Orthodox Jews concentrate around the Western Wall, praying to remnants of a past, a perfect divine connection that even they can’t return to. God’s eternal promise to Abraham can never be broken, but his seed can always be punished. Can they repent the war away? I stood and watched as lines divided by gender grew beyond their velvet-roped designations. A strong collective wish for the time of King David weeped in the form of modest dress and tallits.
When I visited the wall, teenage girls were handing out bright purple wraps to cover bare knees such as mine. The wrap’s vibrant color highlighted my immodesty to hundreds of others so that they would know who warranted judgmental stares. Such shaming was not limited to the Jewish crowds at the wall, but continued in the Christian sector of Jerusalem in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Entering the church, I was greeted by a beautiful, ornate homage to Jesus Christ. In my exploration, I climbed a flight of stairs toward the rock on which Jesus is said to have died, displayed within a highly decorated structure. A small flock of nuns crawled forward on their knees to kiss the rock. Along with a dozen other tourists, I watched the ritual in silence. That silence was broken shortly thereafter by a bishop yelling at me, in broken English, “No bikini…no bikini…” in reference to my shorts which had previously been wrapped in purple at the Western Wall. He continued to yell at me until I exited the church’s top floor. Leaving ashamed, I locked eyes with a woman who prayed in Latin while motioning a cross along her body. I was an affront to everything they stood for. Their Orthodox conventions were immobile. God was more real than the bodies they hid.
Do these conventions hide the war? Israeli attachment to a past form of divine excellence alienates the country from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into which they were born. In Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss examines how the creation of a settler state–Israel, a country defined by orthodox religion–allows for the collective imaginary of culture and, moreover, normalcy. She illustrates how a settler state requires ignoring the havoc inflicted around them: a havoc ignored to retain a sense of everyday life. Moreover, Israeli culture is defined by religious orthodoxy – one specifically tied to ethnic validity and even purity, thereby strongly attaching Israelis, orthodox or not, to what one cannot see or prove (G-d). An Israeli sense of self is created in an environment of the unreal, a strong belief and faith in a created reality. The abstract conception of religion is the foundation of Israeli collective imagination. It is out of this fantastical orthodox foundation that Israelis carve a sense of self.
To manufacture a state from this collective imaginary requires the concentrated effort of the Israeli government to create a culture. One that attempts to solidify Jewish Israeli existence, or rather, its cultural domination. The Batsheva Dance Company is funded heavily by the Israeli government. Historically, culture has supported the creation of national identity, intended to define invisible lines between peoples, easing the blunt knife of violent oppression. Palestinians, like every group outside of this particular form of nationalism, are not like us! Culture can work for a nationalist agenda but it can also work against it. While in its formation Batsheva was created in part to refine an Israeli culture that did not exist before 1948, the artists that comprise the company reject its nationalistic framework. Ohad Naharin, the resident choreographer of the Batsheva Dance Company and creator of the Gaga movement language, broke the boundaries of traditional dance in which I was trained. During my time with him in Israel, he told me to “move like honey” and “shake like there were marbles in my chest.” He stripped me of my ballet technique, my Horton training, my clearly defined position in dance. He stripped me so I might be free of the imposed “correctness” that previously outlined where each finger laid to rest, the shape of another’s style—a national or supra-style—on my body.
On January 9, 2026, I attended his talk at the Jewish Museum. In response to questions about his choreography and its relationship with Jewish heritage he denounced its supposed national quality. He claimed, “The language of this piece can be understood by everyone who understands the movement language (gaga). If all you take away is what we say at Passover, we haven’t communicated… It’s not about Jewish heritage.”
Gaga speaks outside of a mainstream conversation of nationality. It is a mechanism of connection that crosses nationalities. But Naharin denies its definition as Israeli. It is a language created in Israel, sure, but it lacks a national style. Rather, Gaga works to reconnect the dancer with a primal humanity that is creative in nature. So, while Gaga was not inherently designed to fight the conception of an Israeli identity, its universalizing approach to dance technique works to subvert such a conception. Naharin leans into this.
This message culminated in his request to return to your “animal” through dance. For a long time, I associated this animal with something primal (correct) and unsophisticated (incorrect). He corrected this assumption by explaining, “It is the animal in us that can learn and imagine.” When he calls upon the animal, he is returning to a creative inclination that is unique to humanity: a primal, animalistic inclination that is disturbed by man-made convention: technocratic war, money, nationalism.
Now, at the Jewish Museum in 2026, he explained that returning to our animal might tap into an existential freedom: “We can all move but many of us feel locked inside our bodies…. we can be released out of this jail with movement.” The jail to which he refers was, at first, placeless and infinitely mobile. It could be where our bodies exist geographically, the pain we carry, literal imprisonment, or mental exhaustion. Whatever the metaphorical jail one is trying to escape, one must first strip oneself of a nationally defined style to do so.
