dancers and musicians from the United States and the USSR were drawn into the battle for hearts and minds, crossing the Iron Curtain to prove their artistic and ideological prowess. After the passage of the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement, direct cultural exchange between the two superpowers opened up, and the Moiseyev Dance Company arrived in the United States in 1958. The first Soviet cultural representatives to tour America, this folk-dance troupe's repertoire included dances from territories controlled or influenced by the USSR, including Uzbekistan, Crimea, and Poland. Drawing on contemporary personal and published accounts, Victoria Hallinan explores why the dancers garnered overwhelming acclaim during their multicity tour and Ed Sullivan Show appearance. The "boy-meets-girl" love stories of the dances, and their idealized view of multiple Soviet cultures living together in harmony, presented a comforting image of post-World War II gender norms and race relations for audiences. Americans saw the dancers--their supposed enemies--as humans rather than agents of communist contagion.

At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other artists to political "hot spots" overseas. This peacetime gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success. Among the artists chosen for international duty were José Limón, who led his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America; Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center. Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources, including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the inner workings of "Eisenhower's Program," the complex set of political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US. CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner.

Clare Croft chronicles the role of dance and dancers in American cultural diplomacy, telling the story of how tours sponsored by the US State Department shaped and sometimes re-imagined ideas of America in unexpected, often sensational circumstances.

Bringing Zion Home examines the role of culture in the establishment of the "special relationship" between the United States and Israel in the immediate postwar decades. Many American Jews first encountered Israel through their roles as tastemakers, consumers, and cultural impresarios—that is, by writing and reading about Israel; dancing Israeli folk dances; promoting and purchasing Israeli goods; and presenting Israeli art and music. It was precisely by means of these cultural practices, argues Emily Alice Katz, that American Jews insisted on Israel's "natural" place in American culture, a phenomenon that continues to shape America's relationship with Israel today. Katz shows that American Jews' promotion and consumption of Israel in the cultural realm was bound up with multiple agendas, including the quest for Jewish authenticity in a postimmigrant milieu and the desire of upwardly mobile Jews to polish their status in American society. And, crucially, as influential cultural and political elites positioned "culture" as both an engine of American dominance and as a purveyor of peace in the Cold War, many of Israel's American Jewish impresarios proclaimed publicly that cultural patronage of and exchange with Israel advanced America's interests in the Middle East and helped spread the "American way" in the postwar world. Bringing Zion Home is the first book to shine a light squarely upon the role and importance of Israel in the arts, popular culture, and material culture of postwar America.

American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere is the first full-length examination of a Soviet cultural diplomatic effort. Following the signing of an American-Soviet cultural exchange agreement in the late 1950s, Soviet officials resolved to utilize the Bolshoi Ballet’s planned 1959 American tour to awe audiences with Soviet choreographers’ great accomplishments and Soviet performers’ superb abilities. Relying on extensive research, Cadra Peterson McDaniel examines whether the objectives behind Soviet cultural exchange and the specific aims of the Bolshoi Ballet’s 1959 American tour provided evidence of a thaw in American-Soviet relations. Interwoven throughout this study is an examination of the Soviets’ competing efforts to create ballets encapsulating Communist ideas while simultaneously reinterpreting pre-revolutionary ballets so that these works were ideologically acceptable. McDaniel investigates the rationale behind the creation of the Bolshoi’s repertoire and the Soviet leadership’s objectives and interpretation of the tour’s success as well as American response to the tour. The repertoire included the four ballets, Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, Giselle, and The Stone Flower, and two Highlights Programs, which included excerpts from various pre- and post-revolutionary ballets, operas, and dance suites. How the Americans and the Soviets understood the Bolshoi’s success provides insight into how each side conceptualized the role of the arts in society and in political transformation. American–Soviet Cultural Diplomacy: The Bolshoi Ballet’s American Premiere demonstrates the ballet’s role in Soviet foreign policy, a shift to "artful warfare," and thus emphasizes the significance of studying cultural exchange as a key aspect of Soviet foreign policy and analyzes the continued importance of the arts in twenty-first century Russian politics.

The making of the classic musical: “A fascinating read focusing equally on the show and the world into which it was born.”—Choice From its 1957 Broadway debut to multiple revivals, from the Oscar-winning film to countless amateur productions, West Side Story is nothing less than an American touchstone—an updating of Shakespeare vividly realized in a rapidly changing postwar New York. A lifelong fan of the show, Julia Foulkes became interested in its history when she made an unexpected discovery: scenes for the iconic film version were shot on the demolition site destined to become part of the Lincoln Center redevelopment area—a crowning jewel of postwar urban renewal. Foulkes interweaves the story of the creation of the musical and film with the remaking of the Upper West Side and the larger tale of New York’s postwar aspirations. Making unprecedented use of director and choreographer Jerome Robbins’s revelatory papers, she shows the crucial role played by the political commitments of Robbins and his collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Arthur Laurents. Their determination to evoke life in New York as it was actually lived helped give West Side Story its unshakable sense of place even as it put forward a vision of a new, vigorous, determinedly multicultural American city. Beautifully written and full of surprises for even the most dedicated West Side Story fan, A Place for Us is a revelatory new exploration of an American classic.

The official monthly record of United States foreign policy.

Why did dance and dancing became important to the construction of a new, modern, Jewish/Israeli cultural identity in the newly formed nation of Israel? There were questions that covered almost all spheres of daily life, including “What do we dance?” because Hebrew or Eretz-Israeli dance had to be created out of none. How and why did dance develop in such a way? Dance Spreads Its Wings is the first and only book that looks at the whole picture of concert dance in Israel studying the growth of Israeli concert dance for 90 years—starting from 1920, when there was no concert dance to speak of during the Yishuv (pre-Israel Jewish settlements) period, until 2010, when concert dance in Israel had grown to become one of the country’s most prominent, original, artistic fields and globally recognized. What drives the book is the impulse to create and the need to dance in the midst of constant political change. It is the story of artists trying to be true to their art while also responding to the political, social, religious, and ethnic complexities of a Jewish state in the Middle East.