He wished all of us to return to our “animal” through dance but also as humans more broadly, to forget the order created to impose humanity. For Naharin, touring the IDF base camps as a part of an entertainment group revealed the details of this imposition. There, “humanity” and “order” reeked of violent, nationalistic order. He and every other Israeli experience the violence their state commits against Palestinians rather directly. When they return home, they must reenter the collective national imaginary. Those who accept this feeling of normalcy will easily return to everyday life. Naharin, however, after seeing the violence his state commits and the involuntary, falsely patriotic way Israelis are asked to be a part of it, wished to regain a sense of humanity. I imagine he wanted to break and rebuild anything he could. So he freed me from ballet. He scrubbed dance of the order evident in the classics, denying dance classification as various styles, rather as an essence. He explained, “Style is a way of representing something. Dance is not how we represent it, but its essence…The essence of dance is how we connect with the animal, the human animal, with the gift to remember, the gift to imagine.” Naharin was speaking generally to a mixed crowd of American museum-goers but related this jail to Israel: “People dance in Israel because it’s hard in Israel.” He spoke, I project, to the atmospheric violence that defines and outlines borders to their collective imaginary. Jail, then, has a geographic location. Beyond that, he paints a scenery of violence and corruption. Within a political state of terror, this unstylized–or denationalized–dance language becomes liberatory.
Naharin’s movement language radically opposes the orthodoxy and violent political turmoil that defines his state. He critiques his country with his body by de-stylizing it. Naharin asks for the universalization of dance. He asks for a corporeal reaction to what feels good. He demands pleasure through disbanding what we accept as control. Our pleasure is a revolution when our bodies cannot leave. He refuses to be attached to the conservative—whether that is dance, religion, or politics—redefining the state by radically opposing the culture that exists within it. And Gaga has, in fact, made it to a national stage. Naharin’s Israeli cultural production has worked to subvert a concrete sense of Israeli self, instead connecting the soul with a denationalized human animal. Perhaps, then, the atmosphere of a collective imaginary—one that lacks modern cultural conception—allows the artist to produce more fantastical, esoteric works that inversely work to subvert the national imaginary by which it was created.
Finally, subversion is a mode of reconnecting the individual practitioner with their “animal,” a universal soul, moving it away from the alienating categorizations that exist through nationalism. This subversion creates an identity beyond nationalism, working as an interpersonal mode of revolution as opposed to an activated deconstruction of the system. That being said, one works toward the other. As an Israeli-funded entity, Batsheva’s nationalism and artistic subversion tactics are two sides of the same coin. We cannot know the future, but in a Marxian conception, what is built up can always come down.
While a powerful modern example, Naharin is not the first to denationalize as a direct response to authoritarianism. We could start with Jesus. In antiquity, the Messiah denationalized Judaism, opening the faith to Gentiles. However, I will lead with something more recent. Herbert Bayer, a student of Bauhaus and later teacher, experimented with creating a form of “universal lettering.” He designed the new lettering system to rid the alphabet of its cultural and national signifiers. Herbert Bayer’s Universal Lettering (a project from 1922-1928) contained lettering with smooth, almost perfectly circular curvature with cornered straight ends. Alphabets contain cultural markers, from the curvature of a letter to the tail ends in cursive. They can be traced back to cultural groups, imbuing handwriting with national aesthetics.
Herbert Bayer’s “Universal Lettering”
Bayer wished to strip basic writing practices of national affinity, ridding it of the “spiky black letter German print, now emphatically nationalist in claim,” as Leah Dickerman described in her catalog Bauhaus:1919-1922. Instead, Bayer rationalized the handwritten Roman alphabet using a T-square and compass, aiming for geometrically universal forms. Bayer wrote that the typographic revolution, of which he was a pioneer, was “not an isolated event but went hand in hand with a new social and political consciousness.” His universal alphabet intended to purge national identity, and thus contained a political imperative that ran against the emerging Nazi movement, which championed a strong sense of nationalism.
Many of the faculty and students of Bauhaus were left-wing, and an equally large portion were Jewish. Beginning in January of 1933, the Nazis launched attacks against the Bauhaus through a series of Gestapo raids, which culminated in the seizure of the building on the basis of its inhabitants’ Bolshevik associations. During this process, the Nazis investigated Bauhaus administrators such as Fritz Hesse, who was deemed guilty of “irregularities in office,” as Hans Wingler writes in Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago. However, the details of his and others’ investigations remained sealed. The Nazis used other tactics against the Bauhaus staff. The assets of Josef Albers were frozen so he could not take them abroad. As the City Council of Dessau put it, the justification for these strong-arm tactics was the Bauhaus’ status as “a germ-cell of Bolshevism.” The final blow to the Bauhaus was a list of conditions presented by the Gestapo under which the Bauhaus had to operate, which included the removal of Jewish professors Wassily Kandinsky and Ludwig Hilberseimer, along with curriculum modifications. For reasons of principle and because the Bauhaus was now economically fragile and could no longer persist under pressure from the Nazis, the remaining faculty decided to close the school in August of 1933.
Bayer’s alphabet begins with the position that nationalism infiltrates our language, our letters, our art, even our silence. Authoritarian violence is purposefully looked beyond, thus illegitimized, if we collectively forget the individual demarcations of its typeface. Can we simply silence their infiltration? Can the Nazis be silenced?
Ilya Kaminsky thinks you can. In his poetry collection Deaf Republic, Vasenka, a fictional village plagued by violent occupation, assumes a new language: sign language. Kaminsky is Ukrainian and employs town names and people that are suggestive of Eastern European languages, signaling loosely the Russian occupation of eastern Ukrainian territory, during which Ukrainians were forced to speak Russian. The people of Vasenka, by communicating exclusively in sign language, remove the soldiers entirely from their communication. Language functions as a nationalistic tool. To create a new language, then, is a form of resistance. It silences the sound of one’s oppressors. Kaminsky begins his poem “Deafness, an Insurgency, Begins” by writing, “Our country woke up next morning and refused to hear soldiers.” Silence effectively becomes their revolution, and sign language their new, exclusive form of communication.
Authoritarianism often works as cultural usurpation. removing the oppressed’s culture and language from conversation to diminish their sense of personal identity, defining it as lesser than that of their oppressors. Kaminsky displays the soul of the occupied person within a colonized setting. In his poem “Such Is the Story Made of Stubbornness and a Little Air,” Kaminsky describes the mother as a communal original form. He writes, “Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand. / She believes in God, yes, but also in the mothers / of her country who take off their shoes / and walk.” Coming from a mother, simply being born, is a universal experience. This is where a human soul, or animal, begins; not on soil, not within borders.
Kaminsky goes on to relate this humanity to silence: “Their [mothers’] footsteps erase our syntax…” Being born of a mother—to-be, the first human before a patriot, innately gives us the power to resist. Such humanity gives us the power to erase the syntax of stylized language and to instead communicate through unoppressed languages. We are born as a universal subject, and we may find universalization in the way we speak to our siblings, the children of our mothers.
The essence of silence is nearly divine. Kaminsky continues, “What is silence? Something of the sky in us.” The original creator, where we all come from, is a mother. In a sense, mothers are the physical embodiment of a divinity, the original creators. The ability to resist, to speak within silence, comes from a faith-driven, aspirational, extraterrestrial-yet-human, and finally animal connection. Resistance is something of a soul, one that is expressed through art and supplanted into the minds of the oppressed.
While their bodies might be trapped within an occupied state, their minds and souls exist on a higher plane where they cannot hear words of subjugation. In his poem “What We Cannot Hear,” Kaminsky equates the soul and silence more explicitly, writing, “They shove her / and she zigzags and turns and trips in silence / which is a soul’s noise.” The soldiers shove her body, stripping and eventually murdering her, but her soul is silent. Existentially, then, she is free, even if physically imprisoned. This is just what Naharin described with his “jail.”
If Kaminsky locates resistance in silence and the interior life of the oppressed, W.E.B. Du Bois turns to sound—specifically song and worship—to show how a people preserve identity under oppression. In his chapter “Of the Faith of the Fathers” in W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois centers the institution of the Black Church as the true soul and narrative of the Black American. He begins the chapter by reveling in his first experience at a “Southern Negro Revival.” He describes how the passion and sorrow of devotees are expressed through song and prayer. Du Bois attributes the Black spiritual, or “the Music,” as the only true American music; how it evolved out of African song is amplified by enslaved people’s tragedy, and integrates other musical forms like hymns to become a uniquely American form. The Music becomes an original expression of hope and sorrow. Du Bois describes “The Frenzy” as the fervor of feet stomping and shouts in response to the sermon. It is the Lord filling the soul of the devotee with “supernatural joy.” The singers’ passionate hallelujahs are a form of authentic communion with God, allowing them to discover within themselves aspects of agency and will.
Music functioned as the vitalization of the soul. When the world works against the prosperity of your physical being, art works towards the cultivation of the inner self. While the act of enjoying music—as with any art form—is not itself an act of classical revolution, it maintains the soul of the oppressed to eventually work towards revolution. They sing so that they do not grow so tired when the moment comes. The soul does not belong to the nation, but one’s body, and the connection with it comes from being witness to violence.
Art does not end wars. Song does not secure freedom. Dance does not dismantle regimes. But language, in these forms, works towards something quieter: a denial of total occupation. Authoritarianism demands not just physical obedience, but submission to something deeper: ideology, or style. Art interrupts this metastatic process. It preserves a part of the self, a whisper of dissent, a feeling of violation. In this sense, resistance is not always loud. Its feelings of pleasure return us to primal feeling, so primal it becomes divine.
Liva Shneider embraces the animal within.